In my GHC poster “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”, I define it as follows:

Women are at least twice as likely to drop out of technical careers after 10 years.  The Mid-Career Donut Hole is the time when women are faced with multiple challenges that make them question whether they should continue a technical career.

In the poster, I selected 5 challenges that women face in technical careers that contribute to our high rate of attrition.  In putting together this poster, I wanted to share an overview of the research that shows how common these issues are and how they impact our careers.  Part of the difficulty for us in dealing with these issues is that they can be quite subtle, so you question whether you’re really seeing it, and whether what you’re seeing is unique.

References:

• “The abrasiveness trap: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews” by Kieran Snyder
• “Social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it does hurt to ask” (PDF) by Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai
• The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation and Institutions by Christopher F. Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg
• “The Fatherhood Bonus and The Motherhood Penalty: Parenthood and the Gender Gap in Pay” by Michelle J. Budig
• The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology (PDF) by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, and Karen Sumberg

Oh, the places you’ll go!

Wednesday:

• 9:30am: opening keynote by Shafi Goldwasser
• 12:30pm: “Executive Presence: Making the Leap” workshop
• 2pm: “Leadership Strategies for High-Impact Women” workshop
• 7:30pm: poster session (come by and say hi!)

Thursday:

• 8:30am: keynote by Satya Nadella
• 10:15am: “Accountability and Metrics for Gender Diversity” panel
• noon: “Humans, Devices, and How They Live Together”
• 2:15pm: “What Do You Mean It Isn’t a Meritocracy?” birds-of-a-feather

Friday:

• 8:30am: keynote by Arati Prabhakar
• 10:15am: “Designing Secure and Privacy-Aware IoT and Wearable Technologies for Healthcare”
• noon: “Systers Creating Change Everywhere Through Community and Technology Initiatives”
• 1pm: Systers lunch
• 3:30pm: “Trends and New Directions in Software Architecture”

I know I’ll go to more sessions than this, these are the ones that I really want to see.  What are yours?

This weekend, The New York Times published an op-ed about “Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem”.  A dressing down from the Times on diversity is painfully ironic, given that the Times has the biggest gender gap of the US’s ten most widely circulated newspapers.  In the Times, 69% of its bylines are men.  That’s not all that different from Google’s workforce, which is 70% male.

The Times has suggestions for improving Silicon Valley’s diversity problem, including this one:

Not all tech industry employees are engineers and programmers. The companies employ large numbers of people who manage projects, market services and design products. Many of these jobs do not require a computer science or an engineering degree. But the proportion of women and minorities in these types of jobs is not much better than the proportion in technical positions. Companies should make efforts to hire a more diverse group of workers — including more liberal arts graduates — for nontechnical jobs, according to Vivek Wadhwa, who has written a book about women in the technology industry.¹

The Times assumes that engineering and programming jobs require a computer science (CS) or engineering degree.  This isn’t true, and hasn’t ever been true.  Anecdotally, I know programmers without degrees at all.²  I know programmers with philosophy degrees, and English degrees, and history degrees.  There have been plenty of times where I’ve been in a roomful of developers where I was the only one with a CS degree.  Software development changes fast.  We value people who are self-taught.  A CS degree is not required for a programming job.

Better is that their solution is a two-tiered solution to engineering.  It’s the same as their two-tiered solution to journalism.  At the Times, as elsewhere in journalism, women are significantly more likely to write articles about lifestyle or health.  Articles about crime, justice, and politics are still more likely to be written by men, as are op-eds.  The hard news and analysis goes to men, the soft news goes to women.  And so too should the hard engineering problems go to men, while the soft stuff like project management or design go to women.

According to “The most comprehensive analysis ever of the gender of New York Times writers”, only five sections have articles that are mostly written by women: Fashion, Dining, Home, Travel, and Health.  According to The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014 (PDF), men have 3 times as many page 1 quotes in the Times than women do.  The Times would do well to improve its own record on diversity before advising others what to do about theirs.

We should not divide software development into men’s work (programming) and women’s work (“manag[ing] projects, market[ing] services and design[ing] products”, as per above).  Women are just as capable as men of programming.  Men are just as capable as women at project management, marketing³, and design.  Tech companies need real diversity, not enclaves of women in specific roles in a misguided attempt at diversity.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of tech events lately, which is probably why this blog post from Bridget Kromhout resonates so strongly.  She starts off thusly:

If you’re wondering why women don’t attend the conferences, unconferences, meetups, or hackathons you enjoy, or why you don’t seem to make meaningful professional connections with the ones who are there, maybe they’ve been having these conversations often enough that they’re tired of it, and would rather spend their time doing anything else at all.

This is part of my decision-making process for tech events.  How likely is it that I’m going to have to deal with this type of interaction? Given other tech events that I’ve attended lately and how often (or not) I’ve had to deal with this type of interaction, do I have sufficient energy for dealing with this type of interaction if it does occur this time?

Next week is the Grace Hopper Celebration!  I’m excited.  It really hit me last night as I was putting the final tweaks on my poster.

Here’s my current schedule for the event:

• Wednesday, 7:30-9:30pm: Poster session, where I’ll be talking about “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”
• Thursday, 1-2pm: VMware networking circle about leadership, in the VMware booth
• Thursday, 7-9pm: VMware Signature Bash
• Friday, noon-1pm: Panel, “Systers Creating Change Everywhere Through Community and Technology Initiatives”
• Friday, 1pm-2:15pm: Systers lunch
• Friday, 6:15-7:30pm: Anita Borg Institute Communities meetup
• Friday, 8:30pm until the dancing stops: Friday evening celebration

Want to meet up for coffee, lunch, dinner, drinks, something?  Ping me.

(Edited 10/2 10:32am to add a link to GHC and to add the ABI communities meetup to my schedule.)

Anita Andrews analyzed Meetup data to see what could be learnt about the global tech scene.  It’s not a perfect analysis — lots of tech events happen outside of Meetup, for example.  There’s still a lot of interesting stuff in here, and a great jumping off point for additional research.  Here’s an interesting point about Las Vegas, the only city with a majority of women in tech:

In Las Vegas, women make up 65% of the tech scene. This is the only top tech center where women are the majority. Why the anomaly?

Outside of the tech bubble, Vegas is a welcoming place for females on a number of fronts. For one, the city has had a female mayor, Carolyn Goodman, since 2011. Across the country, only 18.4% of cities with populations over 30,000 can claim that level of female leadership. Additionally, Nevada ranks highest in the nation for gender paycheck equality, with women earning around 85 cents on the dollar compared to men.

Not that I’m moving to Las Vegas anytime soon.  Oakland comes in #2 at 46.8%, though …

Edited at 12:35pm: I forgot the link to the post.

I attended a talk last week where an executive was asked about what we can do to better support women in tech.  He listed a couple of initiatives, and closed with a lengthy discussion of the pipeline problem.  The oft-quoted stat, which he included, is that only 18% of computer science degrees are being awarded to women.  It’s time to stop talking about the pipeline problem.

The pipeline problem takes attention away from the real problems that face women in tech today.  The pipeline problem is part of the problem that tech companies have in hiring women who have just completed their college.  The pipeline problem is not the problem for the population of women already in tech.  It ignores that women drop out of technical careers at a significantly higher rate than other careers.  It ignores that women have difficulty acquiring mentors and champions.  It ignores that women are more likely to be judged to be less competent without clear points of excellence, and that they are more likely to be judged as not likable (“bossy”, “pushy”), and that being both competent and likable are important for career success.

The pipeline problem makes the problem someone else’s.  Tech companies say, if only colleges would award more CS degrees to women.  Colleges point out that women aren’t starting CS programs, let alone finishing them, so the problem is really that high schools aren’t preparing girls for CS degrees.  High schools will say that girls aren’t signing up for CS courses, so it must be that middle school isn’t making CS interesting to girls.  Everyone gets to point their finger elsewhere.  No-one takes responsibility.  No-one is accountable.

The pipeline problem ignores that having a job in tech doesn’t require a CS degree.  While I do have a CS degree, many of my colleagues don’t.  My previous officemate’s degree was in history.  One of the best developers I’ve ever met has a degree in philosophy.  Getting a job in tech is not dependent on having a CS degree.  There are lots of jobs in tech, like quality assurance or technical writing or program management, where a CS degree isn’t even necessarily the most desirable degree.  Many of my user experience colleagues have degrees in psychology or the arts.

Focusing on the pipeline problem is an easy answer to a difficult question.  It gives executives an easy out when confronted with the problem.  We do need to do more to get girls interested in technical careers.  We don’t need to pretend that it’s the only problem facing women in tech.

Alison Gianotto wrote a great post after she was invited to speak at a Linux conference, and assigned the topic of women in technology.  Since that’s not a topic that she’s interested in talking about, and she has lots of things that she would like to speak about at a Linux conference, she gave some other ideas.  They passed.

The whole post is awesome.  These two paragraphs match my philosophy about speaking at tech conferences:

My position is that the best way for me to be a role model for women (and men) in technology isn’t to give talks about being a woman in technology, but to kick ass and take names at being a technologist, and to give great presentations on technology topics. This is my way of showing men and women in technology that women are as capable and badass as the bros.

It’s the same reason I always agree to speak at conferences even when I know I’m a token. I frequently spend my own money to fly out to speak at conferences that can’t afford to fly me out or cover my hotel, and I do this because it’s important for men and women to get used to seeing women at the podium, demonstrating their skills as an authority in technology. If we can get a few more women on that stage, maybe we won’t feel like such a rarity anymore, and the perceptions of us in technology will shift.

At MacIT 2014, she gave a great talk about security.  She knows her stuff, and she knows how to talk about it in such a way that other people will get it too.  I’m so glad she was one of our speakers, and I’m glad that her talk was a topic that she’s an expert in and that she’s passionate about.