Sarah Allen's Weblog

Gender Diversity in Web Conferences

I was doing a little research for a friend and found some nice resources for women speakers. Jason Kottle collected some great stats about representation of women at web conferences. Every year or so, someone asks me a question like this, so I thought I would post a few pointers.

It's pretty awesome that people are collecting and publishing resources for conference organizers. I find the focused lists most effective:

• Flash Goddess has the a great women speaker list , with topics and details about each speakers area of expertise


• LinuxChix offers Chix who Speak


• BlogHer, of course, has great women who talk about blogging 2007, 2006

Other lists are very broad, and it is hard to see what exactly people are expert at.

Know any lists I missed? Please comment and I will pass them on.

women talk about mentoring open source

I listened to a podcast interview with a number of women who are mentors in the google highly open participation contest (which offers prizes to 13-18 year olds who contribute to open source projects). It's got some interesting tidbits about community building on open source projects and some controversial banter about the role of women. Notes below -- my comments in italics.

Community managers are often women. Someone noted that this project had more women than any other open source project she had been involved with. Is this a great thing where we're seeing more women in open source? or is this the-women-taking-care-of-the-kids thing again? -- ouch. I'd say yes, to both questions.

...coding is fun, and it is an awesome feeling to fix a bug or add a feature, but the human connection is even more rewarding. -- yeah, I like the human connection stuff too, but sometimes it is really hard to carve out time to code. It certainly isn't one of those socialized female traits to ask whether this newbie's future contribution is really more valuable than whatever you are working on.

...Women may be drawn to these roles, but there are also a lot of men are very good at that. Absolutely.

...gnome love mailing list offers a great approach. People will give you something bite-sized to work on. The neat thing about these tasks is that it's not just easier for the new contributor, you also need a much smaller commitment from the mentor. It is a way for a contributor to start small and many folks start there and then take on more central tasks.

...should we target some kind of stamp-of-approval for a women-friendly project? No, we should lower the barrier for all contributors. Frankly, with open source, you do need to elbow your way in. It is pretty intimidating to a lot people not just women. If you make it less intimidating to join your project, you will get more kinds of people, not just women.

Nov 8: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers

A must see event...

Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers.
Thursday, November 8, 2007 6pm
Google Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

This is a fundraiser for Kathy Kleiman to complete a full-length film telling this important story. I saw this short film at Grace Hopper many years ago. Last year, when I was doing research on ideas for our elementary school technology classes, I remembered the stories of these innovative early programmers, who received little or no recognition of their significant technical achievements at the time. I wanted kids today to realize what I didn't know until I was all grown up and a programmer myself. I had no idea of the strong women innovators who came before me.

If you enjoyed reading about Mary Houbolt, one of the first generation of human "computers," you must come to this event. Even if you can't come, please, please blog about this one. This is a very important fundraiser. The full-length movie absolutely must get made, so that these stories can be told to a wider audience and future generations.

Please register for this event if you can come and forward the info to people you know who might be interested. If you can't come, but still want to support the making of this documentary, you can also make a donation.

why women aren't interested in computer science

It is good to read about progress from some colleges in creating gender balance in computer science, since the overall trend has been a steady downward curve in the number of female cs grads. [see NYT article "Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold" -- thanks Tucker!]

"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science." The point is not that standards are being lowered, but rather a change in focus from drawing only those who already know how to program vs. an emphasis on "high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders."

Other tactics that are working...
* materials for tell high school students about computer science, that will be provided to teachers of math, science and English because girls have already opted out by then (Dr. Lazowska and Dr. Blum)
* a Web page for prospective students showing what computer science is for: "everything from designing prosthetics to devising new ways to fight forest fires" and deliberately featuring all women in the photographs (University of Washington)
* a college group called Women in Computer Science runs a program which brings ninth-grade girls from nearby schools to the university campus for five weeks each summer. It creates a “in a positive and encouraging environment.” for learning both concrete computer skills and abstract computer science concepts (Brown University, Artemis Project)

This discussion reminds me of Shirley Malcom's declaration at Grace Hopper 2004 that computer science has a marketing problem, referencing the well-known Edsger Dijkstra quote: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." If girls got the picture that computers aren't about programming, but that it is a powerful way to do accomplish incredible things, then maybe we would have more women getting CS degrees and appearing in software industry.

I've written about this before. Perhaps I should not be surprised that there are so few women in the field, since what I most love about it is not easily seen from the outside. Oliver Steele once summed it up well in conversation, when he said that in college they teach how to be a computer scientist, learning to be a software engineer is a side-effect. It is perhaps unavoidable that university classes are all taught by professors who are interested in computer science as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to an end -- you need to do computer science research to qualify. Most of us who are practicing programmers do it for fundamentally different reasons. Sure, programming is fun, but that's not the point. The point is to change the world in some small or large way, to have an impact on something or someone outside of the machine.

I would love to hear about more tactics that are making a difference ... what else is going on? do you know someone who is making a difference? are you? if you are a woman in CS, what made a difference for you?

Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, has incited some debate about whether innate gender differences contribute to why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers.

William Saletan defends Summers and provides some details about what he actually said in his recent article Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head, The pseudo-feminist show trial of Larry Summers:
"He spoke after the morning session of a conference called "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." He offered three possible reasons for this gender gap. The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities."

Summers' words may have been blown out of proportion, but I would expect a University president to frame a better argument.

1) Spending time away from your kids. Girls and boys decide whether or not to pursue math and science long before they are aware of the details of how much time different careers might require of them per week. Also, more women these days decide not to have children. I would guess that if you lined up those stats, it would still not explain the disproportionate number of women. And most importantly, why must we assume that you have to work 80 hours per week to be successful?

2) High test scores in high school. Setting aside the fact that biology now has a far greater number of women than men pursuing undergraduate degrees, with respect to other fields that are still dominated by men, it would have been fantastic had Summers used the opportunity to highlight that the problems really start in elementary and high-school education. By the time students get to Harvard, there are already fewer women than men pursuing engineering and computer science. Perhaps Summers sees this as inevitable, but discrimination against girls in early education is well-documented. We could do a lot better in educating all children in math and science in this country. I also wonder: do high test scores in adolescence necessarily correlate with great scientific research later in life?

3) Discrimination by universities. Why spend 80 hours away from your kids if you aren't going to get anywhere in your career? People who underestimate the effects of discrimination have probably not experienced it themselves.

There is clear evidence of biological differences between men and women, aside from the obvious sex organs and hormonal fluctuations, some research has shown that the corpus callosum (the major pathway that connects left- and right- brains) is more developed in women. While some might argue there is biological evidence that women are smater, I feel strongly that the debate is inane. Some people are smarter than others. We must teach each of our children as if he or she were the next Albert Einstein or Marie Curie.

In closing, William Saletan notes: "But the best signal to send to talented girls and boys is that science isn't about respecting sensitivities. It's about respecting facts."

"Facts" like our innate differences cause girls to not excel at math and science. Seems like fuzzy science to me.

I'm not a feminist, but...

I appreciate the right to help choose my government representatives. I enjoy the option of wearing pants or shorts if I want. I'm pleased that I was allowed to learn to read and write. It can be very convenient to control how many babies I want to have. It's awfully useful to be able to open a bank account and own property in my name. I like knowing that my husband or boyfriend cannot legally beat me. It's really swell to keep the money that I earn.

poster from one angry girl designs

p.s. actually, I'm not so shy of using the f-word to describe myself, but I really liked this poster which I saw on my travels

different kinds of ambition

A recent weekend was filled with T-ball, two playdates and a sleepover. A conversation about the emergence of casual gaming on mobile devices took place while climbing over big rocks at the breakwater. Late night coding of a drag-and-drop interface to control remote data sets fit in after Bionicles, a new rhyming game, and bedtime.

Choosing between family time and professional interests is not a women's issue, yet these choices are more often intensely difficult for women than for men. I just read "Do Women Lack Ambition?" by Anna Fels (via danah at misbehaving.net):

Women now experience the most powerful social and institutional discrimination during their twenties and early thirties, after they have left the educational system and started pursuing their ambitions. At the age when women most frequently marry and have children, they must decide whether to try to hold on to their own ambitions or downsize or abandon them. Often, a young woman must make this decision at the moment when she is just learning to be a parent, with all its attendant fears, pleasures, insecurities, and around-the-clock work.

Although it is not stated as such, the focus of the article is on ambitions to succeed professionally in fields traditionally reserved for men. More women than men have ambitions to raise the next generation and to create that special relationship with a child that can lead to a healthy happy grown-up. One could argue the clear biological basis for this imbalance. After all, men are ill-equipped for the bearing of children. However, I know many men who value relationships and family and struggle against common expectations and sexism that limits the role of a man in our society.

"Downsizing" professional ambition to be a parent is a different ambition, not a lack of ambition.

Negotiation and the Gender Divide

"Women's goals used to be to get into management, to get onto the boards of Fortune 500 companies, to become CEO... There is a new goal. The aim now is more radical and more abituous: it is to change the game entirely" -- Margaret Heffernan

I enjoyed reading "Women Don't Ask" by Linda Babcock and Sarah Laschever after reading about it on misbehaving.net. It was refreshing to read results of research on gender differences along with some practical suggestion on how to affect change. The gender divide can be so stark at times, that it can feel like there is little we can do to affect change.

"Is is essential to remember, however, that the restraints placed on women are 'socially constructed.' They aren't physical principles like the law of gravity...which can't be altered. They are products of our culture... They can be loosened and changed completely if we want them to change."

Sometimes the simple actions of presence and voice are radical enough. Sometimes we can do more when we play a decision making or decision influencing role.

I used to frequently interview engineering candidates. I noticed a few gender differences. First, resumes from women were almost invariably more impressive than resumes from men. I do not believe that women typically write better resumes or that women are inherently better engineers. I do believe that it is just not worthwhile to pursue a career in engineering as a woman if you are not very good at it. I imagine its not worth the hassle.

The other big difference I saw was in the interview process itself. When asking a man about what he can do, he will typically answer with respect to what he thinks he could do given the opportunity; whereas, a woman will speak with respect to what she has already proven she can do. Both are reasonably and honest responses, but you can imagine how much more effective the former response would be. After I noticed this, I learned to ask not only how the candidate would approach a particular problem but to provide specific examples of how he or she would apply past experience. In this way, I was able to compare candidates effectively without being biased by different communication styles.