On this International Women's Day, Angie will talk about gender parity in technology, entrepreneurship and business -- and how to reach for it. From companies (recruiting, retaining and advancing women), to individuals perspective (as mentee, mentor, parent, colleague, friend), she will provide research-based tips and tricks for bringing women into the fold. First, she will go over why things are the way they are now -- and how to move toward the future of gender equality.
About the speaker: Angie Chang is the VP of Strategic Partnerships & Mentorship at Hackbright Academy, where she focuses on Strategic Partnerships. Hackbright Academy runs a 12-week accelerated engineering fellowship exclusively for women quarterly in San Francisco. In 2008, she started Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners to network women in technology. Dinners are sponsored by companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Palantir. Prior to that, she co-founded Women 2.0, a media company which promotes women in high-growth, high-tech entrepreneurship. She was named in Fast Company's 2010 "Most Influential Women in Technology" and more recently Business Insider named her one of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech". She has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women's high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. Angie has held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.
Increasing Gender Diversity in Tech - International Women's Day 2016
1. IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE:
PRACTICAL
INTERVENTIONS FOR
INCREASING DIVERSITY
ANGIE CHANG
VP PARTNERSHIPS & MENTORSHIP
HACKBRIGHT ACADEMY
2016 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
2. MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY
MONTH
This year’s theme on 3/8 for International Women’s Day is “pledge
for parity” – help accelerate gender parity in tech!
3. PARITY
Wikipedia defines parity as the state or condition of being
equal, especially in regard status or pay.
Each of us can be a leader within our own sphere of influence
and commit to taking action to accelerate gender parity.
5. ABOUT YOUR SPEAKER
In the past decade, launched organizations for women in tech:
• Women 2.0 – co-founder, editor-in-chief, board member (‘06-’13)
• Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners – founder (‘08-present)
• Hackbright Academy – growth & partnerships (‘13-present)
Started Women 2.0 with co-founders in 2006.
(pic: 2007, Women 2.0 Conference @ CNET)
Started Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners
(pic: 2008, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner @ Google)
Started at Hackbright Academy in 2012.
(pic: 2014, Zoe Kay working at New Relic)
8. WOMEN IN TECH
IN THE NEWS…
2016 survey in Silicon Valley showed:
• 60% of women in tech reported
unwanted sexual advances.
• 88% experienced clients/colleagues
addressing questions to male peers
Full report at ElephantInTheValley.com
trolls. doxxing.
rape threats over Twitter.
9. WOMEN AT WORK, DAILY.
Office politics are trickier for women than men:
> Women have to prove themselves over and over.
> Women have to navigate a tightrope between being
too masculine and too feminine.
> Having children just compounds both those problems.
> Gender bias often ends up creating highly freighted relationships
among women themselves.
All of these challenges spawn unique, daily obstacles for women.
10. WHY DIVERSITY MATTERS.
Numerous studies demonstrate having a diverse team
(management, BOD) makes smart business sense.
A 2011 study found that companies with
the most women board directors out-
performed others (16% return on sales,
26% return on invested capital).
- See “Why Diversity Matters” by Catalyst
11. COMPUTING HISTORY (OR HER-
STORY)
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
is recognized as the world’s
first computer programmer.
She wrote a series of instructions
for the analytical engine – the
first computer algorithm! Ada
forecasted the use of the engine
for more than just computing #s
-THE FIRST PROGRAMMER!-
12. MEET GRACE HOPPER -
POPULARIZED
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) led
the team that created the first
computer language compiler,
which led to the creation of
COBOL. The Anita Borg Institute
Celebration of Women in
Computing is named after
Grace Hopper in 1994.
“BUG”
13. THE FIRST “COMPUTERS”
ENIAC Programmers (~1945)
had answered ads that said:
“Wanted: Women With Degrees
in Mathematics” and learned to
program the ENIAC machine -
computing missile trajectory in
15 seconds (whereas human
computers would have spent
weeks to calculate the same).
WERE WOMEN
14. DO WE ACCEPT THE STATUS
QUO?
Born into gender stereotypes and cultural expectations, do we
accept the status quo?
15. DO WE ACCEPT THE STATUS
QUO?
Born into gender stereotypes and cultural expectations, do we
accept the status quo?
16. PROBLEMATIC “PIPELINE ISSUE”
The problem with citing the “pipeline issue” of lack of women in
engineering is that it removes individual commitment.
17. PROBLEMATIC “PIPELINE ISSUE”
The problem with citing the “pipeline issue” of lack of women in
engineering is that it removes individual commitment.
18. HOW TO PERSONALLY
CHANGE THE RATIO
Who can help change the gender ratio in tech:
• senior executives (CTOs, CEOs) & founders of startups!
• coworkers, friends & family
GoDaddy CTO Elissa Murphy
(former Yahoo VP engineering)
Redfin CTO Bridget Frey
(former Lithium director of engineering)
Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield
(former Flickr co-founder)
19. NOT HIRING FOR
“FIT”
Hiring shouldn’t be for “fit”.
/*no comment */
via allmalepanels.tumblr.com GitHub engineering manager February Keeney
20. CREATE AN INCLUSIVE CULTURE
What can you do to help? Make your work environment inclusive,
not stereotypically geeky and expecting an all-male environment.
Consider this in cases of tech office spaces and in interviewing:
• Geek memorabilia is exclusionary for many women.
• Art and posters on walls, coffee mugs and magazines, plants…
• Naming rooms “breakup room”, “bromance chamber”: not OK
21. MENTOR AND SPONSOR WOMEN!
Mentorship and sponsorship are important to bring women up in
the workplace. Volunteer and give back by:
• Mentoring: providing professional guidance.
• Sponsoring: advocating for women from a position of authority.
Pay it forward
by volunteering
as a MENTOR:
22. MALE ALLIES, SPONSORSHIP
How to be a male ally for women in technology?
Intuit VP Vinay Pai shares how the organization identified and
sponsored technical women, with great results in two years and
more to come!
Check out linkedin.com/pulse/how-male-ally-women-technology-vinay-pai
“Reflect on your own team and what you can do to join our small—
but mighty— group of male allies!”
Vinay Pai Alan Eustace Turner Bohlen Mark Zuckerberg
Intuit VP, Dev Platform Google SVP, Knowledge MIT Startup Bootcamp Facebook CEO
23. BE A GOOD ALLY TO WOMEN
How to be a good ally to women:
• Understand your privilege.
• Learn to listen.
• Notice how different women face different
problems.
• Use language of respect and equality.
• Learn the power of calling out injustices that don’t necessarily impact
you.
• CTO Sarah Allen’s talk for hack.summit()
2016 has an example of how to be an ally:
fast-forward the YouTube video to about
15 minutes into the talk for the Sasha
Laundy (pictured) story!
Get started: geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Allies
24. BIAS
There are well-documented differences in how men and women are
perceived:
• Female voices are perceived as less logical and less persuasive than
male voices.
• Women are perceived negatively for being too assertive.
• Code contributions on April 1, 2015 on GitHub…
Training women to LEAN IN (ie. negotiate better, be more assertive) is
not enough to solve this problem. If tech culture is going to change,
everyone needs to change, especially men and leaders.
Hat tip Rachel Thomas, Hackbright instructor and author of:
25. YOUR MOVE.
To counter bias, we have to work a little harder to keep women in tech.
No wonder 41% of women working in tech eventually end up leaving the
field, versus 17% of men.
• Don’t rely on self-nominations or self-evaluations (ie. Google)
• ____________________________________________
• ____________________________________________
• ____________________________________________
26. DURING RECRUITING:
WATCH THE LANGUAGE!
Audit your company website, especially
job descriptions, for neutral language.
Some suggestions:
• No war language: This means no “crushing”, “killing” or “ninjas”.
• Try cutting words like “guru” and “expert” out of rhetoric.
• Avoid extreme modifiers: This means no “best of the best”, “world-
class” or “off-the-charts”.
• Consider that anyone who has been raised/socialized to downplay
their expertise and not “toot their own horn” will be less likely to
characterize themselves in these ways, even when very highly
qualified.
27. TRY THIS LANGUAGE INSTEAD:
• Do you seek an “aggressive, hard-driving” person, or a “motivated,
energetic” person?
• Do you describe the office as “Nerd-filled with shoes optional”, or
“interactive and informal”?
• Do you want a “truly innovative” person with “genuine curiosity”?
• Instead of “expert-level”, is this person “highly respected”?
One company discovered that changing the job title from
“technology manager” to “digital manager” boosted the
amount of female applicants by 30%!
28. PARENTS: STEM IS
FOR EVERYONE!
Move past stereotypical toys.
Sign up boys AND girls for STEM activities.
You can nurture positive gender stereotypes when talking about play
and work. Read STEM magazines with children. Empower.
29. THANK YOU!
Thank you for being a part
of this important conversation!
A rising tide lifts all boats, and
we appreciate our allies.
Got feedback?
Email Angie Chang at a@hackbrightacademy.com
or angie@bayareagirlgeekdinners.com
Twitter: @thisgirlangie Thanks Evernote for having me for #IWD2016
Editor's Notes
The Notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer'. The collaboration with Babbage was close and biographers debate the extent and originality of Ada's contribution.
Perhaps more importantly, the article contained statements by Ada that from a modern perspective are visionary. She speculated that the Engine 'might act upon other things besides number... the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent'. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. She has been referred to as 'prophet of the computer age'. Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. In this the tribute is well-founded. (via http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace)
laughingsquid.com/newsweek-putting-the-we-in-web
I graduated with humanities degrees, but work experience through college as a web designer and marketing coordinator led me to my first job out of college – in an engineering team of a venture-backed startup in Palo Alto. I found that being the only woman in a team of a dozen guys isolating, and learned to go to meetups to learn about entrepreneurship and starting up. I asked why there were not more women starting high-growth high-tech companies, and was connected with my fellow co-founders in 2005 of what became Women 2.0, a media company supporting female entrepreneurs. I also started Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in 2008, to network women in technology. Today, we’ve hosted over 100 girl geek dinners. Fast forward to today, where I’ve channeled my passion for getting more women into engineering at Hackbright Academy.
Tarah Wheeler Von vlack
The Notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer'. The collaboration with Babbage was close and biographers debate the extent and originality of Ada's contribution.
Perhaps more importantly, the article contained statements by Ada that from a modern perspective are visionary. She speculated that the Engine 'might act upon other things besides number... the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent'. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. She has been referred to as 'prophet of the computer age'. Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. In this the tribute is well-founded. (via http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace)
Popularized the term computer “bug”
http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac
Historically women in computing is not a new concept
If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention — Tech Diversity Files
Rachel Thomas, Hackbright instructor writes in Medium
medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-in-tech-is-just-a-pipeline-problem-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention-cb7a2073b996#.d62yk3qog
“To succeed, you need to care. And that means having the most senior executives and founders care, else all the team will model the leadership’s lack of valuing diversity.”
- Sharon Weinbar, Hackbright Academy CEO, for TechCrunch
https://hackbrightacademy.com/blog/12-female-ctos-you-should-know-2016
allmalepanels.tumblr.com
Studies show women choose computer science when not associated with geeky things..
www.livescience.com/9772-geeks-drive-girls-computer-science.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-male-ally-women-technology-vinay-pai
both men and women will want flexible working patterns then there will be more pressure to redesign working practices