In my last blog post, I highlighted the different family configurations
between men and women working in high-technology – namely, 82% of technical women
report that their partner works full time, compared to 37% of technical men,
and a majority of women are partnered with someone working in high-tech as
well.
This creates the need for flexibility. Now, “flexibility” is
probably one of the most over-used buzz words when it comes to talking about the
retention of women in US corporations. It is thrown around a lot, and yet ill
defined. It is often used in the context of “flexible work” to refer to
part-time work arrangements, and usually it is thrown around as a solution for “work-life
balance” specifically for women. It is often viewed as a “special arrangement” or
a “perk,” a concession that a company makes for an employee. However, we are doing ourselves a disservice
by framing flexibility as a women’s issue and an exceptional “perk.”
Would you build an inflexible technology system? Consider
the following engineering definition of flexibility from
Wikipedia.
“In the context
of engineering design one can define flexibility as the ability of a system to respond to potential internal or external
changes affecting its value delivery, in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Thus, flexibility for an engineering system is the ease with which the system
can respond to uncertainty in a manner
to sustain or increase its value delivery. It should be noted that
uncertainty is a key element in the definition of flexibility.”
Where flexibility is necessary to the success of technology systems,
it is necessary to the success of human systems:
There
is ongoing and significant uncertainty built in any human system (just
like engineering systems), leading to all employees experiencing variable
demands on their time from their families – in the form of sickness, closed
schools, spousal travel, elderly parents, divorce, sick children, etc.
In
order to deliver technology products and services and maximize return on
investment for the company, managers must build in flexibility in the way
they allocate the workflow of their employees.
This
flexibility will enable teams to respond to uncertainty and meet their business
goals.
Since
technical employees deeply care about flexibility, our organization will be
able to attract and retain top talent.
Flexibility is a business imperative that has been
demonstrated to positively impact the bottom line:
- Recruitment and Retention benefits
oOur
own Research
shows that 78% of technical men and 83% rate flexibility as very or highly
important to them, second only to the basics of healthcare and financial rewards.
Companies that take flexibility seriously will thus be able to attract and
retain technical talent.
- Other case studies have shows that flexibility increases
retention – for example, IBM, in a global survey of 42,000 employees, found that
flexibility is a top contributor to retention. Difficulties around work-life balance
were found to be the second top reason for intending to leave the company
(again, only second to dissatisfaction around financial rewards)
- Reduced absenteeism
One
study of flexible work practices by researchers Dalton and Mesch in Administrative Science
Quarterly found that the introduction of flexible schedules led to higher
employee satisfaction and reduced absenteeism. When the organization removed
the flexibility schedules, absenteeism and satisfaction rates went back to what
they were before.
- Flexibility is a two-way street: global human capital
management
Globalization is putting increased demands on today’s
workforce for shifting and unpredictable schedules, and an appropriate
implementation of flexible practices is critical to companies’ ability to meet these
new demands. In The Global
Human Capital Study, CEOs defined “adaptability” as a critical feature of the
new human capital model. Companies that can quickly deploy talent with the
right skills to specific problems need workers who are adaptable and flexible –
and this flexibility mindset needs to be reflected in organizational practices.
While flexibility practices take many forms, such as part-time
options, compressed work weeks, telecommuting, or the newer on-ramps and
offramps, a company doesn’t need to implement complex changes to experience the
wins of flexibility. Incorporating a flexibility “mindset” can be very effective
even if informally. Some critical components of fostering a flexibility mindset
include:
- Integrate flexibility with business strategy – consider
which projects, times, or tasks are conducive to flexibility.
- Understanding how flexibility is valued by your
employees – understanding employee needs around flexibility is critical to implementing
the right solution.
- Executive buy-in and modeling – in order to send a
signal that formal or informal flexibility is an accepted business practice, executives
need to engage in it where possible.
- Making sure evaluation and promotion practices are
aligned with flexibility mindset – this requires ensuring that there is no evaluation
penalty associated with flexibility.
Learn from Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation.
In my last two blogs I talked about the winners of the Anita
Borg Institute Women of Vision
award winners, and today I wrap up this series talking about Mitchell Baker,
the Women of Vision winner for leadership,.
Mitchell Baker
is the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, and former CEO of Mozilla
Corporation.Mozilla’s best known
product is Firefox.Software is an
increasingly competitive business, but what is unusual and inspiring is that
the Firefox product not only is a strong competitor for becoming the top
internet browser, but the product is developed and supported by the open source
community.Developers from all over the
world, on a volunteer basis, contribute to the Firefox product.
Mitchell is a lawyer, but she is legendary in the technology
community.She developed the innovative
and influential Mozilla Public License, which provides open source guidelines
for their development community.
When Firefox 3 was released on Jun 17, 2009, Mozilla
saw8.3 million users download the
software in just 24 hours. A week later that number surpassed 20 million. The
Firefox browser continues to gain market share, and has become a serious
contender in the browser wars.
What Mitchell is known for is bringing together an
international development community.She
travels around the world, visiting the Mozilla volunteer development
communities in Switzerland, Korea, France,
India, Germany, England,
Brazil,
and many other places.
Mitchell Baker, together with Yuqing Gao, and Jan Cuny are
truly Women of Vision.
After publishing “Climbing the Technical Ladder”),
I have given talks about our findings to several high tech companies. One of
the findings that resonates the most with technical women is our depiction of the
reality of dual-career high-technology couples.
Our data show that women in technology positions are more
than twice as likely as men to be in a dual-career couple. Furthermore, among
partnered high-tech employees in Silicon Valley,
over 60% of women report that their partner also works in high-tech. Along with
that picture, not surprisingly, male respondents are five times more likely to report
that their partner has the primary responsibility of the household/children.
This situation creates a significant discrepancy for
technical women – their work-life reality is fundamentally different than that of
their male peers, with serious consequences on their life choices.
Women and men in dual career technical couples reported on
the juggling act they have to achieve to meet the demands of a globalized work
schedule, where both have to be on frequent late night calls with India and early morning calls with Europe.
In order to retain and advance technical talent, companies need
to acknowledge the reality of dual-career couples, and the implications for
technical women. One of the women we interviewed who had attained a high level
position in technology reflected on her husband’s flexibility as being key to
her success.
What is currently a gender issue could be becoming a
generational issue. We find that the statistical gender difference between men
and women who say their partner has primary responsible for the household and
children disappears for those technical employees under age 30 – however,
technical men under 30 were still less likely to report having a partner who
works full time than women under 30.
In our next few blogs, we will be showcasing companies and
practices that successfully support technical women’s careers and the reality of
dual-career couples.
In my last blog I talked about Dr. Yuqing Gao, our Women of
Vision winner for Innovation.
Our 2009 Women of Vision winner for Social Impact is Dr. Jan
Cuny.Jan is a program director at the
National Science Foudnation (NSF) and has created a new and very successful
program at NSF’s CISE directorate called Broadening Participation.
I’ve known Jan for many years, I met her when she was a
faculty member at the University
of Oregon.Over the last many years, she became involved
in the Computer Research Association programs (CRA-W) for increasing the number
of female students and faculty.She
also served as the Grace Hopper conference program chair in 2004, and the
general chair for the 2006 conference.
But her passion for inclusion of all people took a new and
influential turn when she joined NSF. Under her leadership, Jan has created venues for under-represented
groups to gain experience with using and creating technology, ensuring that
they will be qualified for positions in our technology-driven world.These groups include Women, African
Americans, Hispanci, and other underrepresented groups.The NSF BPC program supports 10 major
Alliances- broad coalitions targeting the academic
pipeline from K-12 to early faculty ranks, and operating on a national or
regional scale and 40+ demonstration
projects focused on scaling and replicating successful efforts.
What makes Jan’s contribution unique is her commitment to
creating a community among these alliances and projects ensuring shared understanding
among the project leaders and further collaboration between universities.
Her commitment to inclusion for all people, is why Jan well
deserves this honor.
While everyone has their own leadership style to a certain
extent, and while all of us exercise leadership in our lives (whether it’s managing
2,000 employees or raising our children), there is a lot of speculation on
whether men and women tend to lead differently. Research on how leadership styles
differ by gender is mixed – some studies find a difference, while others show
no gender effect.
In a Harvard
Business Review article), Judy Rosener’s research showed how male leaders
are more likely to use a “command-and-control” leadership style where formal authority
and a focus on the task at hand drive action by subordinates, while female
leaders are more likely to report using a “transformational leadership”
approach, motivating others to embrace broader organizational goals and building
inter-personal relationships. Alice Eagly, author of Through
the Labyrinth performed a meta-analysis of all such research studies and found
that indeed, women leaders tend to rely more on transformational
leadership. This leadership style,
she found, is “more akin to being an excellent teacher than a traditional boss”,
growing others for success and enhancing overall employee leadership capacity.
The best leadership approach depends on organizational
culture and context, yet transformational leadership has been shown to be more effective
overall in environments necessitating collaboration and innovation and high
levels of organizational change, such as the high-tech industry.
Attributes of
Transformational Leaders:
- Individual consideration to other’s needs
- Mentoring and coaching others to be successful
- Challenges assumptions and invites ideas from others
- Creates and articulates a vision that others want to
follow
- Trust is built with co-workers and employees
Examples of transformational leaders according to various
websites:
One of the great parts of my job is the chance to recognize
extraordinary women leaders, many of whose contributions are not widely
know.The Anita Borg Institute’s Women
of Vision event recognizes three women in the areas of Innovation, Leadership
and Social Impact.This year’s winners
are incredible!!
Our winner in Innovation is Dr. Yuqing Gao, a senior manager at
IBM Research.Her work has pushed the
envelope of speech to speech transition. Early in her career, she led a team to develop the first commercially
viable speech-recognition system for Mandarin to English.
Her recent speech to speech translation systems have
expanded the limits of what is possible in communication between people around
the world.She led a team that
developed a system supporting English-Iraqi and English-Farsi dialogs.This system included a vocabulary of over
50,000 English works and 100,000 Arabic words, and translated in real time
free-form speech.As any of you who
use speech recognition on your cell phone or through a service provider know,
speech recognition is hard, and prone to errors.Combing speech recognition with speech
translation is challenging, and Dr. Gao is at the forefront of this important
work.
Dr. Gao’s work was cited by MIT Technology Review in
February 2004 as one of the 10 Emerging Technologies that will Change your
World.Her work has been used by the US
Government as an aid to US troops in Iraq to help with their every day
needs.
Her impact on her field is profound, and we are honored to
recognize her as our Women of Vision winner in Innovation.
Stay tuned to future blogs as I talk about the other two
winners.
Last week, we blogged about the importance of role models in
inspiring and increasing the number of women in technology. What is it like to
be one of those role models? Women in leadership positions in male-dominated
industries face some significant challenges.
First, a female leader who is one of the “very few” women at
the top experiences much more scrutiny than her male peers. She stands out,
because she is the “only one”. All eyes are likely to be on her, and her
actions are likely to be scrutinized. There is no room for mistakes and the
spotlight in on her performance. What she does or does not do becomes interpreted
through a gender lens – she is seen as representing all female leaders. This is
the social psychology dynamic which was coined by Harvard Professor Rosabeth
Moss Kanter and is called “tokenism.”
Women leaders also defy the norm because of societal
stereotypes. Research documented in the book “Through the Labyrinth” shows that men are perceived as more
influential than women (by both men and women), and that women need to show exceptional
competence to be taken seriously as influencers and leaders. This dynamic is even
worse in domains that are stereotypically masculine, such as sports, finance,
and… technology.
This is why technical women often say they have to “work twice
as hard” as their male peers to be taken seriously. This woman in a leadership
position we interviewed for our study of technical men and women in the high
tech industry, Climbing the
Technical Ladder, said it best:
“I’ve had a couple of experiences
where I’ve worked with guys and it was very hard for them to take me seriously
until I proved myself. It might be a little bit harder for women than for men.
If a guy walks into the room, it’s easier (especially if it’s a room full of
guys) for him to believe that he knows what he’s talking about. If you’re a
woman, you have to try just a little bit harder until you prove yourself.”
This is not a case of men being the sole source of bias against
women – women tend to hold the same stereotypical assumptions against women leaders.
For example, in our study, both male and female respondents were likely to rate
the technical competence of their manager higher if their manager was a man.
Women leaders are also not afforded the same kind of repertoire
as their male peers in terms of acceptable behavior. For example, they are
either seen as “too assertive” or “not assertive enough.” This creates a need
for women leaders to self-monitor their
level of assertiveness to match the situation.
While being in a leadership position is tough for women in
male dominated industries, there are several examples of successful role models
who have successfully navigated their tech careers. Stay tuned on their
profiles and tips for success.
In my role at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and
Technology(ABI), I have the chance to interact with senior technology leaders.Because there are so few women in the
technology area, I can’t emphasize how important senior role models are for
those that are in a mid career technical position.
For example, Kathy Hill is Senior Vice President at Cisco
Systems, and is one of the most senior women at the company.She also serves on ABI’s Board of Trustees.We work with many technical women at
Cisco, and I can’t tell you how often we hear from women how much they admire
Kathy.Many of the people I have spoken
to don’t know her well, but it is important to them and their own career
potential to look up and see a woman in a very senior role at the company.
Why are role models important?Most of us see the world through our own
experience.It is easier to
conceptualize a new world when we see examples that relate to us. For women, yes of course many role models
can be men.Most of my personal role
models were men, because they were the people who had the positions I wanted.But it is important to see other women
succeed.
Role models come in all shapes and sizes.They aren’t simply the senior women.At our annual event, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing,
often the most valuable role models for the students that attend are the young
faculty and industry professionals that speak, because they are a few years
older than the students, and their decisions seem more accessible and
possible.
The annual Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
Women of Vision evening recognizes the achievements of three extraordinary
women, and for all attendees – men and women – the evening is inspirational,
and these women are important role models. As an example, Duy-Loan Le, a senior Fellow from TI, won a few years
ago.Her video has been watched by thousands of
people, because of her inspirational message of hope and commitment.Through this one night, she has touched the
life of all that hear her video.
Close your eyes. Imagine the CEO or CTO of a high tech company. Who do you see? For most people, the answer is "white" and "male", because there is such a lack of diversity of role models at that level. Ask a young girl what she sees when she thinks "computer scientist" or "technologist"; unless she has role models in her family, she will probably imagine a man. Role models and mentors play a critical role in women’s career success. However, research shows that women in technology are likely to suffer from a lack of mentors and role models. For example, the annual UC Davis Census of Women in Business in California finds that nearly half of the 400 largest firms in California have all male executive teams, with the software, hardware, telecommunications and semiconductor sectors trailing behind other sectors in terms of female representation in the board room.
That report lists companies that have no female executives or directors, including a long list of high-technology companies.
For girls and women from under-represented minorities, the absence of role models is even greater. In our study of technical women in industry, Climbing the Technical Ladder (www.anitaborg.org/news/research), we found no Latina women at the highest level of companies, and the proportion of African American women falls from 4.6 percent at the entry level to 1.6 percent at the high level jobs. For young Latina and African American women, this complete absence of role models sends them a strong message that this is not a welcoming career path. One technical Latina woman we interviewed reflected that "I’m the only Hispanic person in my group ... There are very few Hispanics in my technical field. Sometimes I look around and I’m ‘both’: I’m the only Hispanic and the only woman."
Fortunately, many organizations are working to address the lack of role models in technology. Our Women of Vision Awards ceremony (coming up on April 30 - http://anitaborg.org/wov/) and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (www.gracehopper.org) shines the light on the accomplishments of women in technology and provides powerful role models- the Anita Borg Institute You Tube Channel showcases many of them. The National Center for Women & IT (www.ncwit.org) showcases interviews with women entrepreneurs who have made a mark using technology.
Many other organizations are working on increasing the visibility of role models for women in technology.
Did you say that you are looking for a job?It is a common occurrence these days, there isn’t a single person I know who isn’t either looking for a job themselves, or who has a close friend and/or colleague that is looking for a job.At ABI, we work primarily with the technical work force, and although fewer of the Engineers and Computer Scientists have been laid off, there are still many.I remember the time during the internet bust of 2000 and 2001 when I had left my previous position at PMC-Sierra, taken six months off, and started looking for work just as 911 happened.It was a challenging time.I learned many things during that time period that served me well then and today.Some of my lessons learned are:
Use your network – I met with and talked to many people that I had known over the 20 years that I worked in Silicon Valley.I reached out to people that I hadn’t talked to in years, and they were always willing to meet with me, even when there wasn’t an obvious fit. My first consulting job came from a Venture Capitalist who I knew from 15 years prior when he was the head of a local research lab, and had tried to hire me.He had several chip companies in his portfolio that needed the expertise that I had developed.In addition, I met with a number of people that I went to graduate school with.Everyone I reached out to was generous with their time, their advice and their candor. Most meetings did not result in anything other than a lunch or coffee, but I learned from each and every encounter.If I was to do it again today, I have the luxury of my LinkedIn network that provides contact information for people I have not seen for many years, but who I am now linked to.
Clearly articulate your value – I was positioning myself as a management consultant, with emphasis on engineering management.For each person I met with, they wanted to understand what I could do for them.To be honest, I was a little vague myself, and the first few times, my value proposition was a little mumbled.What I learned was that the more clearly I could articulate what I could do for potential clients, the better the results of the conversation.Some of the interviews were for permanent positions, but the interviews went much better when the person hiring could clearly see what my experience could do for them.
Refresh your skill set and knowledge base – At the time I had just finished a two year run as VP of Engineering of a Voice over IP Processor Company, and then taken six months off.Before I met with anyone, I went back and refreshed my knowledge about the technical development of the processor, as well as the methods we used to manage the project delivery of the chip, software, and application.Each and every person I talked to wanted to understand the technical aspects of what I could provide for their organization, and my approach to the VoIP processor development.
Appear confidence - for women, this can be the hardest part of a job interview.What employers look for is the ability to deliver, and first and foremost you need to believe that you can deliver (or appear to believe).Often I had to act as if I believed in myself, because inside, I was not fully confident, I was breaking new ground in my career, and learning from every discussion.But I was able to appear confident which provided the opportunity to agree on a next step, and finally to agree on a contract.
Job hunting can be a scary time, but it is sometimes the first step towards a new and better future.If you are looking for a job, think of it as an opportunity – to hone your skills, to find a better position, and ultimately to believe in yourself.
Be sure to check out the Anita Borg Institute’s Savvy Geek Chix, www.savvygeekchix.org, to learn more about opportunities to improve your job hunting skills.
