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Engineering

Equality

Technology, Women and Equity at the 2014 Grace Hopper Conference

October 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Guest post from YY Lee, my business partner and COO of FirstRain

I am proud of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (@ghc) community this week for raising important issues and grappling with uncomfortable, difficult-to-solve questions.

I appreciate FirstRain’s own Penny Herscher (@pennyherscher) for putting herself out there to moderate the Male Allies Panel, despite the concerns going-in about how to constructively include that perspective.  The fiery reaction to that session raised
the level of engagement around deep-seated systemic equity issues in
our industry in a way that would not have been achieved otherwise.  And
in Penny’s usual way — she engaged those issues head-on, in direct personal and online exchanges with the men & women, leadership & grassroots members of the community.

Satya Nadella’s wrong-headed comment the next morning  (as he has acknowledged),
underscored the complacency and problems around gender-equity issues,
even among the thoughtful and well-intentioned.  This forced the
realization that this is not an simply an issue of perception,
interpretation or over-reaction. But will require a real introspection
and major change — even from colleagues and leaders who are confident
they are already totally on-board and acting as allies for equity.
This was the near-perfect opportunity, timing and forum to
examine the truth.  It is remarkable that even given the charged
emotions around this,  the discussion started relatively politely, and
besides excessive piling on, it remained safe — this in stark contrast
to the ugly violent targeting has been simultaneously unfolding around GamerGate.  Which only further highlights the reality of the technology industry’s toxic differences in how men and women are treated.

It is too bad that before Nadella’s KarmaGate comment, he stated one of my favorite quotes of the whole conference — summing up why I’ve loved doing this work, nearly every day for over two decades: 
“[We work with] the most malleable of our resources, software… That’s the rich canvas that we get to shape… paint…”  -Satya Nadella
He nailed it.  He put his finger on that the one thing
that probably links all the men and women in that event.  This is a
deep-thinker who understands the heart of matters, which is what made
his later comment so doubly surprising and disheartening.
I am encouraged to see the after-effects like Alan Eustace trying to do things differently.
 And honest conversations with ABI executives about their awareness and
struggle with the impossible balance of growing their reach and impact
while containing the inevitable, unintended side effect of corporate
co-opting.
To all of you “good guys who do care” — Satya, Alan,
Mike Schroepfer, Blake Irving, Tayloe Stansbury — less patronizing talk
is nice, listening is refreshing, but which of you and your companies
is going to commit to results?

==> Here my question to all the “good guys” out there as well as my fellow female leaders:  Who is going to set and deliver specific targets
for ratios of women and minorities that reflect the real population —
in technical leadership by a specific date… 2016? 2017? Who is going to
hack their orgs & companies to solve this problem, rather than running feel-good, look-good “programs”?

The Grace Hopper Celebration is an inspiring, important
and high-quality gathering in an industry that is littered with mediocre
PR-flogging events.  
  • The technical and career presentations are given by
    presenters who truly care about their audience and strive to offer a
    valuable, nutritious exchanges — not just advance some commercial
    agenda.
  • The leaders remind us of how our work is linked to important broader social dynamics outside of our privileged community. The ABI exec responsible for this conference, introduced the eye-opening Male Allies Panel with a personal reminder about about how social change is about connecting across communities:

“The Asian community owes a lot to the black community. They opened a lot of doors for us [in the fight for equality].” -Barb Gee

  • From early mornings until late into the night, it was a
    surround-sound ocean of substantive discussions between old friends,
    colleagues and strangers about leading-edge technical work, honest and
    vulnerable personal experiences, deep examinations of culture,
    inclusiveness, safety, aspirations and disappointments.

  • There is a natural balance of empowering women create change
    in themselves and their environments. While calling out that real change
    is impossible without the corporations, managers and executives, and
    yes the men who make up 80% of our co-workers, to fully own making that
    change with us.

I’m not going to end this post with some rah-rah “just go get
’em girls!” trope. Because the women technologists are already out there
— delivering effort, innovation and results at 120% while receiving
70%… 80%… (to be wildly optimistic) of the recognition and reward.

I will share just one final favorite conference quote, which is how this gathering makes me feel every time I attend:

“… at #GHC14… Just not enough space to desc. Wow. Much women. So much brain” -@michelesliger

It is our industry and companies that need to be fixed, not the women in it.
I have to believe it is becoming increasingly obvious to our leaders,
managers and co-workers that under-valuing this incredibly intellectual
resource is idiotic, bad business, and just plain wrong.

– YY Lee (@thisisyy), COO of FirstRain

Career Advice

Engineering is the way to bring jobs back to America

October 25, 2011 2 Comments

We are facing an ongoing threat to America’s global economic leadership and increasing the number of engineers in our workforce is one powerful way we can change our destiny as a country.

In Silicon Valley we have one engineering job open for every two engineers that are employed – this means it is hard to find enough qualified workers and so companies move jobs offshore to India and China where they graduate many more engineers than we do. Today we simply do not have enough people trained in the “STEM” areas to staff the technology build up that is happening (STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

When Steve Jobs met with President Obama earlier this year he made this case strongly. From Walter Isaacson’s new biography… “Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. ‘You can’t find that many in America to hire,’ he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. ‘If you could educate those engineers,’ he said, ‘we could move more manufacturing plants here.’ “

But today not only do we not graduate enough engineers, women are a huge untapped resource. Less than 10% of our computer engineering graduates are women, and less than 20% of our total engineering bachelors are women – a criminal loss of potential contribution from half our workforce.

Technology is an area that is a wonderful example of American leadership. Leadership, innovation and the place where we can say “Made in the USA” with pride. Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook – all are growing, innovative global technology leaders. All are changing the world today in dramatic ways. All are essentially American and all need more engineers. Google and Microsoft both invest heavily in change agents like the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology precisely to change the ratio of men to women in engineering and so produce more qualified engineers to grow their businesses.

Just as in the Second World War we had a national shortage of skilled workers for manufacturing, today we have a critical shortage of technology workers. Women and education are the two keys to the solution.

Seventy years ago the Rosie the Riveter campaign moved 6 million women into the workforce. These women were trained and they showed that they could do the work – building the planes, ships and munitions necessary to win a devastating war.

Senator Gillibrand of New York talks about a revival of the Rosie the Riveter campaign to galvanize women to become more empowered and she speaks about the need for women to get Off The Sidelines and get more involved in politics. She’s right, and it’s bigger than that. The low percentages of women who graduate with technology degrees in the US shows the untapped resource. Getting women involved and into technology creates more jobs for both men and women in manufacturing and the ecosystem around the technology jobs.

We are in the middle of a 100 year technology revolution, analogous to the industrial revolution that dramatically changed the Western way of life through the 18th and 19th centuries. This technology revolution is taking us through a series of engineering inventions – the computer, the microprocessor, software applications, the internet, mobile devices and there is more to come we can only imagine.

It’s time for Rosie the Engineer and Robert the Engineer. I’m a Silicon Valley high-tech CEO and I see the need first hand. We need our political leadership to invest in STEM education, and especially for our girls to bring them into the technology. It’s time to put programs in place to motivate our students to get technical degrees so they can get jobs when they graduate. We need engineers, the technology jobs pay more, and they create more jobs in America for everyone.