misbehaving.net

Build-A-Biz

When women entrepreneurs build a business with technology as the infrastructure, you get some interesting results. My son, age 8, has been begging me to visit Build-A-Bear with him. I finally gave in and went over to the mall to experience this new phenomenon first-hand.

Build-A-Bear was founded by a woman named Maxine Clark who may just be one of the most savvy marketers to come down the pike. Just as Pine and Gilmore explained in their great book, The Experience Economy, taking a regular cup of coffee and turning it into the experience known as Starbuck's, creates value that lets you build a loyal, intimate customer base and charge a premium price.

At Build-A-Bear Clark has figured out how to turn buying a teddy bear into a two-hour religious experience. Enter the cheery shop, look at a wall full bins holding unstuffed stuffed animals, pick out the $15 - $20 pelt of your choice, and get ready for an experience that can NOT be called simply "buying a stuffed animal." The short version goes like this. Pick out a bear pelt (or lion, dog, tiger, rabbit, etc) , pick out a sound for your animal, pick out a tiny red gingham heart, go to the Stuffing Lady (my term, not theirs), let her use her glass lion-cage type stuffing machine, which tumbles the fluffy white stuffing inside for all to see, with it's handy chrome fluff-shooting pipe to bring your bear to life, shooting stuffing into each limb. She makes your child repeat some incantations about how brainy the bear will be, how loving his heart will be, how brave he will be. After the animal is fully stuffed, she sews him up, then it's off to the birth certificate area, then to the air blowers to fluff his fur. All around the shop are outfits for your bear, shoes, hats, backpacks, NFL uniforms, even tents, as well as tiny stuffed animals for him to take home as well.

This piece from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Teresa F. Lindeman gives you a detailed description of the B-a-B experience, complete with photos of the fluff-shooting machine.

If they didn't knock their competitors out of the box by expert "experience marketing," they have also done some brilliant things in terms of "cause marketing" -- working with many non-profits to promote literacy, championing endangered species and animal rights issues and getting very politically correct endorsements from the likes of Susan Sarandon.

Throw in some co-branding with heavy weight cool brands like Sketchers (yes, the bears can buy designer sneakers) and The Limited Too and you have an amazing marketing powerhouse.

Ready to add the technology infrastructure? In the store, there are some cool work stations with painted up monitors and keyboards where you sit with your kid and input most of the data any direct marketer would kill for -- name, address, zip, email, kid's birthday, etc. -- all supposedly in order to generate a Build-A-Bear Birth Certificate for your new stuffed animal -- but obviously with the intention of building one heck of a robust database. With such savvy use of technology, I can imagine their back office operations are equally powerful. Their website has a nice ecommerce interface and the extra clothes we ordered online and the free cardboard armoire they tossed in to keep the animal's clothes in arrived quickly, nicely presented and needless to say, my son flipped for the stuff.

[BTW, just saw this great post Glenn Reynolds wrote about Build-A-Bear in September. Check it out.]

Sadie Plant's Zeroes + Ones

I leave tomorrow for Monterey, where I'll be speaking at the Internet Librarian conference. (Any misbehaving readers in Monterey, or going to the conference? I've got free time Sunday...)

On the airplane, I'll be reading a book that a colleague gave me some time ago, but that I promptly lost. Now that I've unearthed it, and read the Amazon.com review, I'm eager to read it at last.

Meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of mathematician Annabella Byron and poet Lord Byron, and a major contributor to Charles Babbage's famous Analytic Engine. Lovelace is in many ways the patron saint of Sadie Plant's exploration of women's roles in the creation of modern technology. The book begins with Lovelace's story, and elements of her writings appear throughout the book--sometimes to emphasize points but often to exemplify attitude. They also serve to anchor Plant's dynamic, almost stream-of-conscious approach as we travel to 19th-century Europe to meet the nameless women who laid the foundation of modern technology with the development of weaving, survey the major female technological innovators of today, and even explore female figures in technology-based fiction.

Plant's "cyberfeminist rant," as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won't find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within zeros and ones of cyberspace many such dichotomies of life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways

I'll post my reaction to the book as a comment to this post once I'm safely ensconsed in the Marriott tomorrow.

Google Anita Borg Scholarships

Speaking of Anita Borg, Google's offering two scholarships in honor of Dr. Borg.

Google is pleased to announce two $10,000 scholarships for female students in the computer sciences during the 2004-2005 academic year. One will be awarded to an undergraduate student and one to a graduate (master’s level) degree candidate.

Applications must be received by Friday, January 30, 2004. Very cool.

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

Last month, the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT) changed its name to incorporate the name of its founder, Anita Borg. Borg, who lost her battle with brain cancer this past April, founded the institute in 1997 "to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology and to increase the positive impact of technology on the lives of the world's women."

Women who've worked in the tech industry for a long time, however, know (or know of) Borg not from the Institute she founded, but through the Systers mailing list that she founded in 1987. It was, to my knowledge, the first mailing list for women in technology, and with over 2500 members, it is one of the largest and most active online communities of its kind.

The Institute has several other initiatives that women in technology should know about. One is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing, a conference that brings together researchers, practicioners, and policy makers to discuss the role of women in computing--and perhaps more importantly, to foster collaboration, mentoring, and networking for women in computing fields. I'll definitely be submitting a paper proposal...maybe you should, too!

The Virtual Development Center is a network of universities working together to encourage collaborative work between academia and communities, focused on women's participation. Each institution in the VDC holds annual Innovation Workshops, in which faculty, students, and women from local community groups brainstorm new ideas for technology-based products. These products are then developed by the students in credit-bearing courses, in collaboration with the community groups. At the end of the year, results are presented at an annual VDC conference.

Then there's the event I want to go to when I grow up...the Senior Women's Summit, which " where a powerful group of women who are exercising major influence on the world of computing in industry, government and academia come together for a day and discuss how computing and technology can impact significant societal issues." I looked at this photo from the 2002 event, and recognized Dr. Caroline Wardle, the amazing and accomplished woman who's the program director for the NSF grant I'm working on.

Julia CodeWoman Rocks

I love reading Julia Lerman's blog as she hangs out at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA this week. She's one of those still much-too-rare birds -- a woman developer. Surely the ratio of men to women at the conference must be something like 100 to 1 ... although I hope it's better than that.

Wait, there was a "Women In Technology Luncheon" and they mentioned that PDC has 9000 attendees and 750 are women.

Even more fun was to read this post about how she solves problems for her clients. She's sensitive to the fact that her woman client really hates computers and she needs to fix the thing fast so the woman can get some work done.

Ada Byron Lovelace

Before the first computer, there was Lady Ada Byron Lovelace, one of the first computer scientists.

Born in 1815 to British poet Lord Byron, Ada’s parents separated just after she was born.  In an attempt to “counter dangerous poetic tendencies,” her mother Annabella Milbanke made sure Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music. 

Eventually, more than a century ahead of her time, Ada would produce the premier text explaining the process now known as computer programming.

At 17 years old, Ada met Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge.  Moved by his ideas about an “Analytical Engine,” the first concept of a modern computer, Byron and Babbage frenetically corresponded about the machine, logic and math.  Soon Babbage enlisted Byron to translate a French article on his development.  Byron’s own notes taken with the translation turned out to be three times the length of the original article.  Babbage had her notes included with the translation.

Published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use.
- Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developing [sic] and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.
- Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace

What's Carly Up To?

Look at this link and tell me what Carly Fiorina is up to. I have my theories, but would really like to know what you think.

Some of the questions that come to my mind are:

1. Is she still running a "technology" company?

2. Will women leaders in technology take tech places men would never go?

3. Does gender really matter when it comes to being a CEO?

4. Does a woman see technology as a way to solve problems in the world that men don't even necessarily see as problems?

5. Do some engineers design technology to impress other engineers with how smart they are, but are essentially solving non-problems?

6. Are these "leading" questions which demonstrate my bias?

Us, run through the Gender Genie

Just for kicks, I ran the last few Misbehaving.net posts through the Gender Genie, mentioned earlier on this site, a site that purports to determine the gender of a writer. The Results: "Why aren't more European Women Online? came up as Female Score: 567 / Male Score: 964; "The Accidental Techie" came up as Female Score: 701 / Male Score: 877; "Re-imagining our Lives" came up as Female Score: 692 / Male Score: 939; "The Opt-Out Revolution" came out Female Score: 903 / Male Score: 1203; "Simulating Women" came up as Female Score: 160 / Male Score: 161; "Social Construction of Technology" came up as Female Score: 232/ Male Score: 498.

Most of us came up as predominantly male. This isn't the most accurate algorithm (you can read about how it is supposed to work in this Nature article), but even at 80% accuracy, it's noticeable.

why aren't more european women online?

As many women as men use the internet daily in the USA, in fact, American mothers spend more time surfing than do their teenaged children, but it's not that way in the rest of the world. Deborah Wheeler is a political scientist who studies how the internet is used in Islamic cultures. She's featured today on the Norwegian site forskning.no (thanks to Hilde for pointing this out), where she talks about the gender gap in internet access in most of the world. In Arab countries, Wheeler's main focus, only 6% of internet users are women. In Latin America 38% of those who are online are women, but surprisingly, in the EU, only 25% of internet users are women. Unfortunately I can't find good statistics elsewhere, confirming these figures. NUA's demographics on women's use of the internet are woefully out of date, though it confirms that in 2001 only 36% of Germany's internet users were women. Even in liberated, egalitarian Norway, where I live, while there's not much of a gender gap in who has access to the net (68% of women and 79% of men) but only a third of Norwegian women use the net daily, while half of Norwegian men do.

The question, then, is why? In Arab countries oppression of women seems an obvious reason. In Europe, the answer is probably often that many women aren't interested - but if so, why do they not see the net as interesting?

Online shopping is better in the States than in Europe. I reckon that's one reason. More interestingly, the same goes for online communities: Europe has so many small countries and small languages that it's far harder to reach the critical mass you need for any topic. I signed up for American mailing lists when I became pregnant, and found a hundred other pregnant women with due dates in July '96, all as eager as I was to share their hopes and worries. There still isn't an equivalent in Norwegian, though there are now Norwegian language forums about pregnancy in general. If I'd not been comfortable in English I wouldn't have found any online community to support me during my pregancy, not in a language I mastered, not in 1996.

The Accidental Techie

I didn’t mean to misbehave. It was an accident. Really.

Okay, my cats might have said that, but it’s true of me too. I’m only technical at all because, well… it just happened.

When Liz asked me to join in all this misbehavior (and she can verify this), my reaction was, “Um. Are you sure?” Because I don’t have any CS degrees, any formal training. I don’t get a bye as an academic; I’m not one. For the year and a half before I started grad school, I was doing data entry, not exactly the world’s most glamorous occupation. (I still do, actually, just half-time. Which my poor abused hands much appreciate.)

I became a markup geek when an insightful boss at a typesetting company thought I was worth taking a risk on. She hired me into the electronic-publishing department to learn SGML, sink or swim. I swam, and discovered I actually quite liked the water. Parsers, regular expressions, text editors, Python, what’s not to like?

It was quite a shock, a year and a half or so later, to hear a working group bristling with Ph.Ds say that in their eyes I’d earned the title “engineer.” Wha’? Who, me? I just wrangle text, that’s all.

Well, okay, and Access databases. Sort of. Picked that one up by accident too. The project I was doing data entry for gave me an excuse one day to look at the VB code. So I did. The report I produced convinced the overloaded database admin that I could fix the database, and rework it as needed for new projects.

Um, I said. (Yes, that’s something I say a lot. We women and our stellar verbal skills, yup yup.) You guys know I don’t have any database or VB experience, right?

Sure, Dorothea. We know. Here’s the bug list. Have at it.

I don’t know, but I would lay pretty substantial odds that half or more of today’s techie women got there the same way I did. No teenage hackfests, no college CS major, no certifications, no 80-hour coding death marches. Just something needing doing, and a woman willing to cuss the computer until she figures out how to make it do what she wants.

Some accidental techies are indeed male; I know one or two. I do wonder about the distribution, though. The accidental techies I know typically came from pink-collar occupations, and how many men does one find in those?

I wonder about some other things, too. Do accidental techies get paid what their jobs are worth? (I have no cause for complaint there, I am glad to say.) How many of them feel as much an impostor as I do? What do the intentional techies think of them? Do they ever learn all the in-jokes? Or the acronyms? Would they advise others to sneak in the back door the way they did? Is it even possible to plan to do that, or does it always “just happen?”

Do they ever get to say that it wasn’t an accident?