breaking into (or out of?) the boys' club

So I gave my presentation at Emerging Technologies last week. And while I put my "slides" online, they really aren't very useful without the commentary that accompanies them. My usual process of preparing for a presentation is to start with lots and lots of powerpoint slides full of text, and then slowly pare those down until they can be distilled into a few web-based images or quotes. So the result is highly useful to me and my audience in illustrating what I'm talking about, but not nearly as useful when viewed in isolation.

Since a few people have contacted me wanting more information on the presentation, what follows is the gist of what I said.

I started out by explaining that while my presentation title was officially "Breaking into the Boys' Club," I'd decided after arriving at the conference and taking a look around that it would be better titled "Breaking out of the Boys' Club." For the most part, my audience wasn't women trying to be accepted in a male-dominated field, it was the men who dominate the field. And to their credit, a number of them attended my talk--including several whose voices are influential in the area. (This is not to say that there were no women there; Meg Hourihan, Dori Smith, Judith Meskill, and a number of other women at the conference did attend and had useful comments to offer during the talk. And considering that I was up against a presentation by Molly Wright Steenson that even I wanted to see, I was surprised and delighted to have them all there.)

From there, I talked about why it's important for the industry to address the underrepresentation of women. There are really two main arguments for this, both of which I've used in the context of education, and which are equally applicable in industry. First of all there's the workplace environment and retention issue. Having a testosterone-soaked work environment changes the tone and the feel of an organization. Here at RIT we struggle with the fact that the men in our classes would enjoy college a lot more if their classes weren't filled completely with other geeky guys; why should workplaces be any different? (This theme recurs in the retention vs recruitment issue later...)

But more importantly, there's the issue of what happens to your product line when it's designed by a homogenous team. We've seen this with other products, from airbags that protect 160-pound men but kill women and children, to voice-recognition systems calibrated to men's voices that literally left women without a voice.

I used a Gary Larsen Far Side cartoon to illustrate this; it shows two birds perched on a baby's carriage, one saying to the other "It's still hungry...and I've been stuffing worms into it all day." Point being that flooding the market with...say...social networking apps isn't necessarily going to satisfy the market's hunger for an application that meets real-world needs. To design products that meet the needs a diverse audience, you'll be most successful with a diverse design team--and if 50% (or more) of your target market is women, having women involved in the product design seems like a no-brainer.

Then I moved on to examples of some of the women who've been remarkably successful in guiding or participating in the development of products that are successful with women as well as men. Amy Jo Kim, who worked on The Sims at Maxis. Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay. Mari Matsunaga, the presence behind the incredible success of Docomo's iMode in Japan. Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott, the grande dames behind the rise of blogging. Anne Mulcahy, who's finally lifting Xerox out of its death spiral. Lili Cheng of Microsoft, who's working on the impressive Wallop project demo'ed at Etech, and Linda Stone, who played a major role in Apple's success in the multimedia market.

Finally, I addressed the issue of how organizations can move to increase the number of women on their development teams. I used a great quote from Tom Melcher of there.com: "If you can build a place that women love, the guys will show up. The reverse is not true." But then we talked about more specific strategies. I mentioned the excellent book Unlocking the Clubhouse, which is a very readable description of how CMU went from 6% women in its undergraduate CS program to 40% by rethinking the way they looked for and evaluated candidates. Not by lowering their standards, but by shifting them to reflect a variety of skills that factor into success in the field. (Prior experience in programming is not the best predictor of success in CS classes, it turns out.) Businesses can do the same thing. Rather than requiring X years of experience in a specific language, think about what the actual skills you need from an employee are. Do you need strong communication skills? Do you need experience more than you need proven aptitude?

Taking other lessons from academia, it also makes sense to showcase the women that you do have in the organization, so that potential employees don't have to fear that they'll be completely isolated. One excellent comment came from Meg Hourihan, who suggested having women in the company participate in writing job ads, since that can significantly change the nature of the language that's used.

Near the end of the presentation, Dori Smith pointed out that it doesn't make sense to encourage young women to go into a field where the environment can be hostile, and the long-term job prospects are not encouraging. This is a very reasonable concern, and the underlying issue that she raised along with it, of ageism exacerbating existing problems with sexism, is a real one. Unfortunately, ageism isn't unique to women's experiences, nor is it unique to the technology field.

What Dori's question highlighted for me, though, was the importance of talking not just about recruitment, but also about retention--which goes back to the paragraph above regarding the nature of the workplace. Recruitment and retention are two sides of the same coin; if we don't retain women int he profession, it's very difficult to recruit them, it's true. But part of how we can retain women is by recruiting enough of them that we reach a critical mass, so that women in the field don't feel so isolated.

This is not an easy problem, and there aren't easy solutions. My research right now, in fact, does focus on the retention issues rather than recruitment. But increasingly I realize how closely tied these are.

At any rate, I came away from ETech delighted to have had a chance to have met a number of smart, interesting, fun women--some I already knew, many whom I didn't. Meg and Dori, who I mentioned above. danah boyd, Judith Meskill and her friend Estee (whose last name I unfortunately neglected to write down!), Jeannie Cook, Quinn Norton, Molly Wright Steenson, Mimi Ito, Lili Cheng, Michele Chang, Ruby Sinreich, Isabel Walcott, Fiona Romeo, _joshua's wife Anja (another one whose last name I've lost track of) and others who I know I'm forgetting. Even if the presentations hadn't been wonderful, the chance to meet so many great women would have more than made up for it!