Want to get ahead in tech? Get a male sponsor, go to industry events, and check your bias at the door
By Lucy Sanders
Lucy Sanders CEO of NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) gave the keynote on “Women and innovation” at theglasshammer.com ‘s 5th annual women in technology career event on 23rd October 2014.
NCWIT is an amazing organization that connects and supports change leaders from across the nation and across the pipeline (K-12 through career) in their efforts to increase girls’ and women’s meaningful participation in computing. There are over 150 free research backed resources (reports, tool kits, data sets, etc.) available on their site for those interested in leading the change.
Lucy Sanders is no stranger to innovation herself, being a technologist, one of the few female Bell Labs Fellows and having worked on the first commercially viable VOIP enterprise communication servers..
Lucy’s candid presentation posed important questions such as: ‘Who designs and implements the world’s technology?’; ‘Why does it matter who works in the technology design process?’; and finally, ‘Why does it matter who sits at the technology creation table?’
Lucy began her keynote framing the topic as one of women’s participation in the technology innovation process.
“Before we leave here tonight, I want you to become fans of innovation and women’s participation, it’s a wild crazy ride, you laugh, you cry, you succeed and sometimes you fail but if you cross the finish line, you have created something from nothing. That’s is so great about what we do…there is no feeling like it.”
Lucy asked us to consider what technology might look like if women were sitting beside men at the technology design table, to think what technology they might create. Collective intelligence research, for examples, tells us that gender diverse teams deliver better results and higher performance. She was careful to state that diversity works both ways, and the reverse is also, i.e., teams that are 100% female will benefit from male participation.
Who is inventing the future?
Who is inventing the technology of the future?
Lucy answered the question by sharing some metrics with us, including some research about U.S. IT patents. NCWIT produces a report, “Who Invents IT?” every few years that analyzes the IT patents in the U.S. patent data base for male and female named inventors. Based on this report, which reveals that 87.4% of all U.S. IT patents have male only inventors, 2.1% of all U.S. IT patents have female only inventors, and the rest (10.5%) have mixed gender invention teams, Lucy stated that “right now we are pretty sure women are not patenting IT ideas and probably not in the computing jobs that lead to IT patents. Technology innovation is a creative process. This is like saying: all food should be cooked by women, all music should be created by men!”
The reason why they aren’t patenting? Women and minorities tend to be clustered in the computing industry; they tend to be in customer facing jobs and in technology support roles. Lucy recommended that firms should measure what technical women are doing. Are they in every type of technical role? Or is unconscious bias preventing us from ensuring women have roles across the technical creativity spectrum and not just clustered in support roles.
Several unconscious bias research studies were mentioned. Lucy talked about the famous Heidi/Howard Roizen case study and how the same resume created different results (impressions on competence and willingness to hire, for example) when only the gender on the resume was changed – the female resume resulted in less positive impressions.
She also talked about a body of research around “stereotype threat”, the fear that a member of an underrepresented group may have that they will reinforce a negative stereotype about their group. For example, researchers found that moving the gender reporting question to the end of the Math SAT test has effects. Women performed better on the test when the question was asked after the test because they weren’t reminded of a negative stereotype about women and math. Stereotype threat just doesn’t just impact women. When a similar experiment was carried out and white men were told they were being studied because researchers were trying to determine why white males fared worse on math tests than Asian males, they did. Internalizing messages can run deep in all of us.
“Technical women aren’t broken, we don’t need to be fixed. We go to the same schools and we get the same grades. We also know that men aren’t evil. Societal bias is the real culprit, biases held equally by men and women and it is a leadership question, everywhere. “
What can we do to change societal bias?
It starts with us. Women and men hold stereotypes ubiquitously as we reported back in June with a new study showing that young women will still vote young men as more leader-like. Our brain fools us; we compartmentalize everything as a survival mechanism. We can challenge schemas but we do have them and this is what unconscious bias is; we can’t really see them, hence it is unconscious.
These biases are in our homes and in our classrooms; they show up at work as subtle dynamics and how “things are done around here”. But they aren’t obvious. You don’t go to work and say “I am going to trip on a little stereotype threat today”, or “I think I’ll be unconsciously biased today”.
“This is not a women’s issue,” Lucy Sanders CEO of NCWIT insists.” Women’s networks are crucial to success, but make sure that there are opportunities to network with everyone in the company.” This is a shared issue, a cultural issue on our technical teams and in our technical organizations. So men are important participants in righting this ship. Sanders agrees that this is a cultural issue and goes on to discuss how we need to take the scrutiny off the women and understand that both sexes have a role to play.
“There’s this undercurrent that somehow women are lacking in something when in reality in technology there is an over-representation of men and they can play a large role in stomping out unconscious bias”.
That way we can at least reduce the stereotypes of what a technologist looks like which prevents women from advancing.
There are many ways to do get the conversation going including sharing passion for the task at hand. One way to engage with the men in your industry is to go to industry events and talk innovation and about the technology out there. It’s a great way to level the playing field and surface any biases that can then be addressed then and there.
A study entitled “Women in Technology: the Leaders of Tomorrow,” conducted by The Evolved Employer sister firm of The Glass Hammer, found a strong correlation between having a role model and having C-Suite aspirations. That same study along with many others suggests that beyond a role model and a mentor which is good for aspirational success, you should get a sponsor or really multiple sponsors to ensure you are in the running for stretch assignments.
“No one gets to any place of power without a sponsor, someone who spends political capital on you,” Sanders says. “We have this mistaken notion that women are great mentors for other women, and they might be — but they might not be. While female role models are important, women also benefit greatly from powerful male mentors.”
Lucy Sanders summed it up at theglasshammer.com event, “Its about us regaining the technical culture, it didn’t used to be this way. Remember, you are not stuck in traffic, you ARE the traffic. We are not stuck in a culture, we ARE the culture.”
