11 Responses to “Celebrating Men…again”

1. Jonathan Lassoff Says:
   March 29th, 2007 at 7:29 am

   I think you’re absolutely right.
   Embody some of the change you wish to see; it’s time to compile your own.

2. AHH Says:
   March 29th, 2007 at 7:43 am

   The landscape of tech financiers is certainly changing. A large portion of Silicon Valley’s up and coming VCs are women. Amazing women who hold patents, have founded companies, pioneered thought on artificial intelligence and even worked on fighter jets. The idea of the Silicon Valley boy’s club of tech will seem anachronistic to us within the decade.

3. Graham Says:
   March 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

   I’m possibly going to be the voice of political incorrectness here.

   The reason why there aren’t so many female tech entrepeneurs being celebrated ?

   A large proportion of tech entrepeneurs have technical backgrounds. Look at the guys on that list. Almost all entries discuss their time at MIT, Stanford studying CS or EE, or their time served as a programmer. They are there because they created a technology, and then built a company around it.

   Look around the classrooms of the upper level comp sci or elec eng classes in many first-division schools. Almost devoid of women (at least in the UK where I studied). Why ? because women do not choose to study these subjects in the same numbers as men.

   Is this sexist ? no. It would be if men were preventing them from studying these subject’s, but they aren’t. In fact a large proportion of engineers and coders I know would actually _prefer_ to work with more women their own age. We do not think of women as stupid or incapable.

   This is by no means a statistically significant sample, but I regularly interview people for engineering positions. Guess how long it’s been since I received a CV from a woman ? _almost two years_. And I’ve been getting sent CVs every week. Last time before that ? _years more_. Do you think this is because I don’t want to employ a woman in a tech role ? is it because there’s something about our company’s site that says ‘this place would be a terrible place to work as a female programmer’ ? I don’t see it.

   They just aren’t choosing to take these subjects and enter these professions.

   Let’s be clear: Women are certainly as intelligent as men. The highest grades in complex subjects like Law and Medicine are well represented with female names.

   But they do not choose the college subjects or professions which lead to creative breakthroughs in physical sciences or engineering in anything like the proportion which men do.

   If this picture is changing, fantastic. But don’t be angry that there’s some injustice when women have until recently chosen not to take part.

   So Julia, if you know women who should be on that list who are entrepeneurs or inventors (not VCs, Lawyers, Financiers etc..) who’ve created a technology and a company around it, name some names. But leave this criteria out when picking them “I know of plenty of women that are attractive..”. It’s irrelevant. They didn’t pick the guys on that list for their looks.

4. julia Says:
   March 29th, 2007 at 9:37 pm

   I’m tired of providing lists of great women. But I feel obligated to put forth two great women, Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini
   http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1373/build-your-own-social-space-with-ning-version-2
   and Beatrice Tarka co- founder and CEO of Mobissimo, Inc http://beatrice.typepad.com/…

5. Graham Says:
   March 29th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

   “I’m tired of providing lists of great women.”

   No doubt they are both great entrepeneurs and innovators. But..

   This is the first such list you’ve given on the blog, and there are only two people on it… MORE!

   In the meantime, read this study from MIT (which compared to the UK universities I attended has much higher female enrollment in EE/CS courses)

   http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY94-95/announcements/13.html

   Important points from it:-

   “The most notable results of these surveys are that women, much more so than men, feel that they have come to MIT “less prepared to major in EECS” than their peers..”

   and

   “There are many superb students who are discouraged from entering electrical engineering and computer science because they are less overtly assertive and self-confident than their peers, or feel that they were not sufficiently exposed to electrical engineering and computer science in high school. These students, both women and men, can become leaders in EECS fields, and it behooves a nationally prominent Department to make sure they that will have every opportunity to do so.”

   One point where I think the MIT committee got it wrong. It’s got little to do with formal highschool programmes in EE/CS (which there is hardly a good supply of qualified people to teach, given the difference in salaries between tech careers and teaching).

   Look back again at the backgrounds of the guys in that list (and the techies you meet in real life). Most of them were playing with computers and machines as toys, rather than business tools, from a young age. Just to see what they could make it do, or find out how it worked. Simple childhood curiosity.

   How many of your female friends at highschool sat around installing Linux or
   writing text-based adventure games in their early teens ? How many of them dismantled old radios or TVs and then asked their parents what the different parts did ?

   If we want to see more female tech innovators, we need to get our daughters their first computer early and let them know it’s a toy, to be messed around with, customised and enjoyed well before they ever have to think about earning money. This is the age and mental state in which much of our most rapid and deepest skill acquisition occurs.

   That’s how most of the guys on that list learned, and I’m willing to bet it’s part of the reason why so many of those women at MIT felt ‘less prepared’ than their male colleagues.

   I’m know I’m taking a contrarian point here, but let me assure you that as a father of a smart daughter I’d be every bit as proud to see her in tech. as I would my son.

   I just know that it’s not going to come from getting mad at business magazine journalists because they simply couldn’t find nearly as many female tech innovators as male ones to pick the best ten from.

   It’s about seeing machines as toys.

6. Leigh Says:
   May 4th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

   “I’m possibly going to be the voice of political incorrectness here.”

   Graham, I think your are being less political incorrectness than (and please take this in the right way) a bit ill informed. While i agree with you that we need to get our daughters involved early, I think it is less about encouraging creativity with machines than breaking down both the overt and implied stereotypes that don’t encourage girls to do that in the first place.

   My start up is co-founded by two women (myself as the business lead and our CTO) and I can assure that in our respective fields even in this day and age we have many struggles that men in our situation simply would not have. Maybe that is a politically incorrect thing to say on my part, as so many people want to pretend that gender inequalities don’t exist anymore, but they do.

   So IMHO, do I think we should get on business weeks case? Absolutely we should. Should we teach our daughters to see machines as toys? Yep…. Should we also teach the men we know about the invisible barriers they create without sometimes realizing it by not understanding the complexities of the issues? Definately that too.

   It’s going to take time, but we will get there eventually I am sure.

   ☺

   (good article by the way on programs to encourage women for IT careers found here http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/05FEwomentechteen_1.html)

7. Kraisu Fa Says:
   May 5th, 2007 at 12:45 am

   Hmm… perhaps it’s because no one gives a damn? I’ll be certain to be extra mail-centered just to piss you off now! HA ha ha ha!

8. Graham Says:
   May 7th, 2007 at 7:55 pm

   “Graham, I think your are being less political incorrectness than (and please take this in the right way) a bit ill informed. While i agree with you that we need to get our daughters involved early, I think it is less about encouraging creativity with machines than breaking down both the overt and implied stereotypes that don’t encourage girls to do that in the first place.”

   Leigh, I’m all for trying, and have suggested to Julia that GIT could help organise girl-only (to remove possible intimidation) tech clubs at the critical age. The point I’m making is that the percentage of girls taking part in tech-hobbyism at an early age is much lower than the percentage of boys, so by the time college and professional career choices are being made it’s often too late.

   I just don’t think it’s fair to automatically blame men for women [i]choosing[/i] not to study these subjects. Maybe a lot of women simply don’t enjoy that kind of thing as much? Would that automatically be proof that men had put them off it?

   There aren’t as many men in the childcare industry. Are women deliberately putting them off it, or do they just generally [i]not want to[/i]?

   Gender inequalities certainly do exist if we’re just talking about looking at statistics, but that says nothing about why those inequalities exist or whether or not it’s wrong or immoral for them to exist.

   Let’s have a real conversation. What kind of prejudices did you face ?

9. Graham Says:
   May 21st, 2007 at 10:37 pm

   I didn’t get much from that report other than ‘women in tech (as technologists) feel like men in tech don’t take them seriously, and the solution is for tech companies to cut deeper into their bottom line to help them’. I want to hear real examples of how this happens so I can understand it before I’m going to take seriously such a request. We live on different continents and I probably won’t ever be fortunate enough to meet you for a beer. Explain your concerns here. Directly.

10. Graham Says:
    May 22nd, 2007 at 11:10 am

    Has it ever occurred to the women complaining of being ‘intimidated’ in a tech environment that they may simply be being treated by the men the way male techies treat each other all the time, but are simply less used to it because women don’t communicate the same way with other women?

    Men put each other down and question each other’s competence in extremely direct and harsh ways, constantly. It’s actually part of the male bonding process, it’s how they develop respect for one another. Men actually expect their closest male friends to say things ‘hey lardass, it’s time you got yourself to the gym’ or ‘that piece of code you wrote was a f**king disaster you moron, you need to read this book before you work on that kind of system again’.

    If it happened to you, this sounds odd, but you should be greatful. Why? because it means the guy who did it was trying to treat you like an equal, rather than an emotionally fragile china doll. It means he was talking to you as he would another man. In my experience, most men (with the exception of a minority of assholes who get an ego trip from intimidating women) usually tone it down several notches before they will be harsh or critical towards a woman as compared to a man. Maybe this is wrong too, but there’s no cruel intent behind it.

    Maybe I’m wrong here, and the kind of things that happened to you were something more, and nastier, than men talking to you as if you were a man and you finding it harsh and unpleasant. If so, please explain it.

11. Leigh Says:
    May 22nd, 2007 at 1:47 pm

    …..I replied on a posting on my site and I will post the same reply here……

    Actually G, I happen to be in a family with three of the most sarcastic, black witted tongued men you will ever meet. I am not even close to a China doll.

    You seem to want specific examples which you and I both know will simply become a back and forth as to whether or not you think my examples are relevant or not. So hope you don’t mind I won’t participate because I don’t think my individual experiences are the point. The collective experience is what we are talking about here and the point I was trying to make was that your desire to pin point “child’s play” as the root of the problem is not accurate and is not substantiated in research.

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