Neha Narkhede began her career as a software engineer, working at Oracle and LinkedIn. She was a co-creator of Apache Kafka, a popular open-source stream-processing software platform that was created at LinkedIn. She spoke on a panel Girl Geek Dinner while she was still in engineering there. She saw a big opportunity with Kafka and convinced her fellow Kafka co-creators to start Confluent as a B2B infrastructure company in 2014 – Kafka’s event streaming is used by 60% of Fortune 100 companies today.
Changing the face of the “superstar developer” matters for all of us
With only 2% of venture capital going to women entrepreneurs, Neha beat the odds and demonstrated that it’s possible to thrive as a technical leader. She served five years as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, and recently became Chief Product Officer to continue growing the brand. Confluent’s founders recently raised Series D venture funding for the company at a valuation of $2.5 billion, and they employ over 900 people.
Silicon Valley needs more Neha’s
In the 21st century, tech companies have made entrepreneurs cool again – an acceptable career path with ambitious MBAs heading to tech instead of finance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff have started billion-dollar companies, with press coverage of their every sentence. Hospitals are named after them. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang’s name is on the newest Stanford engineering building. These highly visible entrepreneurs impact the next generation of inventors and engineers.
The women of Silicon Valley haven’t made the same impact, with the exception of famous spouses. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has a strong chance to make an outsized impact outside her current professional role, we shall see what she does in the future. Many accomplished, super-smart women of Silicon Valley don’t gloss nearly as many magazine covers or present as many conference keynotes. What is the story behind Amazon’s MacKenzie Bezos and her hand in building the world’s biggest business?
It’s time to stop hiding behind humility and enable the mechanisms to lift up technical women leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. That means, have a marketing/PR budget to power the promotion of your women leaders and ensure their press coverage. We need more buzzy business magazine covers with diverse faces:
Magazine covers starring (from top left): Meg Whitman, Limor Fried, Yoky Matsuoka, Katrina Lake, Audrey Gelman, Arlan Hamilton
Neha is tracking to be the next cloud computing leader. VMware’s Diane Greene sat on Alphabet’s board (she’s also on the boards of Intuit and Stripe) and led Google Cloud as CEO until 2018. In her final Google blog post, she wrote: “I want to encourage every woman engineer & scientist to think of building their own company someday. The world will be a better place with more female founder CEOs.“
The adage “You can’t be what you can’t see” means we need more women leading at the highest levels, and more technical women in the spotlight, gracing magazine covers, giving talks and interviews. We need to invest in their startups, buy from women-led businesses, and hire and retain more women in male-dominated industries.
Shining a spotlight on women in tech
Just as Grace Hopper Celebrations fill employers’ recruiting university pipelines, we need technical women to succeed at mid and senior levels as well – to be retained in addition to being hired, encouraged and recognized, paid fairly and promoted.
Melinda Gates recently told Harvard Business Review: “Go to your company and say we’re going to open more internships at different levels. How do we create pathways in?”
At Girl Geek X, we have been putting women onstage for over a decade at their companies’ dinners for networking and learning.
We love watching women progress in their career journeys, whether it’s working in big tech company, or at a startup.
Sponsora Girl Geek Dinner to organize one at your company / employer!
Watch the video from Confluent Girl Geek Dinner featuring Neha Narkhede, Bret Scofield, Liz Bennett, Priya Shivakumar, and Dani Traphagen on YouTube. Please subscribe to our Girl Geek X channel on YouTube for videos from our events.
La Cocina is a non-profit working to solve problems of equity in business ownership for women, immigrants and people of color, launching their career in food.
New cookbook “We Are La Cocina: Recipes In Pursuit of the American Dream” holds 120 recipes accompanied by 200+ striking photos of dishes — and shares the stories of immigrant + women of color who have launched successful restaurants + businesses.
Bookmark this for holiday gift-giving — all proceeds go to non-profit La Cocina to launch more women chefs and their businesses!
Authored by Caleb Zigas & Leticia Landa.
From Nite Yun’s Kuy Teav Phnom Penh to Rosa Martinez’s Oaxacan Cholito de Puerco and Fernay McPherson’s Rosemary Fried Chicken, this cookbook offers 200+ vivid photos and 120+ recipes — a glimpse into the world of La Cocina, and the world around all of us.
You can find Nyum Bai’s famous Cambodian Chicken Salad (Neorm Sach Moan) recipe is one of 120 recipes shared in the new La Cocina cookbook.
Nite Yun is 2019’s Chef to Watch in 2019, raved Eater. Images were taken by award-winning food photographer Eric Wolfinger.
“For most La Cocina entrepreneurs, a few recipes handed down from mothers and grandmothers were their only capital when they came to the United States. It seems almost magical that they can use those recipes as a means of self-expression, making a living, supporting their families, and preserving their culture. Through food, they too can aspire to the American Dream,” writes Isabel Allende in the forward, an early supporter of La Cocina.
THANK YOU for supporting women-owned businesses + chefs!
16-year old Greta Thunberg inspires youth to protest climate change. She has brought much-needed attention to the critical global climate crisis. Recently, she made headlines sailing across the Atlantic in a zero-emission boat to speak at the UN Climate Summit to push for change.
Making Waves
This fall, the teenage environmentalist will grace the magazine cover of GQ (having won“Game Changer Of The Year” award) and Teen Vogue:
#ClimateStrike Begins This Friday!
Starting this Friday, the Global Climate Strike is planning walk-outs of schools, workplaces and more “to demand an end to the age of fossil fuels.”
“It’s not just young people joining in. In Sweden, a group of senior citizens called Gretas Gamilingar (Greta’s oldies) is participating. Indigenous activists, labor groups, faith leaders, humanitarian groups, and environmental organizations like Greenpeace and 350.org will be there, too. Outdoor equipment company Patagonia said it will close its stores on Friday in solidarity with the strike. So is snowboard brand Burton. More than 1,000 employees at Amazon have pledged to join the strike.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted: “New York City stands with our young people. They’re our conscience.”
Corporate Conscience
Teen Vogue reports companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Dr. Bronner’s, Eileen Fisher, Opening Ceremony, Outdoor Voices, and Seventh Generation are participating in the strike. Internet companies like Tumblr and Imgur are planning are participating, too.
Sage Isabella Cammers-Goodwin lays out the societal inequality of San Francisco’s Bay Area, and provides some suggestions for change:
We need a clear image of what valuable innovation looks like. Valuable innovation is work that goes toward raising the bottom standard of living and not increasing the distance between the bottom and top. Valuable innovation makes people self-actualize and does not take away from their productivity. Everyone stands to benefit from valuable innovation. Some persistent issues that would be valuable to fix include access to food, fresh water, healthcare, shelter, and education.
There are companies that work to improve the world and determine success primarily through the fulfillment of their users and nonprofit margins. Propel is a service that assists individuals with managing their food stamp balance. Handup allows people to donate directly to verified homeless individuals. Wikipedia, despite its unpopularity with academics due to a lower reliability than thoroughly fact-checked un-editable sources, offers a non-predatory social good. The belief that taxing tech corporations and breaking up monopolies hurts humanity by limiting innovation is a false rhetoric. Society does very little to encourage the kind of innovation that improves humanity by making the world a more livable, healthy, and equal place.
The true heroes of innovation are the creators of tools to assist those most in need and provide open-source frameworks so that anyone—including private firms—can learn from and build off of what they create.
The tech industry cannot be blamed for preexisting conditions. Many young entrepreneurs do not start as homeowners and did not create the systematic privileges that helped them succeed, whether that be affirmation that someone who looks like them is capable of success, having a family that could provide them an education, early access to computers, or an enthusiastic circle willing to invest in their success. Yet, they are still responsible for the systematic injustices they perpetuate and intensify.
The vast majority of U.S. born citizens, especially women and people of color, are not provided with the resources or encouragement to make earning over $100,000 per year coding seem reasonably achievable.
Ideally, the wealth of corporations would uplift local community and not just drive people out. Fortunately, there are a few legal structures in place to mitigate the negative influence corporations have on the communities they move into, one of which is called “impact fees.” The San Francisco Planning website explains, “The City imposes development impact fees on development projects in order to mitigate the impacts caused by new development on public services, infrastructure and facilities”—for example, improving public transport to counteract the added burden on the system.
Author of “Winners Take All” Anand Giridharadas agrees:
Philanthropy does not undo bad behavior. The range of tech philanthropy efforts — from “self-made” billionaires pledging to give away the majority of their wealth, to corporations promising to match employee donations, to those that give grants up to one percent of annual revenue, to corporations that do not find it within their mission to give at all — are insufficient.
This rhetoric is problematic because it distracts from the fact that automation, prior innovation, corporate bullying, and infrastructural advantages account for a large amount of tech wealth. It also frees corporations from needing to fix the problems they advance. Philanthropy is a positive corporate dogma, but is not sufficient to renegotiate the funds tech corporations owe to society.
A possible improvement could be taxing corporations on their employee-to-wealth ratio at increasing rates for corporation size. This tax structure could be applied internationally to lessen tax evasion loopholes. This money should be used for infrastructure that makes life affordable and for wealth redistribution to improve outcomes for everyone over time.
Get inspired by these privacy and information security experts who are leading Fortune 100 companies, running health and non-profits, and impacting the field of infosec today.
Dr. Alissa Abdullah is Xerox’s Chief Information Security Officer. Prior to Xerox, she was Chief Information Security Officer at Stryker. She served as Deputy Chief Information Officer for the White House Executive Office of the President during the Obama administration. She started her career as a Mathematician for an Intelligence Agency — a certified cryptologic engineer at the U.S. Department of Defense.
Anne Marie Zettlemoyer is Mastercard’s Vice President of Security Engineering. She was Director of Information Security Architecture and Engineering at Freddie Mac, and Director of Information Security Analytics at Capital One. She has worked in various positions, as a Director of Business Analytics at FireEye, Senior Consultant at Deloitte, Special Advisor for the United States Secret Service, and Principal Strategy Analyst for DTE Energy. Follow her on Twitter at @solvingcyber.
Arlin Pedrick is Accenture’s Chief Security Officer. She was at Disney as Director of Global Intelligence & Threat Analysis, and Director of Global Security at Walmart, and held various positions in the U.S. Government for 32 years.
Coleen Coolidge is Segment’s Chief Information Security Officer, having built the Security, GRC and IT org from scratch at the startup. Previously, she was Twilio’s Head of Security and Core Logic’s Director of InfoSec. Earlier in her career, she was at First American Title as an Infosec Project Coordinator, at New Century Financial as an InfoSec Specialist/Engineer, and was a Tech Writer in her early career. Follow her on Twitter at @coleencoolidge.
Flora Garcia is McAfee’s Global Chief Privacy Officer, Privacy & Security Attorney. She discovered privacy law in law school when she read the case of Bodil Lindqvist, a Swedish woman who was the first person charged with violating the EU Privacy Directive. Flora is a graduate of the evening program at Fordham Law School,and Duke University, where she majored in computer science and economics.
Jacki Monson is Sutter Health’s Chief Privacy and Information Security Officer, where she’s been for six years at the nonprofit health network. Previously, she was the Mayo Clinic’s Chief Privacy Officer, and worked in compliance for healthcare companies. She began her career having earned her JD in health law and healthcare compliance certificates. Healthcare runs in her family — her mom worked at a hospital for 43 years in administration. Follow her on Twitter at @jackimonson.
Lakshmi Hanspal is Box’s Global Chief Information Security Officer. She advises Colbalt.io, CipherCloud and HMG Strategy. Prior to Box, she was SAP Ariba’s Chief Security Officer, and a senior leader in information security and risk management at PayPal. She was Bank of America’s Chief Information Security Strategist and Leader for the mortgage line of business, and began her career at Novell as a Senior Security Architect. Follow her on Twitter at @LakshmiHanspal.
Maria Shaw is Varian Medical System’s Chief Information Security Officer. Prior to Varian, Maria worked at McKesson, where she was a Vice President of IT Risk Management & Compliance for over a decade. She led the information security and risk professionals across McKesson’s distributed business units, as well as the enterprise IT risk program (HIPPA, PCI, training, IT Vendor Assurance). She began her career as a Senior Manager at Deloitte.
Mary Prabha Ng is AXA Equitable’s Chief Security Officer. She’s been at AXA for over 7 years. Previously, Mary worked as Vice President of Risk at financial firms and banks. She started her career in security as a computer engineer for the Department of Defense’s Undersea Warfare Center where she led several multi-million dollar government projects through various states of project development.
Mary Welsh is UnitedHealth Group’s Chief Security Officer. Prior to UnitedHealth, she worked at St. Jude Medical in Minnesota for over 8 years, leading security and strategic projects. Prior to that, Mary spent 9 years working for the U.S. government, from domestic assignments in Washington, D.C., to residing overseas in Europe and Southeast Asia on national security issues. She began her career at Arthritis Foundation working as Director of Health Education.
Noopur Davis is Comcast’s Chief Product & Information Security Officer. She was Vice President of Global Quality at Intel for over 4 years. Prior to Intel, she spent 11 years at Carnegie Mellon University supporting the Software Engineering Process Management program. She worked at Davis Systems as Principal for over 6 years, and began her career at Intergraph as a Director of Engineering. Follow her on Twitter at @NoopurDavis.
Parisa Tabirz, Senior Director of Engineering — Chrome (Security & Privacy), Google
Parisa Tabirz is Google’s Senior Engineering Director, responsible for the security and privacy of the Chrome browser. At Google, Parisa’s business card has read “Security Princess”, and she’s been promoted several times since joining the company over 12 years ago. She began her career as a security intern at Google after being inspired to pursue infosec from a campus club at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. Follow her on Twitter at @laparisa.
Sherri Davidoff is LMG Security’s CEO and co-founder. Her infosec consulting and research firm, based in Montana, specializes in network penetration testing, digital forensics, social engineering testing and web application assessments. Sherri is the co-author of Network Forensics: Tracking Hackers through Cyberspace and is working on another book (coming soon). She studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. Follow her on Twitter at @sherridavidoff.
Window Snyder is Square’s Chief Security Officer. She is a security industry veteran and former Chief Security Officer at Intel, Fastly, and Mozilla. She previously spent 5 years at Apple working on security and privacy strategy and features for OS X and iOS. Window was a founding team member at Matasano, a security company, acquired by NCC Group in 2012, and co-authored Threat Modeling, a manual for security architecture analysis. Follow her on Twitter at @window.
Raising Up The Next Generation of Women In Security Engineering
Women in Security and Privacyis a 501(c)3 group creating pathways for folks to get into the field. OWASP has a lot of in depth knowledge and the “Top 10 list”, suggests Salesforce Senior Application Security Engineer Aisling Dempsey.
What are some resources we can add to this page for folks who want to get into cybersecurity as a career? Please tweet @GirlGeekX and share – thank you!
Love building digital products with amazing user experiences? Product Designers as a job title has blazed a trail in tech for the past decade with the rise of Facebook VP of Design Julie Zhuo leading the industry.
We look to Product Design leaders at companies of all sizes to find insight in their careers and map the rise of Product Design as a profession. Lucky us — many of these leaders speak publicly, tweet and share their expertise and thought leadership.
Here are 12 Product Design Leaders to Follow in 2019:
Christine’s Proudest Moment: “There’s so much work that I’m proud of, but my biggest accomplishment is definitely the teams I’ve built over the years, and helping some of the best designers I’ve had the pleasure to work with grow into leaders. Design now has such an important seat at the table – at the executive level, in boardrooms, and shaping the future at the most innovative companies. It’s been quite a journey, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of leading that change.”
Christine Fernandez is a Vice President of Product Design at Stitch Fix. Previously, she was Chief Experience Officer at Art.com, Head of Design at Uber, and worked as Creative Director at R/GA, frog, Razorfish, Schematic and FCB. Connie holds a B.A. in Graphic Design and a minor in East Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter at @ctfernandez and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Connie Yang – Coinbase Director, Design
Connie’s Proudest Moment: “I scaled a team from 3 to 20 in a year – including establishing the functions of User Research, Product Writing, and Brand Design. I did not expect to do that, nor did I think it was even possible. You never know until you actually try.”
Connie Yang is a Director of Design at Coinbase. Previously, she spent six years at Facebook as a Product Designer. Prior to that, she was a UI Director at Twist and PopCap Games, Art Director at ReignDesign and began her career as a Graphic Designer working in advertising. Connie holds a B.A. in Graphic Design and a minor in East Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter at @conniecurious and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Erica’s Proudest Moment: “Landing this role as VP of Product Design at SurveyMonkey 2 years ago – not only because it’s a great opportunity with an amazing company, but also because this role represents a shift in my willingness to take risks, aim high, and flex my leadership muscles.”
Erica Weiss Tjader is a Vice President of Product Design at SurveyMonkey. Previously, she spent six years at Quantcast as the Director of Product Design, where she was responsible for building the design and research functions. Prior to that, she was an Interaction Designer and User Researcher at Move, eBay and Yahoo. Erica holds a B.S. in Cognitive Science and B.A. in Communication Studies from UCLA. Follow her on Twitter at @ericatjader and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Huda Idrees – Dot Health CEO
Huda Idrees is CEO at Dot Health. Prior to founding Dot Health, she was Chief Product Officer at Wealthsimple. Prior to Weathsimple, she was a Product Designer at Wave, an Interaction Designer at Shaken Media Collective, and an UX Designer at Wattpad. She began her career as a Web Developer. Huda holds a BASc. in Industrial Engineering from University of Toronto. Follow her on Twitter at @hidrees and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Irene Au – Khosla Design Partner
Irene’s Proudest Moment: “I had the honor and privilege to build the industry’s most influential and talented design teams over the last two decades. At Yahoo! and Google, we established the gold standard for user experience and design for the internet that continues to shape the profession in this industry today, and we elevated design’s strategic importance in both companies.”
Irene Au is a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures. Prior to Khosla, she was Vice President of Product at Udacity and build and ran design for all of Google and Yahoo! for many years. She began her career as an Interaction Designer at Netscape. Irene holds a M.S. in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of South Carolina. Follow her on Twitter at @ireneau and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Julie Zhuo – Facebook VP, Product Design
Julie’s Proudest Moment: “Helped Facebook scale from 8 million college students to billions of users worldwide.”
Julie Zhuo is a Vice President of Product Design at Facebook. She started as Facebook’s first intern in 2005, was hired as a product designer at Facebook, and has been working at Facebook for over a decade. She published in 2019 “The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You.” Julie holds a M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Follow her on Twitter at @joulee and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Katie Dill – Lyft VP, Product Design
Katie’s Proudest Moment: “My great achievement and greatest joy has been the teams I have had the pleasure to build at Lyft and Airbnb. Great things come from great teams, and my focus as a leader has been finding just the right mix of folks that can come together as one to build lasting change. A strong culture full of people that inspire each other and elevate each other’s work is the best thing I have ever built.”
Katie Dill is a Vice President of Product Design at Lyft. Prior to Lyft, Katie was at Airbnb as a Director of Experience Design. Prior to that, Katie worked at frog design for five years, where she began her career as a Design Analyst. Katie holds a B.S. in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design, and a B.A. in History from Colgate University. Follow her on Twitter at @lil_dill and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Kim Lenox – Zendesk VP, Product Design
Kim’s Proudest Moment: “I have had the privilege to nurture a number of burgeoning designers into design leaders. Seeing how they grow their careers, take new leadership roles and bring their own contribution back to the design community is one of my fondest rewards as a design leader.”
Kim Lenox is a Vice President of Product Design at Zendesk. Prior to Zendesk, she was a Director of Product Design at LinkedIn. Prior to that, she was a Senior Manager of Interaction Design at HP Palm. She has held a number of roles in research, interaction design and UX Design, and has consulted and freelanced. Kim holds a B.F.A. in Photography from San Jose State University. Follow her on Twitter at @uxkim and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Kim Williams – Indeed Senior Director, UX Core
Kim’s Proudest Moment: “I have had the honor of orchestrating Design and Brand Systems teams at brands that focus on connection. First at eBay, and now at Indeed, where I am proud to be building a team of talented product designers, technologists, and creatives. My team inspires and challenges me daily, as we work on creating experiences that further empower job seekers during their job search.”
Kim Williams is a Senior Director of UX Core at Indeed. Prior to Indeed, she was at eBay for two years, working in roles from Head of Brand Systems to Creative Director for eBay’s human interface group. Prior to eBay, she was as a Creative Director for Oglivy & Mather, Serious-Gaming Agency, and Weber Shandwick. She began her career as a Designer for consumer goods companies. Kim holds a BFA in Visual Communications with an emphasis in Graphic Design. Follow her on Twitter at @kimwms_.
May-Li Khoe – Khan Academy VP, Design
May-Li’s Proudest Moment: “Despite having worked on so much of Apple’s product line and have a pile of patents as a result, I’m proudest of putting pink hearts and technics 1200s into MacOS, and building a diverse & inclusive kickass design team at Khan Academy.”
May-Li Khoe is a VP of Design at Khan Academy. Prior to Khan Academy, she was at Apple for over seven years, working in roles from Interaction Designer to Senior Product Design Lead. She began her career at IBM as a Research Assistant for three years, and was at MIT Media Lab as an Undergraduate Research Assistant for three years. May-Li holds both M.Eng and S.B. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT. Follow her on Twitter at @kayli and her product design thoughts at Medium.
Ratna Desai – Netflix Director, Product Design
Ratna’s Proudest Moment: “My greatest achievement has been to build diverse teams and create the conditions necessary for design to live alongside technology and business strategy. Both at Netflix and Google, I was able to connect individuals to the right opportunities within very different organizational cultures. The key has been to lead with authenticity and adapt my approach to complement the culture and design’s relationship to other functions. The successes have come when open-minded, passionate and hardworking teams selflessly collaborate to do their most meaningful work. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the best product ideas thrive, transform industries and shape society.”
Ratna Desai is a Director of Product Design at Netflix. Prior to Netflix, she was at Google for four years leading multidisciplinary UX design teams. Prior to that, Ratna was at frog design for six years as a Creative Director, an Art Director at Gap and Korn Ferry, and began her career as a Marketing Associate at the Wall Street Journal. Ratna holds a B.S. in Graphic Design and B.A. in Rhetoric & Communication from UC Davis. Follow her on Twitter at @RatnaDesai1.
Susan Dybbs – Collective Health VP Product & Design
Susan Dybbs is a Vice President of Product & Design at Collective Health. Prior to Collective Health, she was at Cooper for four years leading the interaction design team as Managing Director. Prior to that, Susan lead UX consulting for a few years. She began her career as an User Interface Designer at Microsoft. Susan holds a M.D. in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. in Design, Urban Studies, Psychology from New York University. Follow her on Twitter at @dybbsy and her product design thoughts on Medium.
Podcasts are great for commutes and multitasking! We recommend these podcasts as gateways to more conversations, and to encourage critical thinking! Tweet at us your favorite podcasts and episodes to @GirlGeekX – Ready to tune in?
Women at all stages of their careers often share concerns and struggle with similar issues: negotiations, imposter syndrome, career transitions, management, self-advocacy, communication. The Girl Geek X Podcast answers frequently asked questions, and offer “best of” advice from inspiring women leaders and girl geeks.
How many desires are our own, and not what society tells us? This new show “Truth Be Told” from San Francisco’s KQED public radio (hosted by Tanya Mosley) features a variety of people of color talking about being enough, colonized desire and finding joy in a heavy, complicated world.
What does it mean to live as a person of faith in this crazy moment in American history? We listened to “What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Race” and “Why We should Keep Talking About Race” in a quest to better understand people’s lives, the world of racial justice (and attempt to translate that from a Christian perspective), and why being an activist and standing up for what’s right means you simply love more.
How do you scale a growth company and business — and continue empowering humans? Stacy Brown-Philpot, TaskRabbit CEO, talks about her experience as an executive in tech — from early days at Google building the Black Googler Network, to giving advice on becoming a new manager. We listen to “Masters of Scale” (hosted by Reid Hoffman) for a gender-balanced interviewee lineup and advice from experienced entrepreneurs.
You may read her hard-hitting New York Times articles — Kara Swisher talks about the tech, business and industry news from Washington DC and Silicon Valley — she is a master at interviewing CEOs and changemakers, giving you the knowledge, news and insights you need as a modern-day leader at “Recode Decode” and “Pivot”.
Flowers are nice, but what moms really need are better work-life policies!
“Instead of flowers and a nice brunch, what we actually need is systemic change for working parents” –this article resonated with girl geeks over Mother’s Day weekend as the United States has the least generous benefits, the lowest public commitment to caregiving, one of highest wage gaps between employed men and women, and one of the highest maternal and child poverty rates for any Western industrialized nation.
The American workplace is still organized as if it were an all-male workplace with a caregiver at home. Technology is iterating on self-driving cars and robots making pizza, yet workplaces have failed to evolve over the last century as women have entered the workplace to stay.
Alysia Montaño ran the 800m in US Track and Field Championships at 34 weeks pregnant.
Olympian Alysia Montaño penned a popular New York Times Op-Ed “Nike Told Me To Dream Crazy, Until I Wanted A Baby” about the advertising industry’s penchant for uplifting women with empowerment to boost their bottom line, but not actually supporting female athletes with maternity leave.
Don’t miss our weekly Girl Geek Dinners where you can connect with companies looking to hire women! Get the inside look at companies, and network with fellow girl geeks.
As the first ever picture of a supermassive black hole circled the Internet on April 10, 2019 – Dr. Katie Bouman now has a Wikipedia page. She is notable because her computer science work helped contribute to the imaging of the black hole for the first time – a feat previously thought impossible.
Here’s the moment when the first black hole image was processed.
Katie’s algorithm was used to image the black hole inside the core of the galaxy Messier 87 from a ton of data from the Event Horizon Telescope:
At MIT as a postdoc fellow, she was responsible for an algorithm to create the first images of a black hole, published in April 2019, providing computational support to learn about general relativity in the strong-field regime. Her research focused on using emerging computational methods to push the boundaries of interdisciplinary imaging – to fantastic results:
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Katie had theorized that black holes leave a background shadow of hot gas; the machine learning algorithm fills in gaps in data produced by telescopes from around the world. She led efforts in “the verification of images and selection of imaging parameters” for the Event Horizon Telescope.
Katie developed “a new algorithm to stitch together data collected across the EHT network. She went on to lead an elaborate series of tests aimed at ensuring that the EHT’s image was not the result of some form of technical glitch or fluke. At one stage, this involved the collaboration splitting into four separate teams which analysed the data independently until they were absolutely confident of their findings,” reported The Guardian.
On the recent black hole image release, Katie is quoted: “We’re a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that’s what it took to achieve something once thought impossible.”
Society of Women Engineers (SWE) review research in 2018 for insight on the status and trends for women in engineering. Here are the highlights:
“Leaky pipeline” / interest in engineering:
“Women offered less-positive estimates of their own intellectual abilities than men, and were more likely to endorse the view that engineers and computer scientists possessed stereotypical (strong) intellectual abilities, which predicted lower female interest in these disciplines.” Bian et al. (2018) “found that messages indicating that a university major, internship, or position involved brilliance lowered women’s interest in those opportunities and were less likely to see themselves as similar to the typical person in those roles.”
Women in academic engineering:
“Griffith and Dasgupta (2018) report on a survey of 383 STEM faculty members at a public research university in the northeastern U.S. They found that female STEM faculty were less satisfied than their male colleagues where women were a minority, particularly in departments where women represented less than 25 percent of the department. In departments with more balance (close to 50 percent women), these differences in satisfaction disappeared.”
“One familiar theme in analysis of female academics in general, and STEM faculty specifically, is the greater burden of service work that falls on women.” Research by Pedersen and Minnotte (2018) contributes to this ongoing discussion: “They viewed service obligations as onerous, isolating, a hindrance to research, and detrimental to family responsibilities and their own health. Women who had already achieved tenure resented being asked to take on additional service responsibilities to shelter junior colleagues, since no such protection had been extended to them.
The male culture of engineering:
“Several of the studies reviewed here note that women who experience a hostile environment often either try to ignore it or rationalize their experience and are not inclined to report their negative experiences or to use existing legal tools to effect changes.”
Later leaks in the pipeline:
Cardador and Hill (2018) examined how career paths affect attrition: “Women were overrepresented in the managerial and hybrid paths, with the latter being the path most associated with intent to leave the profession. Those on the technical path reported lower levels of intent to leave…”
“Another study we reviewed this year points to an additional possible ‘leak’ in the pipeline — the interview process that mediates between school and work.” Wynn and Correll (2018) report on their analysis of observational data from recruiting sessions by technology companies at a prominent West Coast university (this study is particularly interesting because the companies involved were actively trying to recruit women engineers and computer scientists). Wynn and Correll found that interviewing practices put women off. Most of the presenters were men, with women in marginal roles. Question-and-answer sessions were dominated by men and tended to turn into opportunities for ‘display.’ Some of the interview presentations made use of sexualized images of women and there were a number of references to gendered pop culture images and a tendency to describe the workplace as having fraternity-like qualities. The sessions emphasized technicality above all else, which tended to put women off…”
Wages:
“New research on income inequality also came from Europe this year. Career-satisfaction data from Spain revealed that income plays a larger role in women engineers’ career satisfaction than in men’s (Martínez-León, Olmedo-Cifuentes, and Ramón-Llorens, 2018).”
“Women were as likely as men to negotiate their salaries, but men were more likely to receive a greater increase in salary from negotiating. Furthermore, men who negotiated with men were more likely to receive a greater percent increase in salary than women who negotiated with women.”
Intersectionality:
“The study compared and contrasted differences in instrumental versus advice-giving professional networks, and found that men have larger instrumental networks, whereas women have larger advice-giving networks. This is a concern because the study also found that instrumental networks increase scholarly productivity, while advice networks decrease it. In other words, women’s professional networks are less likely to contribute to their scholarly productivity. White men had the highest levels of productivity out of any group.”
Conclusion:
“It appeared that 2018 was going to be a breakthrough year for women in STEM when it was announced that Donna Strickland, Ph.D., had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. She was only the third woman ever to receive this distinction, and the announcement of her award brought a great deal of public attention to the issue of gender in science and engineering. The story took a different turn, however, as it developed. Many were astonished to learn that Dr. Strickland was still an associate professor, even though she was a Nobel Prize recipient well into her career at age 59. Despite her accomplishments, no Wikipedia page on her or her work existed. In fact, one article we reviewed this year noted the general absence of Wikipedia pages on female scientists (White, 2018). Dr. Strickland herself expressed surprise at the focus on her gender and said she preferred to think of herself as a scientist, not a woman scientist (McBride, 2018). When asked why she was still an associate professor, Dr. Strickland answered, ‘I never applied.’ (Crowe, 2018).
Dr. Strickland’s puzzlement and reluctance to engage actively with the politics of gender in science illustrates a dilemma confronting those who seek to increase the numbers of women in engineering and science and promote gender equity in STEM. As we have noted in previous reviews, many female engineers and scientists share Dr. Strickland’s avoidance of gender politics and tend to see the underrepresentation of women in STEM not as a structural problem but as a matter of individual choices and abilities.
This was made clear by an important article we reviewed this year titled ‘I Am Not a Feminist, but … .’ Seron et al. (2018) conducted research at four engineering programs in New England (MIT, Olin College of Engineering, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst). At each school, they tracked a cohort of female students over a four-year period (2003-7), asking them to complete diaries about their experiences. The results of the study showed that respondents generally were aware of their marginalization as women in a male-dominated field, but they rejected a feminist critique of the discipline, tending instead to embrace an individualist account of their own success. Respondents associated feminism with a demand for preferential treatment, something they rejected because they saw themselves as having succeeded on their own merits. The underrepresentation of women in engineering, to them, was unfortunate but natural — the only solution was better-prepared women.
Seron et al. say of their respondents: ‘While providing clear and strong criticisms of their experiences, they rarely recognize structural inequities, or translate these matters and their own marginality, either individually or collectively, into a commentary on the engineering profession itself.’ (p. 133) Seron et al.’s conclusion that many women engineers accept the meritocratic ethos of the profession with its emphasis on individual achievement makes it seem unlikely that organized pressure to change the gender balance in engineering will arise from within. But, in the absence of such a critique, where will the impetus to change come from? As the research we reviewed this year (and in past years) has shown, women have greatly increased their performance on objective tests of math and science ability, but this has not yet translated into significant increases in the numbers of women in engineering, computer science, and related fields. The literature we have reviewed points to the existence of powerful structural and cultural barriers that continue to push against gender equity in STEM. The question is, who will push back?”
About the SWE report authors:
Peter Meiksins, Ph.D., is vice provost for academic programs and professor of sociology at Cleveland State University. He is co-author (with Stephen Sweet) of Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy, 3rd edition (Sage, 2017), and serves as an advisory editor of Engineering Studies.
Peggy Layne, P.E., F.SWE, is assistant provost for faculty development at Virginia Tech. She holds degrees in environmental and water resources engineering and science and technology studies. Layne is the editor of Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers and Women in Engineering: Professional Life (ASCE Press, 2009). A Fellow of the Society of Women Engineers, Layne served as SWE FY97 president.
Kacey Beddoes, Ph.D., is founding director of the Research in Sociology of Engineering group. She holds a Ph.D. in science and technology studies from Virginia Tech, along with graduate certificates in women’s and gender studies and engineering education. She serves as deputy editor of the journal Engineering Studies and as chair of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) Working Group on Gender and Diversity. In 2017, Dr. Beddoes received an NSF CAREER award for her work on gender in engineering. Further information about her research can be found at www. sociologyofengineering.org.
Marc Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate in the higher education program at Virginia Tech, while serving as a graduate assistant on the faculty affairs team in the office of the provost. His current research interests include access to higher education and equity in the college experience for low-income students.
Adam S. Masters is a graduate student at Virginia .Tech, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in engineering education and a master’s in mechanical engineering. Masters researches and advocates for access and equity in engineering; current research explores inclusive practices with partners from diverse, liberatory makerspaces. Masters has served as a SWE counselor twice and is a recipient of the SWE Ada I. Pressman Memorial Scholarship.
Jessica Deters is a Ph.D. student in the engineering education department at Virginia Tech. Her current research interests include access, engineering identity, interdisciplinarity, and experiential learning.
“Leaky pipeline” / interest in engineering:
