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Carri Bugbee

Gender pay gap: new study shows it worsens with age | Considerable - 0 views

considerable.com/gender-pay-gap-by-age

gender pay gap women

shared by Carri Bugbee on 28 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • New data from PayScale shows that women age 45 and older earn 70¢ for every dollar that men earn, before adjusting for factors like experience and industry. By comparison, women age 30 to 44 earn 78¢ for every dollar men earn, and women in their 20s receive 83¢.
  • That gulf between so-called controlled and uncontrolled pay gaps represents what PayScale calls the “Opportunity Gap”—societal and business forces that keep women in lower-paying jobs and industries while men continue to advance and earn more. 
  • Women are opting out of—or being excluded from—some of the highest-paying industries, such as technology, where women make up just 29% of workers, and they’re not being promoted into management as quickly as men are.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In addition to earning fewer promotions and smaller raises, women are more likely than men are to take time off from work to care for family members throughout their careers. Over time, that absence contributes to the widening pay gap. In an earlier study, PayScale found that workers who took at least a year off from a job earned 7.3% less on average than similar employees who did not take a break.
Carri Bugbee

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy.' - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hours-greedy-professions.html

women female gender

shared by Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19
     
    American women of working age are the most educated ever. Yet it's the most educated women who face the biggest gender gaps in seniority and pay: At the top of their fields, they represent just 5 percent of big company chief executives and a quarter of the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies. But recently, mounting evidence has led economists and sociologists to converge on a major driver - one that ostensibly has nothing to do with gender. The returns to working long, inflexible hours have greatly increased. This is particularly true in managerial jobs and what social scientists call the greedy professions, like finance, law and consulting - an unintentional side effect of the nation's embrace of a winner-take-all economy. It's so powerful, researchers say, that it has canceled the effect of women's educational gains. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother. [Sign up for In Her Words, a twice-weekly newsletter on women, gender and society.] This is not about educated women opting out of work (they are the least likely to stop working after having children, even if they move to less demanding jobs). It's about how the nature of work has changed in ways that push couples who have equal career potential to take on unequal roles. "Because of rising inequality, if you put in the extra hours, if you're around for the Sunday evening discussion, you'll get a lot more," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who is writing a book on the topic. To maximize
Carri Bugbee

Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517788

startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech racism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 04 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • it was a reminder that as a woman in tech, she should be prepared to have her authority questioned at any moment, even by some guy trying to get a job at her company.
  • at some point, something inside her broke. Maybe it was being at tech conferences and hearing herself, the “elder stateswoman,” warning younger women to cover their drinks, because such conferences—known for alcohol, after-parties, and hot women at product booths—have been breeding grounds for unwanted sexual advances and assaults, and you never knew whether some jerk might put something in your cocktail. She couldn’t believe that women still had to worry about such things; that they still got asked to fetch coffee; that she still heard talk about how hiring women or people of color entailed “lowering the bar”; that women still, often, felt silenced or attacked when expressing opinions online.
  • At one party, the founder of a start-up told Wu she’d need to spend “intimate time” with him to get in on his deal. An angel investor leading a different deal told her something similar. She became a master of warm, but firm, self-extrication.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Wu is struck by “the countless times I’ve had to move a man’s hand from my thigh (or back or shoulder or hair or arm) during a meeting (or networking event or professional lunch or brainstorming session or pitch meeting) without seeming confrontational (or bitchy or rejecting or demanding or aggressive).” In a land of grand ideas and grander funding proposals, she found that the ability to neatly reject a man’s advances without injuring his ego is “a pretty important skill that I would bet most successful women in our industry have.”
  • a recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions.
  • nly about a quarter of U.S. computing and mathematical jobs—a fraction that has actually fallen slightly over the past 15 years, even as women have made big strides in other fields. Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do.
  • Studies show that women who work in tech are interrupted in meetings more often than men. They are evaluated on their personality in a way that men are not. They are less likely to get funding from venture capitalists, who, studies also show, find pitches delivered by men—especially handsome men—more persuasive. And in a particularly cruel irony, women’s contributions to open-source software are accepted more often than men’s are, but only if their gender is unknown.
  • For women of color, the cumulative effect of these slights is compounded by a striking lack of racial diversity—and all that attends it
  • Three years in, Silicon Valley diversity conferences and training sessions abound; a cottage industry of consultants and software makers has sprung up to offer solutions. Some of those fixes have already started filtering out to workplaces beyond the tech world, because Silicon Valley is nothing if not evangelical.
  • The industry’s diversity numbers have barely budged, and many women say that while sexism has become somewhat less overt, it’s just as pernicious as ever.
  • When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm.
  • The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
  • “workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career” are the main reasons women leave. “Undermining behavior from managers” is a major factor.
  • gender bias is a big problem in start-ups, which are frequently run by brotherhoods of young men—in many cases friends or roommates—straight out of elite colleges. In 2014, for instance, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was two years out of Stanford and already leading a $10 billion company when his frat-boy-at-his-misogynistic-worst undergraduate emails were published and went viral. In them, his only slightly younger self joked about shooting lasers at “fat girls,” described a Stanford dean as “dean-julie-show-us-your-tits,” and for good measure, saluted another fraternity because it had decided to “stop being gay.”
  • “I, and most women I know, have been a party to at least some sexist or discriminatory behavior in the workplace,” she wrote, explaining that she and many other women had witnessed things like “locker-room discussion during travel with colleagues,” which they tried to brush aside, since “any individual act seems silly to complain about.” The Pao trial, however, shifted her attitude.
  • Eighty-four percent of the respondents had been told they were too aggressive; 66 percent had felt excluded from key networking opportunities because of their gender; 90 percent had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company off-site meetings; 88 percent had had clients and colleagues direct questions to male peers that should have been addressed to them; and 60 percent had fended off unwanted sexual advances (in most cases from a superior). Of those women, one-third said they had feared for their personal safety.
  • many people there believe—despite evidence everywhere to the contrary—that tech is a meritocracy. Ironically enough, this very belief can perpetuate inequality. A 2010 study, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” found that in cultures that espouse meritocracy, managers may in fact “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women.”
  • telling participants that their company valued merit-based decisions only increased the likelihood of their giving higher bonuses to the men.
  • a 2015 study published in Science confirmed that computer science and certain other fields, including physics, math, and philosophy, fetishize “brilliance,” cultivating the idea that potential is inborn. The report concluded that these fields tend to be problematic for women, owing to a stubborn assumption that genius is a male trait.
  • “The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,”
  • At Google, the initial tally showed that just 17 percent of its technical employees were women. The female technical force was 10 percent at Twitter, 15 percent at Facebook, and 20 percent at Apple.
  • Lately, unconscious-bias training has emerged as a ubiquitous fix for Silicon Valley’s diversity deficit. It’s diversity training for the new millennium, in which people are made aware of their own hidden biases.
  • “That sort of discipline really, really resonated effectively with the hard scientists we have here.” Facebook put unconscious-bias training front and center in its diversity efforts, too; both companies have posted online videos of their training modules, to offer a model for other workplaces. Since then, talk of unconscious bias has spread through Silicon Valley like—well, like a virus.
  • Too many decisions are made on gut instinct, the training argues: A time-pressed hiring manager looks at a résumé and sees a certain fraternity or hobby, or a conventionally white or male name, and bang—thanks to the unconscious brain making shortcuts, that person gets an interview
  • “Virtually every company I know of is deploying unconscious-bias training,” says Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute. “It’s a fast and feel-good kind of training that helps you feel like you’re making a difference.”
  • Unconscious-bias training may not work. Some think it could even backfire.
  • even just talking too much about gender inequities can serve to normalize them: When you say over and over that women come up against a glass ceiling, people begin to accept that, yes, women come up against a glass ceiling—and that’s just the way it is.
  • “You would think all things are equal,” she said, “but these backdoor conversations are happening in settings that women are not invited to. The whole boys’-club thing still applies.
  • Mike Eynon, wrote in a Medium post that bias training makes “us white guys feel better” and lets the “privileged realize everyone has bias and they aren’t at fault,” while nothing changes for discriminated groups.
  • if you can’t easily dispel bias, what you can do is engineer a set of structural changes that prevent people from acting on it.
  • the first 20 seconds often predict the outcome of a 20-minute interview.
  • The problem, he wrote, is that such quick impressions are meaningless. He added that Google strongly encourages interviewers to use a combination of skill assessments and standard questions rather than relying on subjective impressions.
  • It is, for example, a hallowed tradition that in job interviews, engineers are expected to stand up and code on whiteboards, a high-pressure situation that works to the disadvantage of those who feel out of place. Indeed, whiteboard sessions are rife with opportunities for biased judgment.
  • “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,” she says. “Managers will take it seriously.”
Carri Bugbee

Women Do Ask for More Money at Work. They Just Don't Get It. - 0 views

www.thecut.com/...k-money-work-salary-raise.html

sexism money women in tech harassment gender bias

shared by Carri Bugbee on 12 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • In a 2017 study titled Do Women Ask?, researchers were surprised to find that women actually do ask for raises as often as men — we’re just more likely to be turned down. Conducted by faculty at the Cass Business School, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Warwick and using data collected from over 4,600 Australian workers, the study was expected to confirm long-established theories around women’s reluctance to negotiate. Instead, the analysis showed that men’s and women’s propensity to negotiate is roughly the same.
  • Women are far more likely than men to work in jobs where salary negotiation isn’t necessarily possible, such as low-skilled hourly wage jobs or part-time roles. Previous studies that reached the “women don’t ask” conclusion often failed to account for certain types of jobs (and industries) being dominated by one gender, focusing instead on the overall number of men or women who’d reported salary negotiations,
  • women actually negotiate for pay raises at a slightly higher rate of 31 percent to men’s 29 percent.
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  • Now for the bad news: Both McKinsey’s research and the Do Women Ask? study found that while men and women ask for pay raises at broadly similar rates, women are more likely to be refused or suffer blowback for daring to broach the topic.
  • hey also reveal an uncomfortable truth about society’s propensity to assign blame to women for situations outside their control. By buying into the “women don’t ask” narrative, employers who should be doing more to rectify gender pay gaps in their own organizations get to ignore their role in fostering said gaps, and pass the buck back onto us.
  • Carri Bugbee on 12 Mar 19
     
    In a 2017 study titled Do Women Ask?, researchers were surprised to find that women actually do ask for raises as often as men - we're just more likely to be turned down.
Carri Bugbee

The truth about the gender wage gap - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...gender-wage-gap-explained

gender wage gap sexism pay gap pay equality

shared by Carri Bugbee on 02 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 02 Nov 18
     
    The highest-paying jobs disproportionately reward those who can work the longest, least flexible hours. These types of job penalize workers who have caregiving responsibilities outside the workplace. Those workers tend to be women.
Carri Bugbee

7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process - 0 views

hbr.org/...ce-bias-in-your-hiring-process

bias hiring interviews

shared by Carri Bugbee on 13 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Research shows that unstructured interviews — which lack defined questions and whereby a candidate’s experience and expertise are meant to unfold organically through conversation — are “often unreliable for predicting job success,
  • Bohnet suggests using an interview scorecard that grades candidates’ responses to each question on a predetermined scale.
  • A growing body of research suggests that diversity in the workforce results in “significant business advantages,” says Gino. She recommends that “at the end of every hiring process, leaders track how well they’ve done against the diversity goals they set out to achieve.”
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  • Experiment with the wording of job listings by removing adjectives closely associated with a particular gender. Ask candidates to take a work sample test — it’s useful in comparing applicants and it’s an effective predictor of future job performance.
  • Instead, standardize the interviews process by asking candidates the same set of defined questions. Allow surface demographic characteristics to play into your resume review. Use a software program that blinds that information and ensures a level playing field.
  • Unconscious biases have a critical and “problematic” effect on our judgment, says Francesca Gino, professor at Harvard Business School. “They cause us to make decisions in favor of one person or group to the detriment of others.” In the workplace, this “can stymie diversity, recruiting, promotion, and retention efforts.”
  • When it comes to biases and hiring, managers need to “think broadly about ways to simplify and standardize the process,”
  • “Even subtle word choices can have a strong impact on the application pool,” says Gino. Research shows that masculine language, including adjectives like “competitive” and “determined,” results in women “perceiving that they would not belong in the work environment.”
  • oftware programs that highlight stereotypically gendered words can help counteract this effect,
  • A blind, systematic process for reviewing applications and resumes “will help you improve your chances of including the most relevant candidates in your interview pool, including uncovering some hidden gems,
Carri Bugbee

Closing the gender gap in venture capital deserves immediate attention - Recode - 2 views

www.recode.net/...y-minshew-gouw-fonstad-hoffman

gender venture venture capital sexism female women silicon valley tech entrepreneurs startups

shared by Carri Bugbee on 13 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Last year, female founders received about 2 percent of venture capital funding — and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. While the average investment in companies led by men jumped 12 percent, to $10.9 million, the average investment in companies led by women dropped 26 percent, to $4.5 million. Statistics tell us that funders award women founders just a quarter of the funding they ask for. Male founders, meanwhile, are getting half.
  • only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture firms are women. Fewer than two in five firms had even a single female partner.
  • there is a lot of evidence that unconscious biases are impacting the way female founders are received. Consider, for example, the finding that investors tend to describe young male entrepreneurs as “promising,” and young female entrepreneurs as “inexperienced.” Or that the managing partner of one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms admitted that one of the things he looks for when deciding whether to invest is an entrepreneur who fits the Gates, Bezos, Andreessen or Google model — which is to say, “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • We also need to encourage better measurement and data on diversity in the venture and startup ecosystem. Project Include has designed some helpful frameworks and recommendations — and funds like Reach Capital and First Round Capital are ably demonstrating what these efforts look like in action.
  • At the VC level, funds should commit to treating harassment and discrimination against female founders with the same legal protections as harassment and discrimination against employees. Commit to a clear code of conduct, share it openly with your team and portfolio,
  • If your company screens for “culture fit,” look closely at how that operates: Is it thoughtfully assessed based on company values, or has it become an excuse for people to prefer those “like them”? Anything involving “I would get a beer with this person” is a sign that unconscious bias is alive and well.
  • What often gets lost when you have a persistency in underclass representation — be it women, minorities, introverts, etc. — is that the persistency in and of itself becomes justification for the outcome. In other words, if 7 percent of the venture industry is women and has been for decades, it must be something inherent to women in tech, not conditions or other factors. Only by examining that narrative and challenging it with experimentation, initiatives and constantly evaluating results can we drive systemic change in our industry.
  • referring to “the pipeline problem” is really just a way of saying, “It’s not my problem.”
  • And, frankly, anyone who says this is also saying, “I'm okay with sexism. I'm okay with inequity.”
  • According to a 2016 survey produced by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte Consulting, women make up just 11 percent of partners at venture investment firms. And of the $60 billion in funding the industry disbursed in 2015, female founders received just 7 percent.
Carri Bugbee

social media and gender research: Impact of female-dominated usage | Cision Blog - 0 views

blog.us.cision.com/...pact-of-female-dominated-usage

shared by Carri Bugbee on 03 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 03 Feb 12
     
    in an industry where 45 percent of profiles are women's but women have 70 percent of the connections, women would be considered the savvier networkers.
Carri Bugbee

Joanne Wilson: Build a Gender-Balanced Workforce From the Onset - The Accelerators - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...anced-workforce-from-the-onset

shared by Carri Bugbee on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • hedge funds owned or managed by women have an 8.95% return rate, handily beating the 2.69% return rate generated by an index of typical funds. Also, Google’s attrition rate decreased by 50% after it extended its paid maternity leave for women to five months
  • Five years ago, I started a conference with my co-founder, Nancy Hechinger, called the Womens Entrepreneur Festival at the ITP division of New York University. We celebrate and showcase women entrepreneurs. Women network differently. They run their companies differently and they think differently than men.
  • Carri Bugbee on 12 Aug 14
     
    having a balance of men and women in startups is actually one of the real keys to success.
Carri Bugbee

We Asked Men and Women to Wear Sensors at Work. They Act the Same but Are Treated Very ... - 0 views

hbr.org/...re-treated-differently-at-work

shared by Carri Bugbee on 15 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 15 Feb 19
     
    This indicates that arguments about changing women's behavior - to "lean-in," for example - might miss the bigger picture: Gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.
Carri Bugbee

Boston Has Eliminated Sexism in the Workplace. RIGHT? - 0 views

www.bostonmagazine.com/...sexism-workplace

shared by Carri Bugbee on 05 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • the higher you climb on the corporate ladder, the bigger the pay gap gets; that women are compelled to prove their abilities over and over again in a way that men are not; that women who negotiate or stand up for themselves are labeled “aggressive” or “pushy” or worse; and that being so labeled can have significant negative consequences and cause even the most confident and competent women to doubt themselves.
  • ven though more women than men have attended college since the late 1970s, women continue to make up the minority of chief executives—28 percent at U.S. firms, 4 percent in the Fortune 500. They fill just 7 percent of leadership roles in the top 100 VC firms.
  • he most convincing argument comes from a McKinsey & Company study, which showed Massachusetts would receive a jaw-dropping 12 percent bump in GDP if it achieved gender parity in the workplace. “There’s clear data that shows that gender-balanced firms produce significantly better outcomes and that female founders do more with less and produce better returns on average,” says Nancy Cremins, a lawyer and the cofounder of SheStarts, a female-focused tech accelerator. “You’d think that the business case could easily be made, yet there is still resistance to the concept.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • that subjective approach to hiring leaves a lot of room for unconscious bias—and typifies how Boston’s faith in its own progressivism may be exacerbating the struggles of the city’s women.
  • most people make assumptions about the roles that men and women are supposed to play—men are stronger leaders or more original thinkers; women are better organized or equipped with “soft skills” such as high emotional intelligence—and we default to them, unwittingly, throughout the day. We all have biases; they’re like subconscious shorthand. But in the workplace, problems can arise when they color the way a person’s work or ability is perceived
Carri Bugbee

Google Employee Memo: Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's Response | Fortune.com - 0 views

fortune.com/...google-diversity-memo-wojcicki

women sexism female silicon valley Google Youtube harassment

shared by Carri Bugbee on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • “Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?”That question, whether it’s been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone’s mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology.
  • Time and again, I’ve faced the slights that come with that question. I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.
  • I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I’ve written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we’ve been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions. But while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender
Carri Bugbee

The Odds That a Panel Would 'Randomly' Be All Men Are Astronomical - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...411505

women sexism conference panel entrepreneurs venture capitalists silicon valley tech female

shared by Carri Bugbee on 01 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • If conference speakers were being chosen by a system that treated gender fairly (which is to say, gender was never a factor at all), then in any conference with over 10 speakers, say, it would be extremely rare to have no female speakers at all—less than 5 percent chance, depending on one’s assumption about the percentage of women in mathematics as a whole.
  • One of the more compelling points you make in your analysis is that if speakers’ lists were truly selected without bias, we would be 18 times more likely to see an overrepresentation of women speakers than an underrepresentation
Carri Bugbee

Under Silicon Valley's Rough Turf, Tunnels of Women's Networks Spread | Xconomy - 0 views

www.xconomy.com/...nels-of-womens-networks-spread

female women entrepreneurs sexism startups venture capitalists harassment founders tech silicon valley

shared by Carri Bugbee on 01 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • women aren’t facing these challenges alone, female entrepreneurs say—not if they tap into the dense ecosystem of engineers’ groups, startup founders’ organizations, meet-ups, conferences, mentoring relationships, and female-friendly investors that have evolved in parallel with established Silicon Valley institutions mostly staffed by men.
  • women’s groups—representing thousands of members—seem energized by the eruptions of public attention to gender discrimination and harassment that arose after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other women accused powerful men in the tech industry of pressuring them sexually, touching, or groping them.
  • Even if a male venture partner or company executive hasn’t been outed on the front page of a national newspaper, his behavior might already be the subject of scorching accounts by women on their group channels, possibly damaging his reputation among hundreds or thousands of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This could come as a shock to some of those men if they haven’t been directly confronted about their conduct.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A Geek Feminism wiki is keeping an annotated list of news reports on VCs accused of harassment and gender or racial bias.
  • The FairFunders group plans to gather facts for a profile of each investment firm, such as its ratio of female partners, and the number of women-led companies it has backed.
Carri Bugbee

Where Did you Go to School? - 0 views

www.linkedin.com/...id-you-go-school-richard-kerby

silicon valley sexism entrepreneurs startups venture capitalists women in tech funding

shared by Carri Bugbee on 01 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 01 Aug 18
     
    After going through ~1,500 investors, I found that 40% of venture investors have attended Stanford or Harvard. Just TWO schools! Why is that? Everyone wants to work with those they are most similar to, and education, gender, and race are attributes that allow people to find similarities in others. With 82% of the industry being male, nearly 60% of the industry being white male, and 40% of the industry coming from just two academic institutions, it is no wonder that this industry feels so insular and less of meritocracy but more of a mirrortocracy.
Carri Bugbee

Why Are There Few Women in Tech? Watch a Recruiting Session | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ech-watch-a-recruiting-session

shared by Carri Bugbee on 02 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The chilling effect, according to Wynn, starts with the people companies send to staff recruiting sessions. As students entered, women were often setting up refreshments or raffles and doling out the swag in the back; the presenters were often men, and they rarely introduced the recruiters. If the company sent a female engineer, according to the paper, she often had no speaking role; alternatively, her role was to speak about the company’s culture, while her male peer tackled the tech challenges.
  • follow-up question-and-answer periods were often dominated by male students who commandeered the time, using it to show off their own deep technical know-how in a familiar one-upmanship. Rather than acting as a facilitator for these sessions, male presenters were often drawn into a competitive volley.
  • The paper also describes recruiters using gender stereotypes. One online gaming company showed a slide of a woman wearing a red, skin-tight dress and holding a burning poker card to represent its product. Another company, which makes software to help construct computer graphics, only showed pictures of men—astronauts, computer technicians, soldiers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • presenters often made comments that disparaged women or depicted them as sexualized objects, rather than talented technical colleagues.
  • This type of informal banter occasionally devolved into overtly sexualized comments.
  • Wynn says she’s presented this research to recruiters and people within tech firms. “They’re astonished. They often just don’t know what’s going on in their recruiting sessions,”
Carri Bugbee

A template for investor/founder sexual harassment policy | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...harassment-policy-template

investor founder harassment policy startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech

shared by Carri Bugbee on 06 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Founders should expect and push their investors or those they consider partnering with to have made a clear commitment to eliminating harassment. Those looking to support this drive can share this template with the hashtag #HarassmentPolicy. 
  • Statement of values regarding why protecting founders from harassment by investors is necessary due to the imbalanced power dynamic Explanation that standard  sexual harassment law does not adequately cover the investor/founder relationship, so voluntary policy is needed Recognition that harassment and discrimination perpetrators and recipients can be of any gender or identity, though most often women are harassed by men Discussion of the need for a culture of explicit consent
  • Zero-tolerance for investors overtly sexually assaulting, harassing, or discriminating against founders or their teams
Carri Bugbee

Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech | Technology | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-diversity-black-women-workers

shared by Carri Bugbee on 08 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Google’s workforce is, by its own accounting, 69% male and just 2% African American. Just 20% of technical jobs are held by women. Google may be unequivocal in its “belief” about diversity, but the figures make its shortcomings clear. The company tends to hire white and Asian men over women and other racial minorities.
  • ack of diversity in Silicon Valley is an old story. Eighteen years ago, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson first launched a campaign to encourage the region’s tech companies to hire black and Latino workers.
  • Google is the subject of an investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has accused the technology corporation of systematically discriminating against women (the company denies the charge.)
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the tech industry has lately been shaken by allegations that high-profile venture capitalists have abused their position to prey on female startup entrepreneurs.
  • Meanwhile, the representation of black, Latino, and female employees at top Silicon Valley technology firms remains so disproportionately low that a government report published last year described the problem with the same word that Jackson uses: “segregation”. For all its forward looking technologies, Silicon Valley is in many ways mired in the ugliest practices of the American past.
  • The DC area is a kind of mirror image to Silicon Valley when it comes to hiring African Americans. Overall, blacks make up 14.4% of the workforce nationwide and 7.4% of high-tech employment. In the DC metro area, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, blacks hold 17.3% of the jobs in 12 computing occupations, according to government employment data. But cross over to the west coast, and in Silicon Valley African Americans hold just 2.7% of the jobs in the same categories. At premiere employers like Google and Facebook, black representation in technical jobs drops below 2%.
  • the fact that northern California’s workforce is heavily Latino (more than 20%) is not reflected in the area’s tech companies (about 6% Latino).
  • Where the DC tech industry grew in a symbiotic relationship with government, many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were techno-libertarians, ideologically opposed to government regulation and oversight.
  • Tech leaders like McNealy and Cypress Industries CEO TJ Rodgers were openly hostile to the idea of consciously diverse hiring. Rodgers wrote an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News in 1999 declaring that “the only sharecropper I know is my dad” and calling Jackson “a hustler who exploits white shame for his own financial and political ends”.
  • At the top 75 companies in Silicon Valley, only 3% of employees are black, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Premier employers Facebook and Google have yet to crack 2% in technical jobs.
  • It’s not the fault of tech companies that the pipeline is overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian people, Silicon Valley’s defenders claim.
  • But there’s a problem with that argument: black students are earning computer science degrees at higher rates than they are being hired by Silicon Valley companies. In 2014, they received 9.7% of the bachelor degrees awarded in computer science, according to the National Science Foundation.
  • “How difficult do you think it would be to go to an engineering meeting and tell all these people who went to Cal, Stanford, and MIT that the person coming from the University of Texas El Paso or a community college can do their job as well as they can?” Miley asked. “You will not be able to convince them of that. They don’t want to believe that they’re not special.”
  • “Amongst the African American students that I engage with, I don’t hear many of them aspiring to work at Google.” he said. “They hear Silicon Valley and they think, ‘I’m not going to see people like me.’”
Carri Bugbee

The Google affair bares Silicon Valley's trust deficit - 0 views

www.ft.com/...10-7cfe-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c

google silicon valley sexism women female harassment venture capitalists tech entrepreneurs founders

shared by Carri Bugbee on 11 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Male bias? That was not the Valley’s fault; women just would not knuckle down and get engineering degrees.
  • Moreover, Mr Damore’s outburst backfired, drawing attention not to his grievance but to his employer’s grievous lack of diversity. The company’s leadership is 75 per cent male. A mere 20 per cent of its engineering team — where most of the clout resides — are female. In an ongoing lawsuit, the Department of Labor claimed that “compensation disparities” are systemic across its workforce.
  • This year, Uber — one of the most highly valued private companies in Silicon Valley — lost 20 of its employees, a board member, and its chief executive officer after numerous scandals involving bullying, sexual harassment and even interference in investigation of a rape by a driver in India. In the computer games industry, the Gamergate campaign publicly targeted women with harassment, bullying and threats of rape.
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  • Around the world, the tech industry has failed to prove itself an open, exciting place for women to work, to be taken seriously and to advance.
  • The temptation of huge financial gains, and a quasi-religious faith in the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand, has brought in a new, macho generation with no time for any principle beyond self-interest.
  • A frat boy culture of bullying and exclusivity is accompanied by aggressive attempts to avoid tax. The sector is secretive in its attempts to hoard and capitalise on the private data of its customers. It balks at legitimate government attempts at accountability and restraint.
  • All this calls into question the legitimacy of the industry and its new role as one of the most powerful movers in the global economy, and in wider society.
  • When commentators routinely compare Silicon Valley today with the arrogance, isolation and destructive might of Wall Street before the crash 10 years ago this week, it is time to start thinking about reputation — and what might ensue when the glamorous superficial allure of these tech giants wears off.
Carri Bugbee

Is Your Company's Diversity Training Making You More Biased? - 0 views

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shared by Carri Bugbee on 11 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Why, then, does it spark a backlash? The answer has to do with biases deeply entrenched in most people’s patterns of thinking — attitudes not about race or gender per se, but about the nature of autonomy and choice, and about group membership. The political conflicts around “political correctness” and inclusiveness stem from the same cognitive issues.
  • Diversity training involves hiring practices and helps ensure legal compliance. Inclusion training focuses on creating the kind of unbiased atmosphere and broad leadership opportunities that will attract diverse employees to stay.
  • All of these programs directly address the problem of bias. But the unfortunate truth is that you can’t eliminate bias simply by outlawing it. Most people don’t like being told what to believe, and anything that feels like pressure to think a certain way makes people want to do the opposite.
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  • In a study published in 2011, “Ironic Effects of Antiprejudice Messages,” participants were divided into two groups — an autonomy group and a control group — and asked to read a brief antiprejudice essay.
  • Participants who read the autonomy essay displayed less prejudice, as expected. But participants who read the control essay tended to test as more prejudiced than they had before. Reading the demands set off what the researchers called a “counterresponse to threatened autonomy”: a backlash. In other words, employees need to feel that they’re freely choosing to be nonprejudiced, not that they’re having it forced upon them.
  • Backlash is also triggered by the message that differences among people are valuable. There is a deeply tribal aspect of human nature that reacts negatively to this message
  • Studies have shown that when countries pursue multiculturalism policies, many people become more racist and more hostile toward immigrants. Laboratory studies have also shown that watching a video celebrating multiculturalist values can increase viewers’ levels of prejudice against immigrants.
  • people with authoritarian personalities — those valuing strong and forceful control of situations and society — tend to become more racist when faced with the inclusion message, not less. “Well-meaning programs celebrating multiculturalism…might aggravate more than educate, might intensify rather than diminish, intolerance,”
  • In short, when people perceive one another as members of the same in-group, racial bias — and possibly other forms of bias against groups of people — tends to melt away. Thus, the way to increase inclusion in the workplace is to make everyone feel like they’re part of the same team.
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