For Women in Tech, Bias Runs Deeper Than Most Think

A VC's recent suggestion that women in tech use an initial instead of a first name to escape bias grated on many readers.

OCTOBER 7, 2016

Venture capitalist John Greathouse doesn't believe women who want to work in the tech industry should use their full names online. Just use a first initial, he suggested in a now widely criticized blog post in theWall Street Journal in late September -- one he eventually apologized for.

Related: Women Made Incremental Progress in Tech the Past Few Years (Infographic)

By using an initial, Greathouse argued, hiring managers won't know you're female and will treat you the same as any other applicant, without any sort of unconscious bias trickling in.

I disagree -- because I see women in tech from a different lens. In fact, it's more than that: My view is the polar opposite of what Greathouse is saying.

Not only do I want to see women's full names when they apply to work in tech, but I am actively seeking them out for investment and recruiting them to work with my early stage venture capital firm,White Star Capital, every day.

Why? Because the women who are working in technology today know how to triumph over adversity. This is a group that has suffered significant bias in our society -- studying computer science or engineering in college, going out into the male-dominated environment of the modern tech world and succeeding despite those biases. And then, many have gone on to start companies in the tech industry despite the well-known challenges there.

That is a fact to be celebrated, and sought out by investors looking for high-performance collaborators, not hidden behind initials. These are women that I want to talk to. These are the proven entrepreneurs that I want to invest in.

I admittedly am biased because of my academic background in computer science at the University of Waterloo and my prior experience at Microsoft and aQuantive. Many of the women that I studied with were brilliant, and in my past life as an engineering and product lead, many of the female engineers that I worked with were among my teams' superstars. This collection of former colleagues includes the team that launched the first version of Microsoft.NET -- you can imagine how strong all of those team members were -- and the founding team at aQuantive, which was eventually acquired for $6.3 billion.

In short, I know that women can be game-changers in tech, and I've seen it firsthand.

Another layer of bias

Still, there is another force at play here, and it is one that I believe is holding back not only the startup community's female founders but the entire tech industry as a whole.

While I see impressive growth in female entrepreneurship -- and I love being part of the New York City ecosystem, which is "Officially the Best City in the World for Women Entrepreneurs" -- there is a form of female entrepreneurship that I eagerly want to see more of: that's growth in the number of female technical founders of highly technical companies.

I define these as companies doing work in areas like database development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, M2M, etc. Given my background, I am naturally drawn to highly technical companies where technology is one of the company's key strengths and key barriers to entry.

Image credit: Courtesy of Lylan Masterman

The problem today, as I see it, is the "Venn diagram of biases," shown below. Yes, the tech industry is becoming more open to women in general, but there remains an unconscious bias that keeps smart, capable female entrepreneurs out of leadership in truly complex, high-tech work. In my view, there are simply not enough women in tech who find the opportunities, or appropriate encouragement and mentorship, to take the reins as CTOs or starting tech-focused companies:

This perception is pervasive across the industry.

I was at a conference recently where a highly regarded female VC (who will remain nameless) said on stage something along the lines of its being obvious that female entrepreneurs are most likely to create startups focused on ecommerce, fashion, media, social, etc.

She may have been commenting on the apparent numbers in our imperfect world. But I still respectfully disagree with the statement. If we removed the bias and barriers girls and women face across society, female entrepreneurs would be as inclined as men to launch any kind of startup.

I am undeniably happy every time I read a new list of impressive tech companies that have women founders. These are fantastic companies led by impressive entrepreneurs. But most of the companies on these lists do not have technology as one of their leading differentiators. They are too often, as predicted by the VC mentioned above, doing work on what I view as the fringes of tech -- social media, advertising, retail and so on.

Regardless of why this bifurcation exists, it is a loss for our industry.

I adamantly believe that women can and should be the founders of successful startups that will follow in the footsteps of deep tech companies like MongoDB and Domo, both of which I consider highly technical companies. In fact, there are already a number of impressive examples of successful female founders of similar companies, including but not limited to: VMware's Diane Greene, semiconductor company Marvell's Weili Dai, Sunrun's Lynn Jurich, Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepsen, Clara Labs' Maran Nelson and PlanGrid's Tracy Young.

These are successful, tech-focused women who hopefully never needed to hide behind their initials online in order to get ahead in Silicon Valley.

I am convinced that the number of technical women who will follow in their footsteps will grow exponentially over the next several years, helped by organizations such as Women Who Code, TechGirlz.org,MentHER, Empress Capital. A powerful new ally for women in tech will be an as-yet unnamed new initiative from Melinda Gates. There are also gender-neutral apps, like Hopscotch, which teach children to code, the STEMinists at Skillcrush and accelerators such as Grand Central Tech.

The overall lack of female entrepreneurship in high-tech fields is an absolutely critical issue that we collectively must work on fixing. I am not alone in this opinion, but it's important to remember that there are several levels to this problem.

Related: There's No App to Explain This: The Gender Salary Gap in Tech

It isn't enough to simply hire more women for tech roles. We need to create an environment where women feel empowered to work in even in the most tech-focused parts of the tech industry, starting companies and driving growth. Women need the same sponsorship and mentorship available to men. Only then will we be able to take steps toward true equality of opportunity and success in technology -- with full names attached.

What Do Women’s Career Paths Really Look Like?

We know that women’s presence in the workforce has increased dramatically over the last several decades, but is it true that all women are working more? And if not, which women are most likely to work full-time across adulthood?

Typically, researchers answer these questions by taking a snapshot of women’s lives at one point in time to see whether or not women are working for pay. While this certainly tells researchers a lot about changes in employment – many more women are working today than in previous years – we wondered what this looked like over the course of a work career. We wanted to identify whether – and which – women were working full-time for years at a time, and which women were staying out of the paid workforce across adulthood.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we looked for “group-based pathways” – broader patterns that emerge over time – for women’s workforce participation across their twenties, thirties, and forties. The data came from annual (and then bi-annual) surveys with women who were born between 1957 and 1964 and recruited into the study in 1979. The women are now in their fifties; our dataset spans from 1982 to 2010.

What we found, in research recently published in Demography, is surprising: over 90% of Baby-boomer women spent much of their 20s, 30s, and 40s engaging in paid work. Moreover, 60% of the women followed what we would think of as a traditionally “male” work pathway—they worked full-time or engaged in “overwork” (working over 50 hours a week) through middle adulthood.

Our long-term view also shows a very different picture of women’s time spent out of the workforce. A snapshot of women’s employment – examined in any one calendar year – shows that about 20 percent of mothers were not employed in a given year, but our research suggests a much smaller subset follows this pattern long-term. Only about eight percent of women in our sample followed a “stay-at-home” pathway for the majority of these years.

Women’s work patterns do remain diverse, with about 30 percent of women reporting that they worked either part-time or intermittently over this period. Over time, some women increased their work hours, others decreased their work hours, and still others worked full-time in their twenties, left the workforce for a period, and then returned to full-time work by their forties. It seems likely that most of these strategies were used to accommodate women’s greater childbearing and childrearing responsibilities.

This leads us to our second question: Why do some women work steadily while others do not? Surprisingly, we found that women with the greatest financial needs – those who experienced poverty when they were young, were unmarried and lacked access to a second income, or were less educated – appeared to face the greatest barriers to continuous full-time work. While it is often common to think that women work because they “need” to do so for their families, our work supports findings from Sarah’s first book, which argues that women who have the greatest financial needs are the least able to find steady full-time work. Women who worked “like men” – that is, full-time for the majority of the years we examined — were more advantaged both during their childhood and throughout young adulthood relative to their peers.

Even some part-time work options seemed limited to more-advantaged women. White, well-educated women were more likely to enter, leave, then re-enter the workforce than were women of color or their less-educated white peers. Importantly, this suggests that women’s work “choices” are more narrowly constrained than is often imagined. While full-time work is often seen as a necessity, our research shows that stable full-time employment is an accrued advantage that requires that women enter the workforce early on with a specific set of advantages to which not all women have access.

We think our research points to two important takeaways:

A majority of women – beginning with the Baby-Boomers – work full-time across adulthood. A nontrivial proportion of women return to work after their children are a bit older. Yet a stream of research suggests that women’s commitment to paid work remains under suspicion, particularly when they have children. We need to move away from outdated understandings of how women work.
Supportive work-life policies matter: women who stayed employed were advantaged in many ways, which suggests that they were also more likely to work in places where they had access to better work-life policies. Extending paid parental leave policies, paid sick leave policies, and universal childcare to all, not just people privileged enough to work for companies that provide these “benefits,” may expand the workforce and help both women and men maintain employment.
Sarah Damaske is Assistant Professor of Labor and Employment Relations and Sociology at Pennsylvania State University.
Adrianne Frech is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Akron.

https://hbr.org/2016/06/what-do-womens-career-paths-really-look-like

Sexual and Gender Identities

WGS.110 Sexual and Gender Identities

Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Description: This course introduces scholarly debates about sexual identities, gender identities and expressions, and sexual orientation and its representation in various media. We begin with an investigation of the theoretical underpinnings of the emerging field of queer studies, from the nineteenth century to the present day, and consider how subsequent work in transgender studies continues to challenge traditional understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Author: Prof. Kim Surkan

Date Published: 2015-10-07T18:57:53.082652

Categories:
All/Social Sciences/Psychology

Languages: English

Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies

Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies (MIT)

Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Description: This course offers an introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, an interdisciplinary field that asks critical questions about the meanings of sex and gender in society. The primary goal of this course is to familiarize students with key issues, questions and debates in Women's and Gender Studies, both historical and contemporary. Gender studies scholarship critically analyzes themes of gendered performance and power in a range of social spheres, such as education, law, culture, work, medicine and the family.  WGS. 101 draws on multiple disciplines--such as literature, history, economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science, anthropology and media studies-- to examine cultural assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. This course integrates analysis of current events through student presentations, aiming to increase awareness of contemporary and historical experiences of women, and of the multiple ways that sex and gender interact with race, class, nationality and other social identities.

Author: Dr. Andrea Walsh, Dr. Elizabeth Fox

Date Published: 2015-09-05T08:40:15.980820

Categories:
All/Humanities/History/Topical/Gender
All/Humanities/Women and Gender Studies