Auctions and Women Entrepreneurs

Last week I was one of the many busy volunteers who helped pull-off the once-a-year Forum for Women Entrepreneurs auction and fundraising dinner in Palo Alto. I was in charge of the "for the family" items - things like hand-knit afghans, photography sessions, and crafts projects. Got a lot of VCs and lawyers I know to "bid up" - I wasn't satisfied until I got at least double the "suggested list price". More fun than a term sheet, since there isn't any triple liquidation preference on a scrapbook - or maybe they just haven't thought of that yet.

Susan Hailey, FWE CEO, is a real kick - fun, sharp, and quick-witted. I met her at a Buck's lunch in Woodside, and was impressed at how she'd taken a pretty much bankrupt organization that had lost direction after the bubble burst and suffused it with purpose and cash. You've got to have a lot of confidence to inspire confidence in others, and she has all that and more.

So, what were the real neat items that the VCs bought?

Yahoo! had donated a basket of memorabilia that got ignored until I started directing everyone to it, with a "collectables" spiel. Ding. Sold high. El Fornaio, the trendy Italian restaurant, had a basket with a cookbook - but most of these "high flyers" don't cook and told me so in no uncertain terms. So I pointed out what a great "gift" this would make for any client at the restaurant to close a deal. Ding. Sold high.

Things like photo and spa sessions were no brainer sells, since everyone likes personal services. But crafts were a bit more of a hard sell - until I described how well an afghan would fit over an antique rocking chair, or how beautiful the Girls Middle School of Mountain View basket of hand-made crafts would fit any office.

Treats like cookies and candies sold easily, but it took a bit of work to sell the baskets of DVDs and children's books. Fortunately, I've seen Branagh's version of Henry the V by William Shakespeare, along with a number of other "classic" DVDs and pitched them all. Watch the bid start at $40 and zing up to $180 - a whopping 4.5 multiple for a half hour's work! What VC wouldn't be pleased with that. Ding Ding Ding. Sold real high - everyone loves movies!

Well, not everyone loves children's books, but I had also read a lot of those as a kid. So I went on about much I loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare when I was a girl, so I emphasized how important it is to cultivate a young mind with substantial and excellent reading even if they aren't your own children. Bid started at $20 and zoomed up to $150 - an incredible 7.5 multiple. Ding Ding Ding. Sold higher - my best percentage of the evening (though not the costliest products - the spa days and photo sessions were a lot more expensive, but not 7.5 times more). Maybe I ought to be a VC!

OK, you may ask - what was hard to sell. Well, the "suggested list price" item that wasn't bid up was the wireless access point product for home. It did sell for the minimum, so the FWE got the money that Fry's would have otherwise gotten. But is a WAP "for the family" or is it "for the techie"?

Maybe they put it on my tables because I am a technologist? Food for thought (or not, since I didn't get to enjoy the special dinner that guests enjoyed - we ate in a room down the hall).

Susan asked me at our first meeting "Why are you interested in FWE?" My quick answer - "I work in technology mostly with men, and I thought it would be nice to work with women for once". And after telling guys to clean up their messy cat5, all I can say is that FWE is sure different from those all-guy datacenters, right?

Google, Tech, and Dinner

Last week I attended the It's Never Too Late: Careers in Computer Science gabfest at Google's main campus organized by the newly renamed Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (aka Systers). Google was in high-paranoia mode, given their pending IPO, but I wasn't there to hear about the rightness of Dutch auctions or the Securities Act of 1933. I was there to hear about women in technology and sample their famous conference snacks - not in that order.

"According to the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau" stated the introduction to the event, "high-paying occupations for computer workers and IT specialists are projected to have some of the steepest gains over the next several years." This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone - tech always needs to innovate. However, they go on to say that "Despite the doom and gloom headlines about outsourcing, prospects for meaningful jobs in these fields is bright."

"Doom and gloom" is right - it sure doesn't look good for tech people right now. Karl Schoenberger wrote about a steep decline in CS majors several months back in the Merc, and I wrote a lead business page article last year for the San Francisco Chronicle while attending Anita Borg's memorial service, Paving the Way for ‘Systers’, which explored the declining numbers of women in technology, especially at the managerial level. "The numbers from Berkeley of the 1980s indicate that our technology workforce should have a considerable number of women in management and CTO positions by now" I wrote in September of 2003. "Where have all the women in technology gone?"

The impact of the dot-com bubble burst, coupled with the difficulty mid-level technical women face raising children and handling family issues, maintaining a technology edge, writing and producing new works such as patents, and breaking into established male networks, simply pushed many women over the edge. Ironically, at a time when women in technology should be in their career "prime of life", many are opting out.

How does this impact the next generation of women in technology? Simple - the key to mentoring and sustaining growth in technology for women are those women who have risen in the ranks in technology to hold management positions today. But "the vital middle, necessary to mentoring these young women proteges, is painfully absent. As the older activist women move on to retirement and other activities, who will take up the mantle and mission?". Certainly not new young CS majors - they're in decline. But why is this the case?

The article I wrote got a slew of mail from parents of college-age kids saying they didn't want their kids majoring in technology (computer science, engineering, even hard science) because "there are no jobs". Many of the writers were men with top engineering credentials from major universities like Berkeley, Stanford, and CalTech, who hadn't worked in 2-3 years, and were struggling to pay for college for their kids.

Well, 2-3 years unemployed does make an impact on even the most thick-headed engineer. Parents are saying "No". No to engineering. No to computer science. No to science. It's just too hard, and they won't pay for it. The major of choice is - amazingly - business!

If the chairmen of any computer science or engineering department had any sense at all, they'd stop blaming the parents and students who are only acting in their own best interests and start putting the blame squarely on the business school wormtongues who are extolling outsourcing (and poaching their students) using the "jobs increase when we outsource" theory that doesn't hold water.

Why doesn't it hold water? Simple. If everyone from the biggest to the smallest wants to act like a multinational corporation, a simple tax code change to make them bear the burden for the true costs of international business would make them flee so fast it would make your head spin.

Currently the true costs of international business are subsidized by the ordinary taxpayer. This is simply a case of creating "unenlightened self-interest" on the part of the taxpayer, brought to you courtesy of the business school spinners. As one businessman I know well said sagely "We shouldn't restrict trade - but we needn't subsidize it either."

It is good to see the Systers take up the challenge. Panel discussions at least bring out the issue into the light. I hope Google not only sponsors these events but also remembers that hiring cheap young people is part of the solution, but they also need a vital middle committed to mentorship as well, and that means family-friendly policies for women as well as men.

Paternalism and Corporate America

Mike Cassidy of the Merc wrote a thoughtful piece about how companies need to be "taking care" of their workers better in these tough economic times. Now, I have no problem with fairness as both an employer and employee, and I think workplaces are far too riddled with unfairness, petty jealosies, back-office politics, and ego, and too little thought is taken to treating everyone in the business with professionalism and respect.

Mike's underlying motive for suggesting this is a noble one - "To me the current situation is more like business are prepared to drag their employees out in the courtyard and shoot them when they no longer need them. I think a few steps back to the days when employees were valued as a company asset wouldn't be so bad."

But Mike's reason for a company doing the right thing for the workers left me a bit cold - precisely because they are so weak and powerless. It reminds me a bit of the time in the not-so-distant past where men were exhorted to take care of women because they were also weak and powerless because had very few / no legal rights or protections - they were viewed as property. And this situation continued until it was noticed in the US that women were also citizens with the same rights as men.

Most of the third world still lives by this older code, however - Noblesse Oblige. It sounds romantic, but do we really want corporations acting as landed gentry and treating employees as serfs chained to the land - "I take you as my vassal. You are of my house, even as the very stones. I pledge to hold you, to guard you, and to keep you. I pledge to honor your service as it deserves, and reward your loyalty in kind"? This is a loose kind of oath, isn't it? Or would it end up as Edith Wharton described in The Age of Innocence - "He found, with rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige among the business and financial supermen"?

Should our country revert to this older view just because much of the world still lives this way and "just because we can". I notice even Bill Clinton said recently in talking about his book that this was probably the most morally unjustifiable reason for doing things - "because I can".

Acting with the best of intentions is well and good, but the human condition often forces us to impose fairness when fairness isn't always seen as more important than, say, the bottom line. That's why we have laws and protections, and force equitable arrangements.

Denali, Space, and other Challenges for Women

While I've been talking to middle-school girls about physics and astronomy and the wonders of space, my sister-in-law has been taking up another challenge in a different space - climbing Denali in Alaska. I just got the word from my brother Greg Messner on her accomplishment today:

"SPECIAL NEWS FLASH!!!!! 3:25PM. The team tried Sat but encountered a storm at 19,000 feet and were unable to Summit and were turned back. They tried again on Sunday and Matt, Steve, Scott and a girl named Nicky [Messner] were able to reach the summit. They are now back at Camp 5 resting before heading down the mountain. They should be in Talkeetna in 2-3 days."

So girls are doing simply everything these days. Way to go, Nicky!

Progressive Venture Dinner for Women Entrepreneurs

Last spring I was having coffee with a business journalist in Palo Alto, and we wandered onto the topic of why women find it hard to obtain institutional investment, how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously, and finally, how not "looking like them" can preclude consideration of a candidate company, because it's easier to talk to people you relate to like yourself. So, what do we do about it to "level the playing field"?

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs (FWE) Venture Dinner upcoming in Newport Beach, CA is one of the very few opportunities for women to pitch their companies to investment, with FWE-provided infrastructure and bootcamp. In contrast to other venture forums such as Art of the Start (sponsored by Garage Ventures), this is a venue where women are presenters, organizers, and judges, and where being a woman doesn't mean you're virtually standing alone.

One major reason women don't get before the investors is that there is very little support infrastructure to guide them, as well as set their sights on the big story venture craves (which is why the bootcamp - otherwise it's "you've got a nice little biz, dear, but..."). There's rarely any significant press coverage and little support to encourage women to enter.

I'm not talking "beauty schools" where some coach takes your money and "tunes" you, but real "shape the message, get out there and pitch" opportunities to real investors" opportunities. And I mean real investors, working to an established and balanced framework to seriously consider the candidates and pitches, as they themselves are judged by peers on how they comport themselves in like manner.

I pitched my own company ExecProducer last year in La Jolla - there were 90 entrepreneurs, and 70 investors. 3 minutes per pitch, three different tables, salad to dessert, 9 different capital providers. The organizers were great, especially Jennifer Beckey and Cynthia Trevino. I went through their bootcamp earlier in the day - had a great advisor (Jim Butz of Resonnect) - reworked my pitch per his advice. I know absolutely I did very well. I sat at a table with a woman CEO pitching her company, and a male CEO pitching his company, so it was two women to one man. Think about it. And every single one of my investors were men, but it didn't matter. They liked the pitches.

Wouldn't this be worthwhile to be a part of? Many of the VCs covered in the mainstream business press send partners to this dinner just to judge pitches, as my own binder of companies who appeared, and the bios of the investors would attest.

I won't be pitching this year, but I enjoyed it so much that I did the pitch for the dinner itself. I was one of the few women from Silicon Valley (and the only woman CTO) to pitch a hard-tech company. And I had a great time doing it.

ExecProducer's CEO, William Jolitz, by the way, was with me at the La Jolla Venture Dinner last year for moral support, but he said I should do the pitch my way - "It's FWE, the company is your idea, and you've been on Sand Hill Road enough times - you will do it". I love working with a CEO who not only has great investment and business connections, but also expresses confidence in all of his team to do the job (and I do mean all, from the admin to the Board).

It takes everything you've got - connections, mentors, talent - to make a business go these days, and let's face it - women are usually short on connections, both business and press. And I know a lot of people in the business agree with me that the connections nowadays are much more intent on "outing" people and putting down ideas and small businesses than ever before. It's a cynical time.

So I hope this little epistle not only starts to answer those questions I was asked last spring over coffee - I also hope that women will participate in this fun event. And finally, I hope the business press will cover those pitches. It makes a great story - an unapologetic "against the tide of pessimism" upbeat story.

New Ventures, Pitches, and SJSU

Last week I wandered over to SJSU to listen to their panel on "The Entrepreneurial Experience: what starts up start ups?" as part of their gearing up for their Neat Ideas Fair. One of the panelist, Derinda Gaumond, workit.com founder (a business events calendar) is also a FWE member, and I and others wanted to cheer her on.

I'm actually quite familiar with the SJSU College of Business business plan competition, since I was a volunteer last year and saw a lot of interesting posters and heard some fun student pitches. I'm pleased they're doing it again.

Last year's SJSU New Ventures Fair pitch competition was quite interesting, since you can be more open to ideas and more forgiving of mistakes when presented by someone young and inexperienced.

Student groups were each given a PDA and TabletPC from HP and encouraged to create a company. And what a variety there were. There were complex (and actually quite difficult to implement) ideas of "hotblock" WiFi using active interaction (no, these kids weren't technologists - just business idealists). There was a ticketless reservation business using hotspots and downloaded movie ads. Again, nice dream, but not there yet for real technical and business reasons.

There was an etextbook pitch, since books are expensive and heavy on-campus. Actually, I liked this one because it was based on real student experience and was bounded by who is the vendor (the campus bookstore) and who is the buyer (students) and what (assigned textbooks for courses) from who (major textbook publishers using encryption and key technology supplied by vendor at time of purchase). It actually could work, mainly because keyword search is very useful when writing papers.

There was a hotel maid management system, but I had to laugh thinking about how hotels didn't trust their maids to clean the rooms but they were willing to put $200-$400 PDA's into their hands? Seemed a bit optimistic to me. But no more so than the "lifesaver" pitch. Now, CPR training for businesses is a good idea, but it seemed more like a good sensible small business than a venture pitch.

Of course, being Silicon Valley there just had to be a parking pitch, in particular, how do you find a parking spot when the garages seem to be filled? Well, using our magic PDA and TabletPC combo, we can get "realtime parking updates" and direct the car to the right location. Seemed a bit "scifi" to me, though.

Finally, there was the "interactive philosopher", an elearning tool where through dialogue with a computer program you explore such epistemological questions as "What is virtue?" Interesting that an "ethics" package is pitched to VCs. Perhaps this student understood his market need better than he thought.

A LISP programmer by the name of Joseph Weizenbaum many years ago (in the 1960's I heard) wrote a program (aka ELIZA) called "Doctor" that RMS put into EMACS as a game. You'd talk to the Rogerian shrink and it would say things like "And why do you say that?", and "listen" endlessly and patiently. Reputedly, his secretary got so involved with the "Doctor" discussing her concerns that she asked him to leave the room so they could have some privacy.

The winners - the maid monitoring system took the prize, followed by the mobile parking monitor, and third went to the etextbook. I think we should discuss this with the Doctor. "How do you feel about that?"

Advocates Unlock the Clubhouse at Google

Google last night hosted another Anita Borg Women in Technology meet and greet with authors Jane Margolis of UCLA and Allan Fisher of iCarnegie Inc. They were on campus to talk about their study Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing describing the trials and tribulations of women in academic computing. This discussion dovetailed quite nicely with an article I wrote last year for the San Francisco Chronicle Paving the Way for ‘Systers’, which explored the declining numbers of women in technology, especially at the managerial level, so I was quite intrigued.

Karl Schoenberger of the Mercury News SF Bureau and I three months ago had a conversaton on Tech Outsourcing and the Dwindling CS Major in Lynne's Take on Tech. My view as expressed was that the impact of outsourcing, the loss of tech jobs, and parents refusal to pay for science degrees is interconnected. And, as I noted in my Lynne's Take on Tech observations of Google, Tech, and Dinner a few days prior to my talk with Karl, the Systers were quite optimistic in their enthusiasm for more jobs for women in computing, stating at that time "Despite the doom and gloom headlines about outsourcing, prospects for meaningful jobs in these fields is bright." Is it still as bright?

The number of women in computing rose from 7% in 1988 to 40% prior to the dotcom bubble burst, according to the authors of this study. Now it's at 30%. So naturally one of the key items discussed was the impact on women studying computing in a "maturing" market. Now, no woman wants to be told she's starting to look mature, but in an age of offshoring and downsizing and nonstrategic products, the reality now is that technology companies are not as upwardly mobile and inviting as they once were. So how is it possible to level the playing field when the team has shrunk?

Probably the hardest thing to deal with is "expectations". The authors noted that many women left the major, even if they did well, because they did not feel it came naturally - "not born to it" in their words. Of course, the same was true for physics, medicine, and other scientific areas, and I don't see a lot of excuses like that from women. Mainly in those areas we opine about pay equity and job security, interesting and meaningful work, and the difficulty of staying on the fast track and taking care of our families. So I find this claim a bit hollow.

I want to contrast this with the issues that impacted middle school girls when I taught Girls Just Want to Have Astro Fun at the AAUW Stanford Tech Trek. Like in CS, girls don't have a lot of experience with equipment - in this case, astronomical equipment. Instead of getting all theoretical and letting them be timid, I brought my nine-year-old daughter Rebecca and her SCT Celestron C-5 telescope to demonstrate that girls can 1) own, 2) handle, and 3) enjoy equipment. What a difference it made to these 13-14 year old girls to see a girl younger then them expertly handle an expensive instrument. Not only that - they also got to handle it too! I didn't hear anything about being born to it, not because they might think that, but because it was so clearly proven to be just an excuse. And perhaps that is what's wrong with young women in CS today - they've been led to believe they can make an excuse and bow out instead of fighting for the real issues: academic respect, fairness and consideration in pay and project opportunities, and family fairness. All these are the same as women in industry need to survive. If they don't get it, is it any surprise they leave?

Maybe this excuse of naturalness is really an easy way to opt out of what has become an unglamorous major, an unwelcoming industry, and an unimaginative age. Meaning in work is absolutely critical to happiness and well-being in life. So maybe in an industry of downsizing, outsourcing, and pessimism, doing the hard work to commit yourself to a major that no one respects is really an "unnatural act".

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs Video - "FWE Success Story"

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs - Bay Area Chapter latest events video introduces Derinda Gaumond, Founder and CEO of workit.com. Derinda talks about the value of FWE to women in business as part of the SJSU Entrepreneurial Society and College of Business Neat Idea Workshop panel 9 Sept. 2004. Footage courtesy of Chris Surdi and the San Jose State University
Entrepreneurial Society.

Mompreneurs and Tech

OK, most people think that startups are done by 20-something guys who sleep on the floor, talk really fast and don't use deoderent. Well, that was kind of true 20 years ago, and that is the type of guy who some VCs like to fund thinking "Wow, they'll work day and night and all I have to do is pay their parking tickets". But what about those "moms" who are also "entrepreneurs"? Well, according to Marianne Costantinou of the San Francisco Chronicle, a women who has kids and wants to run a business "...has it all, all right: the chaos, the stress, the pressures of being mom and businesswoman all at once, all at the same time." Yes, she's a mompreneur!

And I just loved this "Mompreneur" story because it made me laugh. I've always been a mom and an entrepreneur. I married into a Silicon Valley startup (my husband got venture funding) back in the early 1980's. Symmetric Computer Systems. A Unix workstation company with a bunch of Berkeley grads.

While I was pregnant with our first child, I soldered the first five boards and wrote the manual while I was still going to Cal. When my daughter Sarah was born, she napped in the buyers office. Had her own tools and workstation set up for her to play. Loved the highlighter pens in the supply cabinet.

What was my day like? Morning commute from Rockridge to San Jose. Work all day with Sarah around the office. Around 5pm my father-in-law would get off work from Ford Aerospace and drive over to get Sarah and take her to her Grandma's house. Work continued until about 10pm. Drive over, get a sleeping baby, drive home. Sleep.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The company became kind of famous. Even did a talk last year for the Vintage Computer Fair at the Computer History Museum - "Before 386BSD: The Symmetric 375 and Berkeley Unix". Did the story of a startup, and dug up lots of pictures. Boy, did we look Berkeley. Even have a picture of Sarah as a baby held by her dad - lest they think it wasn't very long ago, he commented at the talk "She's in college now". (See A Wandering through the Vintage Computer Faire).

People were a lot more accepting of having a baby around the office in the 1980's than they are now. Must have been because it was a bunch of 20-something boomers creating a new industry. But there still was a much more tolerant attitude towards women - even moms - in tech then, because we all were having fun doing a *hard tech* startup. We were making a difference. And it wasn't odd to see a woman who had kids and worked - in fact, that was very ordinary.

Sadly, I don't see this today with the Gen-X managers and boomer investors. They're very rigid and intolerant of any deviation. Woe to the person who has an idea that his manager hasn't thought of first - that's a firing offence nowadays. Fun means only indulging yourself by using the business - not building the business itself as fun. Vulgarity is rampant - not discretion. Investment means scam - not product. In and out in six months. No wonder moms have to work at home nowadays to get by.

I've had a rule I've stuck with, whether I worked at other companies or at my own - if my cellphone rings and I'm in a meeting and it's my kids, I take the call. Made it clear to my staff and others. And they accept it. As long as you're up-front, it doesn't impact your work. Makes it less stressful, because you are always in the loop at home and at work.

It's crisis and unexpected situations that increase stress - just keep an even strain and it works out.

Glad I have those memories. But you'd think things would have gotten easier for younger women since this time, instead of harder. But it certainly hasn't.

Good thing kids get older - after doing startups in workstations, operating systems and networking, and semiconductors, my kids now work for me.

Women are Scared of Search? Or Simply Pragmatic?

Of course, any survey analysis is as good as the people who construct it. I did quite a bit of it in my youth, and I was very good at it, so I'm very critical of sloppy work. And since most people aren't very good at survey analysis, they certainly produce some incredible howlers - especially about women and technology.

I just finished reading a Just An Online Minute... Sponsored Results Naïveté article and I fell over laughing at the "results". What do they conclude? Simply that women aren't as "confident" of their search ability as men, despite being just as successful (or not) in their searches as men? And somehow this humility reflects on women badly?

What nonsense. It's obvious that women are more concerned about bad results then men, and consequently more honest about unsuccessful or bad results. Women must be more concerned, since they often are judged much more harshly in the workplace if they provide incorrect or incomplete information. It's too easy to take them out.

And since when have men had less than a "higher opinion" of themselves in anything they do, no matter what? Are they going to admit they might be wrong in writing, because that's what the survey is asking them to do. They're simply measuring bravado - not objective results - here.

Is a woman's realistic understanding that searches can produce trash results as often as valuable information really a negative? After all, all search engines are is a collection of webpages - good, bad, and ugly - with no ranking as to editorial quality or balance. Online information sources are still substantially smaller than off-line information, especially with respect to archival sources. Online searches have the proper use, but wouldn't it make sense to go directly to respectable sources of information, online and off-line, as well to provide a more accurate case?

Sounds like more women are just using good common sense and well-established diverse research methods to obtain the best information possible. And don't you want to deal with people who are skeptical of results and careful of information, instead of people who are uncritical and careless? Seems like an easy answer to me.

Girls and Science - the Hard Costs of Pushback

Recently there has been a stormy controversy about women and their abilities in math and the sciences, including astronomy and physics coming out of Harvard. Harvard's President Summers, in an unguarded (or simply unthinking) moment, decided that the reason there are fewer women in science than men must have a "biological" component - in other words, women must be inferior to men in science. QED. Quite an intellectual tour-de-force, but since he's a big guy I guess he could get away with it (I doubt any woman in academia could).

But a recent discussion on the astronomy lists caused me to actually put down in writing why a lot of girls abandon science and engineering - it's simple clear nasty misogyny - that's hatred of women, for those who don't know. Yes, like other awful human vices like bigotry and racism and religious hatred, it cuts through all levels of society and cuts through it's victim's souls like a knife. But ordinarily in balanced civilized environments (that's called "diversity"), people who try to indulge their private vices get pushback - from their coworkers, friends, and bosses - fast and hard. So going over the line has a price.

But in highly male-skewed professions, there is far less pushback from the "crowd". Instead, truly offensive behavior is turned into (if you'll forgive me) a mano-a-mano fight more suited to the boxing ring than the science table. Most women and girls (not to mention a lot of nice guys I know) just don't have that bloodlust in them to fight to the death - it's even scary to girls since we're not Xena. So they just give up and walk away - often times forever. But girls aren't the only losers here.

I think all the recent supercilious intellectual putdowns and just plain mean remarks I've come across in both the Summers and astronomy lists discussions can lead to a "teachable" moment and a bit of goodness. I've mentored many girls in the sciences and found them bright, eager, and talented - as much as the men I've worked with at Berkeley. I've written for major newspapers about this real issue as well.

But I've watched these girls leave the sciences because they said they never felt they'd be treated with respect - that if they brought up a controversial position, even in a respectful and positive tone, they would be considered a "bitch", and if they remained silent a "lightweight".

Now, I've worked with some really top flight guys over the years, including my husband, and in the process received with them patents, accolades, and great projects. So I tell these girls that there are great guys out there - your fathers, your brothers, and lots of other great men who love working with women and men who love their subject.

But this is a time where I have to point out that there are some men out here who have a problem with a woman not "staying in her place". Oh, these guys may protest and say "some of my best friends are women" and all that, but when push comes to shove they just don't feel comfortable with women. And they find every chance they can get to get in a quick sucker punch. They have a private vice, and they like to indulge it publicly. That's crossing the line.

And it's this kind of thing that smart girls see and say "Forget it - they're all a bunch of jerks".

This is why girls leave the sciences. Not because they're not smart enough or not dedicated enough or not creative enough. Promising girls leave fields like astronomy and physics and computer science because they get sucker punched over and over again by a witless no-nothing jerk who doesn't play by the rules (a firing offense) imposed in every company and school, and no one seems to care.

As I said, I've got the credentials. I've got the awards. And most importantly, I've got lots of guys who'll fight at my back. I've earned their loyalty and respect. Jerks like this can't damage me, because I'm *already* a success. But for groups who are *seriously* interested in astronomy, physics, or any other hard science / technology area, I'd say you'd better take a real close look around and see just how many women and girls you're reaching right now. You'd better take a good look at the kind of people who are considered spokesmen for your group. Because they may be saying and doing things that are leading normal bright girls to leave because they think your group is uncaring, cruel and out of control. And this should be taken very seriously.

It's also time for the fathers to speak up for their daughters, because they are the next generation. I already mentor and speak up for the girls who are ignored. I listen to them and comfort them. But it's time that these men stop being apologists for the very same bozos that keep their daughters down. By letting these jerks get away with murder, these dads are jeopardizing their own future welfare, unless they think Mr. Bozo is going to support them when they get old or take care of them when they get fired. Loyalty should be measured and reasonable - and letting someone kill your daughter's or some other girl's chances to indulge a private vice is not reasonable or loyal.

And for those girls who get those jerky smirky remarks intended to make them lose confidence and never come back - girls, take out your notebooks please and learn to say the following, like a mantra, because no one will say it for you, but you have to tell the truth:
"I'm sorry you don't like women, but it's really your problem. But it's not my problem. It's your problem."
And that is that.

You Can Have it All - Unless You Want to Retire

Sue Hutchinson wrote a nice article that discusses the closing of the gender gap in longevity. But I'm hopefull for a followup. Seems that there's serious talk in the social security reform set of taking into account women's "longer" lifespans by reducing benefits (e.g. Meet the Press last month) right when we don't seem to have that edge anymore:

"MR. RUSSERT: Do you think Congress, Mr. Chairman, would accept any formula that said that people would be treated differently because of their gender or their race?
REP. THOMAS: If we discuss it and the will is not to do it, fine. At least we discussed it. To simply raise the age and find out that you've got gender, race and occupational problems later, I would not be doing the kind of service that I think I have to do. You and I have been around quite a while. We went through the '80s. We went into the '90s. And now we're in the 21st century. We saw the choices that were made in the past. We went to the well over and over again with the same old solutions which really aren't solutions. We've reached the point where we have to fundamentally examine it in my opinion. The president has given us that opportunity. We ought to take it."

So what if there is no "longer" lifespan for women within the next 30 years if these factors Sue described continue? The reset for social security is then based on an outdated premise? Coupled with lower lifetime earnings by women, looks like the reforms in social security could create a new subclass of permanently improverished women.

Why Women Don't Like IT?

Ed Frauenheim of cnet put together an article on why women have trouble with IT. So I start talking, and before I know it I'm sitting in CNET's letters section next to one of RMS's rants. Good show!

It's a good article, and I'm pleased to see this subject is starting to be discussed more. When I wrote about this serious loss of women in computing (SF Chronicle, Sept2003, Paving the Way for Systers reflecting on the passing of Anita Borg and the impact of women on technology, I found a real dearth of discussion of this issue in the mainstream and technical press - it was viewed solely as a "woman's issue" relegated to the margins. Yet I received a great deal of email, both from women and men who have lived with this problem when the article appeared - much more than usually is received. And what they shared with quite striking.

It is not the long hours that dissuade women - for example, women in medicine are now at parity with men in most specialties, and I expect that to continue. Take it from someone who did an entire OS with her husband, working morning til night writing and programming with two children in school and pregnant with the third - long hours of work is handled by women all the time, especially by women with 2-3 jobs at the lower economic level. I think we tend to discount how hard women work for their families unless it is some high paying exotic job - but American women and women around the world have always worked long hours. This is a totally bogus claim, and ought to be called out as such by reputable journalists.

Unfortunately, the number of women who have 1) achieved in some area technically and 2) are free to criticize the power structure from which they benefit are very few. We all worry about blacklisting, and in a "slave", uh, excuse me, "ownership" society, a loss of your job can mean permanent career destruction.

Why do we discount women, or act as if they never contribute anything at all? Well, that's an easy one to answer. Women, in particular, find that a higher profile leads to greater risk - work denied, ridiculed, or outright stolen. Women don't and shouldn't risk as much - a woman's first priority from society's standpoint is to her family and community, and raising risk endangers family and community and is discouraged, all the Xena's or Lara Croft's notwithstanding. Any cultural anthropologist could tell you this one - it's Anthro 101.

And since women generally have less credibility with the public in technology precisely because women aren't supposed to "like" technology, as you wrote in your article, it's easy to get away with demolishing a reputation that is a priori unlikely.

It's not pretty, but it is pretty simple. Maybe it's time to just deal with it as such?

Fun Friday - Silicon Valley Cowboys a Dying Breed

Wired today laments the lack of women at C-level in Silicon Valley tech companies. After Carly's ouster lask week, there are only seven women at Fortune 500 companies and none of them are SV companies. Wired printed my response today.

It's not surprising that Silicon Valley is particularly difficult for women to move up in ranks - the "cowboy" company style isn't known for consensus management, team players, or progressive initiatives. The thing to remember is that many of the founders and investors in these cowboy companies (e.g. National Semiconductor, Fairchild, Intel, ...) are still going strong in Silicon Valley, and the independent gun-slinger executive who they identify with most strongly is also most likely male. Not always though - Carly's go-it-alone style fits more with cowboys than the older HP way of Hewlett and Packard. Perhaps Carly would have been better shaking up things at Intel or National Semi? She'd fit right in.

If you want to see Silicon Valley change, watch the obits. The fewer cowboys, the less fascination with the old cowboy style and the more interest in global strategy and fast execution. And women will most certainly do well in this new Internet age.

Girls Can Do Calculus and Physics and Astronomy and Look Nice!

Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed a psych professor who claims that girls don't do calculus in high school because they didn't do well in algebra in middle school (training their brains). Funny, she's also got a book coming out. Her comments don't jive with the research or studies, but, hey, it reinforces stereotypes and makes her money, right?

Perhaps we should interview middle school teachers on what they see "in the trenches", or maybe we parents should take a glance at the honor roll lists. Girls are usually the A students in these subjects. Often the validictorian is a girl, which meant all A's. More girls than boys are on the highest honors (all As). By this simple objective measure, clearly girls on average are training their brains by " reinforcing and strengthening their skills in math and science" just as boys are.

All this nonsense about outside activities compensating for middle school boys increased ability ("building blocks and train sets"? - come on, she seriously thinks middle school boys are into this stuff?) without any serious objective measures and studies is academic doubletalk.

It turns out that girls do read more outside of school than boys, but this doesn't mean that boys are on average building up math and science skills outside of school. If this were so, why all the hand-wringing over television and video games (and no, video game playing doesn't build these skills - only video game programming and design build these skills, but the number of boys and girls who do this in high school is very small)?

So this professor's claims are absolutely bogus given the objective metrics, and there is no serious objective study which credibly substantiates outside school activity to explain this difference. But maybe we should keep this simple - just ask any parent what their son is doing in his free time, and I guarantee you they won't spend much time talking about building math and science skills, unless they forceably enrolled him in a math / science summer camp.

So why do people keep saying these things? Well, as my old anthropology professor used to say, "Man is a naming creature", and people want everyone to fit into little stereotyped boxes, no matter how absurd or ill-fitting they are. And there will always be opportunists who will sell books to people who want to find a basic biological reason to map out 50% of the population.

If you want to know about how social pressures in science and math affect girls' career choices in high school and college, we should talk to the American Association of University Women, who organize the Stanford Tech Trek every summer for promising middle school girls all over California (see Girls Just Want to Have Astro Fun).

I had the privilege of speaking to these girls about opportunities in physics and astrophysics. I led my discussion with the reports that women in these fields earn the same as men, find far less discrimination in their professions, and love the cutting-edge nature of their work. It's a great time to be in the sciences.

Look at the Spitzer team - Dr. Yvonne Pendleton of NASA spoke at Foothill last year on this ground-breaking look beyond the dust obscuring the galaxies, and it was inspiring to young women and girls, my own daughter included. NASA currently has women on many teams - some teams are predominantly women. Look at the new Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, Dr. Denice Denton. Hey, better yet, we should interview her about women in the sciences. I'm sure she'd be great.

I found these girls bright, exciting, and curious. My own daughter (then nine years old) brought along her telescope and demonstrated to them that instruments are fun and sturdy (see Rebecca Jolitz Demos Telescope Techniques at Stanford Tech Trek). None of these girls had any trouble playing with the instrument, but then again, no one had ever told them "Go ahead, move it. Play with it. If a nine year old girl can use it, you can too." It worked.

I've written about this topic as a mother and a woman in science for years, but I guess I'm not catering to prejudices enough to be heard. But I'll say it again - girls are worried about working with instruments bacause they may look stupid and unattractive in learning how to handle them.

We are all clumsy at first with any new toy, whether it is a computer or a piano, but to girls at the middle school age - so terribly self-conscious and unconfident - the fear of being told she looks stupid or ugly is real and palpable. This is enough to discourage the formation of the habit of exploration through experimentation, even if it means looking a bit inept. It is not a biological issue - it is a social issue. And it is easily corrected - just let them play with the instrument without fear of ridicule! It really works, and it costs just a bit of time and encouragement.

It's time we got over this obsession in our society with using pseudoscience to justify prejudice. People all have different skills, and instead of trying to avoid our societal responsibilities we should be facing them to make sure our citizens, all of them, reach their full potential. That's what makes our country the greatest in the world - that we are a country "of the people, by the people, for the people".

That's what made Silicon Valley great, too.

Women in the Newroom, Women in the Schoolroom, Where Will It all End?

Enjoyed Pati Poblete's article today "Personal Perspective: Whither the Woman's Viewpoint?" in the SF Chronicle. It is so true that getting up into management and calling the shots on a news story is rarely a woman's choice. But this is also true, actually much worse, in industry trade press like the computer industry. It's hard to have the dual tech and writers credentials, and keep them current given the levels of stress (work, family, finances) and demands of the business post-bubble. But, as the they said during the Blitz, "We'll muddle through somehow".

I also was asked today privately about an academic's work who happens to also be a woman married to another technologist who does similiar work. The question in a nutshell was "Should she be considered part of his work, or is her work separate"?

Kind of an odd question, isn't it? After all, I haven't had anyone connected to me except for those nine-months (thrice) when I was pregnant. Amazingly enough, ever since my kids were born they have not been connected to me, let alone my husband. So assuming that a woman, just by marriage, must somehow be "part" of her husband's work instead of a "co-worker" is really quite bizarre. But of course, this question is interlinked with Harvard, and we all know what's been going on there. But if everyone is "enlightened" and "talking about it", why does this question keep coming up? Perhaps it's simply lack of disciplined thinking... so let's practice a bit, shall we?

I try not to interlink a woman who's clearly trying to establish her own professional identity separate from her spouse or significant other with her partner. I respect her as an individual. And I respect that man who is a separate person in his career, but a man doing his own thing in his work is kind of a given, isn't it.

Unfortunately, many men aren't aware of how difficult it is for a woman to achieve respectability in a field when she is associated with a strong man in the same field. They assume she's some kind of "weak sister", even if she's head of a department or receives patents or publishes or otherwise demonstrates competence, just because she has also worked with her partner. It's really quite narrow-minded.

In academia in particular, as many readers are probably aware, there is a long and honorable history of women and men working in partnership and marriage on research projects, ranging from physics / astrophysics (my field) to anthropology, with each partner contributing fairly. It's always interesting to see personal relationships intersecting with professional - in fact, sometimes these teams balance and strengthen their talents, and all the rest of us in the field are the beneficiaries of the works stemming from these collaborations.

In other words, sometimes spouses just really enjoy working with each other, and find they do great work together. Don't you work best in a friendly and honest collaboration? I sure do. :-)

It's a shame that such associations are viewed so negatively nowadays. It is a great loss when we can't work with the people we like and do best with, simply because of prejudice and envy. Anyone who uses such associations like marriage or personal partnerships, which should be viewed positively and with respect, as a means to attack or undermine the worth of an individual contributor merely as a way to get back at her spouse is despicable. It is a mean and petty act.

There will always be unfairness, but that is also an opportunity for courage - witness Pierre Curie's refusal to exclude Marie from the Nobel prize because she was a woman and women were not awarded Nobels. Pierre said it was dishonest to exclude the primary researcher on this basis. He stood by her and did not allow envy and dishonesty to prevail. She couldn't fight the battle directly, simply because the debate was over what she was and not what she had done. (NB - they would not present her the Nobel as an individual, so he was also named as a compromise, but I have studied his contributions as the history of physics is a hobby of mine and found he guided her on much of her work and was valuable in his theoretical insight. In other words, he was more her unnamed collaborator and probably contributed more as a team member than many named Nobel prize winning male collaborators).

Oftentimes (one sees this in biz all the time) a woman's contributions are viewed as ipso facto below average and reduced in value, where a man's contributions are viewed in like manner as above average and increased in value - both without a fair and balanced review. So I try to view everyone, men and women, as individuals with value and accomplishments independent of others biases or agendas.

And if they are partners, I view them as a team effort, and judge it on the basis of comparison with other teams and what they've achieved. So it works quite well across many different disciplines. :-)

I think this attitude has served me well in leading diverse teams in OS, networking, semiconductors, and Internet companies. You look at what the person has to offer, and understand what you have to give. As an aside, it must be especially interesting at Harvard right now, with Sommers spouting off those women are intellectually inferior arguments. Quite a tempest in that neck of the woods. And an example of sloppy thinking leading the charge here. Yet out of every storm a bit of growth arises. So let's not be lazy. Perhaps evaluating everyone as individuals is a lot more work than just relying on stereotypes and assumptions. But it does make life a lot more interesting and fun.

Watch Out for that .... Queue! Oh Wait, I Feel Buffer.

Ran into Vidya Babu (Director SW Engineerng, Cisco) at a girls Internet event sponsored by the ATW and Cisco called Great Minds Program Series: The Human Internet Game. What was it about? According to the invite the "...participants play the roles of routers, switches and packets in a network. Working together, these "components" (AKA the girls) have to route as many "human packets" as they can through the network in a limited amount time." In other words, I got to watch my daughter Rebecca Jolitz and her friend Jesse run from hop to hop, while other girls stood around acting as very unsophisticated routers.

So I asked Vidya "What do you do with the girls if a packet is dropped"? I kind of left her speechless. Nope, no congestion control, retransmission, window, or other stuff. This would have made the game a lot more fun and real to the girls. I guess we're just at link, right?

Or maybe I should save the inside humor for Byte next time.

Roomba, We've Waited for You All Our Lives

CNN has a delightful profile of Helen Greiner, Roboticist and Roomba inventor that is a must-read for young women in technology. "I think in the old days, robots had a perception of being kind of scary, and more science fiction than science fact. These robots are on a mission, and so are we: to bring robots into the mainstream. ... We can make robots do a better job than humans in some cases."

An admirer as an 11 year old girl of R2D2 in Star Wars, her latest consumer product (IRobot also has substantial military applications, but that's not "consumer") is the Roomba robotic vacuum. Imagine never having to tote around a vacuum again. The little Roomba scouts around the room, scooping up the dust and dirt, so you never have to. It's not surprising that has sold over 1 million in two years. I've watched the little critter skitter around at Frys.

It hasn't been easy to pioneer an entire field - even one so thoroughly explored in science fiction and media. With an engineering and master degree from MIT, Greiner founded iRobot with fellow MIT student Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor and CTO. According to the article "the three would start their workdays at 10:30 a.m., take late afternoon naps on office couches then work in the machine shop until 3 a.m." Typical startup hours - we did the same at Symmetric Computer Systems.

Keeping a company going that is easily ridiculed and trivialized precisely because we can't build Blade Runner replicants yet is very hard in a cynical and frankly very stupid business environment (the in-the-know people call it "nonstrategic"), especially for a woman. "Greiner spent long hours in the machine shop after iRobot's founding in 1990, struggling to create practical robots under continual threat of losing the financing that has kept the company going. Greiner had lucrative offers to go elsewhere, but stuck with iRobot."

But now the Roomba is selling well and the military just has to have more PackBots. We've all talked about robots in our home for years and enjoyed movies ranging from Star Wars to Sleeper. But it took a woman with vision, courage and a lot of hard work to really put one in our house.

UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology

Dr. Denice Denton headlined a talk at Google last night on "Leadership and Strategies for Cultural Change in a High Tech Environment". Ms. Denton, an accomplished engineering professor, was recently appointed Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. Articulate and involved, she didn't throw punches on the difficulty of integrating more women and minorities into an institution with very slow processes (tenure) and conservative personal networks in a fast-paced technologic world (see "Advocates Unlock the Clubhouse at Google").

Given the recent Summers diatribe at Harvard and the propensity of jerks and bullies to get their way (see "Girls and Science - the Hard Costs of Pushback", Dr. Denton did tackle the "why aren't there women in the sciences?" question, and she wasn't afraid to point out that a grave imbalance in gender didn't imply ipso facto that those few women there would welcome more women, since the risk of becoming "just one of many" could erode the unique position such a woman might have. So while the "only woman" or "only minority" might chair a search committee, for example, with the charter of increasing "diversity", there isn't a lot of incentive to the lone representing person to personally risk a loss of position and also possibly antogonize her male colleagues by championing a woman. A man, in contrast, can do this without a loss of status, because he's arguing against others in his somewhat homogeneous group the same as he might if he were debating fantasy football picks.

Yes, I know this is just common sense. To expect a lone woman to risk her career and position to help a stranger is not reasonable (although some still do). This fear of isolation and ridicule even impacts the mentoring of younger women - I've found very few established women willing to speak up for their younger female colleagues. In this case, it helps to be on the business side - see "Girls Can Do Calculus and Physics and Astronomy and Look Nice!".

Often, to be honest, I find many of these women don't have children of their own, having sacrificed motherhood for the brotherhood of university success. I do know women in academia who have sons and daughters and are motivated for their children to do the right thing. But then we run into the "can't get tenure because of the babytrack" complaint (see "Why Women Don't Like IT?"). Women in business run into this same problem - see "Mompreneurs and Tech". I wish more women had the courage to do the right thing. But I understand in an area where the Dr. Summers of the world can rant about their peculiarly bigoted beliefs and still get raises, the likelihood of the few women in academia who have survived the gauntlet championing women, tenure notwithstanding, isn't something I'd bet the farm on.

Denice Denton and the Politics of Ugly

On June 24, 2006, Dr. Denice Denton, Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, leaped to her death from the roof of the Paramount apartment building shortly after her release from the UCSF psychiatric hospital. "Didn't you meet Dr. Denton at Google?" asked my husband. "Sure did - I wrote about her" I responded as I struggled with the coffeepot (see UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology). "Why?". I was totally unprepared for the next sentence: "She killed herself this morning".

Prior to her death, I was aware of the intense animosity Dr. Denton provoked from political opponents along with the scrutiny of the local press. Much of the legit concern stemmed from what appeared to be the excessive benefits (remodeling the Chancellor's residence, a cush job for her partner) given to her by the Regents and Office of the President as part of her pay package at a time of budget cuts and fee increases. To his credit, UC President Dynes took responsibility for these decisions, and in the real world would be the one held to account. After all, he's the President, right?

But as frequently is observed, academia isn't the real world. UC Santa Cruz is a very ideological campus - far more so than my own alma mater UC Berkeley. Berkeley, for all of its fractious and exciting history, has a very large student body living in a very small footprint, it's very academically intense, and there's a lot of diversity right at your doorstep. People are everywhere, shops are crowded, and there's plenty of room for interaction or privacy.

UCSC, in contrast, has a smaller student body living on a very beautiful spread out campus. You can spend a lot of time wandering back and forth between the residence halls and classes and see more trees than people. It's almost idyllic. It's also a great place to harden viewpoints and actions into ideological abstractions. And Denice Denton, selected by the Regents as much for her icon status as a lesbian success story as for her excellent engineering and academic credentials, became an ultimate ideological abstraction.

I think most everyone was aware of all this prior to her suicide. It was no great secret, and it clearly chafed on Dr. Denton when I met her. When any man or woman works very hard to achieve professional or academic credentials, it is frustrating to discover you will be judged not for what you have done but for what you symbolize. In the case of a woman, that representation is reflected in her personal appearance - and nothing is more insulting to people than a woman who isn't attractive according to their personal ideals - whatever they may be.

Which comes to the jist of this little piece. Before I wrote that essay, I knew she had an image problem, but dismissed it as "the price of the position". But after it appeared (it was well-ranked) and before her suicide, I was able to observe how people accessed (searched) for the story. Search is a mirror on the psyche of the viewer, and the anthropologist in me always enjoys puzzling out why some search terms are valuable and others not. In the case of Dr. Denton, what began as a series of standard search terms like "Denice Denton" or "Chancellor Denton" or "Chancellor of UCSC" began to degenerate. One search entry I began to see more frequently was "Denice Denton ugly" (the term "ugly" actually related to a separate blog entry on search ranking and legal recourse).

I got intrigued enough to begin to traceback what I would call "mean" search terms. Unlike the generic searches, I found most of them originated from the Santa Cruz area - sometimes even UCSC IP blocks. Her most vicious opponents lived in her own back yard. And they thought she was "ugly". I guess nothing else - her ideas, her thoughts, her achievements - mattered. She was "ugly" and that was good enough to threaten her, frighten her, and insult her. No wonder she was depressed!

Now that the medical examiner's report on her death has been released and analyzed, and all of the laments, charges, excuses and honest expressions of sympathy have been aired, perhaps it is time to step back a bit and ask yourself a a few simple questions: "Did I think less, belittle, or run down someone today because of what s/he looked like? Did I stoop to name-calling because it was was an easy win?". We used to call this bigotry. But given what happened to Dr. Denton, perhaps a better term would be "the politics of ugly". Be as it may, it is important to remember that you are the sum of your words and experiences. Make sure they're good ones. Because you're not as anonymous in your hate as you might like to think.

Moms in Tech, Really? Impossible!

The NY Times today featured an article on MomsRising, a "post-feminist" group that's concerned about discrimination in the workplace against mothers. They've got a website, petitions, and all that, and of course are speaking a cross-politics lingo that everybody loves. I wish them luck.

So what's this got to to with tech? Technology has been the bellwether for this country's economy, and is the driver for the global economy. The pivotal works I co-authored which pioneered open source operating systems are commonly referenced today throughout Europe, Asia, Central/South America, Africa and the Middle East. Because of globalism, the US-centric dominance of a handful of companies no longer exists. Open source has been key to this.

So how do women fare in technology? Not very well...

Aside from all the studies that track executive / board level positions (which affect only a handful of women) and academic positions (improving somewhat at the same time technology studies in academia are waning), the real question is "Can you get a job in tech if you're a woman?" If you have experience, maybe yes. But if you're starting out and need to gain experience plus have to handle family responsibilities, the answer is probably "No". As more and more engineering, programming, manufacturing and line management jobs are off-shored, women who have families are particularly vulnerable. And once they are derailed, they are unlikely to ever get the experience to justify higher management positions.

A small observation. When I started out working in technology, I was a student. Nobody minded I was studying at Berkeley while working - it was a given that good students are valuable. Later, when I married and had a child, no one worried about seeing my daughter in the startup office or on campus - it was a given that women would marry, have children but also work.

Now I would seriously hesitate to recommend to any young woman a technology career if she also wanted a family. Beginning the in mid-90's I have observed an unrelenting (and very open) bias against women with children in tech at the starting levels (not so much at the executive level - after all, we can negotiate benefits others cannot). More and more, I read reqs that demand "hands-on" work (even though they don't do that work in the actual job description), heavy-lifting ability (as if anyone uses 2 ton computers anymore), and 50%+ travel time (which really doesn't happen unless you are supervising an international team - we all use email).

Technology as a profession has been degraded - the "race to the bottom" has meant that the people who have contributed their talents are discounted along with the equipment. And women, fewer in number and often living with more constraints (family, children, community) are more likely to get bushwhacked by the budget ax. Even so, the frequent ugly vulgarity that has grown in the workplace as the pressure has increased has never been acceptable. Perhaps one reason the NY Times says "mom's mad" is simply because she has a right to be. If you were a target simply because of your race, sex, or marital status, wouldn't you be angry too?

Fun Friday: Turing Goes Pink

Well, it finally happened. The Turing award went to a woman. Frances Allen, IBM Fellow, began her career teaching FORTRAN in 1957 (the year of Sputnik) at a time when nobody really knew what to do with those big clunky room-sized computers and "computer science" didn't exist as a discipline. By the end of her career, she had worked on parallel computing and high performance computing initiatives such as PTRAN, and also become a mentor to many younger scientists. An honorable career.

Ms. Allen is an absolutely delightful person. In a recent interview, she openly admitted that her entry to IBM was motivated more by money than enthusiasm for the company (she preferred teaching math), and that once the field was professionalized, women had a much harder time ("...in the '60s things got pretty bleak for women"). She also expressed surprise and disappointment that this field has never attained the same levels of women's participation as have other rigorous (and time-consuming) fields such as medicine. Since it wasn't really a matter of putting in the time, it appears that once this rather free-spirited group worked out a number of hard fundamental questions, IBM found it easier and easier to recruit based on a given set of metrics and criteria which not surprisingly would have precluded many of the people who they had hired to figure things out. "Computer science became a science and it became much more structured to people that were being hired, and there were mostly men that met the requirements. It significantly changed the workplace."

I understand her perspective. As I discussed in a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, in the early 1980's women also streamed into the computer industry as new startups were funded and the personal computer revolution began. But opportunities dried up pretty quickly with the first economic dip, and the first to go were the women hires to get "lean and mean". As a consequence, even today it's not easy to find women in their 40's who have the line management experience and technical background necessary to achieve upper management positions. And oftentimes those who got rid of people because they weren't "ruthless enough" (code words for women and family men) with no regard to skills and relationships (yes, relationships matter) would end up isolated, with a wrecked product line or a wrecked business.

Will we ever learn? Well, they did in medicine and many areas in biology and even areas of physics, so I presume computer science will catch up eventually -- if it even lasts as a true academic "discipline".

Todd Brooks memorial service was held a few days ago. Family, friends and colleagues gave testament to his compassion, humor and vision. In Paul's letter to the Colossians (Colossians 1:27-28) he wrote that "what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus". Perfection, in our conduct to others and to ourselves, is a great struggle and a necessary one. Singular acts do not always take away from the totality of life, as the minister noted, nor do they always redeem it. While standing in witness as a singer perhaps I find the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" most cogent:

Rest in peace, Todd. And God bless your family and friends.

Anne Wojcicki, Google and the Changing Face of Silicon Valley - A Watershed Moment

Silicon Valley has been considered a hallmark of the American Horatio Alger legend - come with an idea, build it, and become rich and famous. And it is true that many men have arrived here with little more than a degree and an idea and built a fortune. But the dirty little secret in Silicon Valley has been that those who didn't fit the "look and feel" of investors were far less likely to get a meeting, much less a deal. African-American men in particular have long complained about the parochial nature of hiring in the "Valley of Heart's Delight", and the lack of women in major Silicon Valley roles, both in industry and investment, has been a subject of much study.

The claim as to why women and certain minorities were underrepresented usually hinged on the lack of a technical degree and line management experience, but as I discussed in an article on Anita Borg's influence on women in technology in the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago, it isn't that simple. During the 1980's there was a great influx of women into computer science in the top schools, with the expectation that they would take part in the booming entrepreneurial experience of that time. But most women found they were immediately channeled into field sales or marketing jobs instead of engineering jobs. The few women who were placed in engineering generally found themselves in lower-paying quality assurance positions working with men who often had no comparable degree or training. These jobs were also not considered manager tracked positions. By the time I wrote my article, I noticed there were very few women who had lasted through this gauntlet through real line management to executive level. If you make it into a top university, endure the competition, and study and receive a degree in a universally-accepted "tough" major, you would expect to be considered for positions that your credentials merit. And if you aren't, would you feel you got a good return on your investment? I doubt it.

This is why the latest gossip about Anne Wojcicki's new startup is so interesting. Anne, if you've been living on newly demoted subplanet Pluto recently, is the wife of Google's Sergey Brin. Her sister Susan (Harvard, UCSC, UCLA) is a VP at Google, and her family is plugged into the Stanford scene - dad is the Stanford physics department's current chairman (he's involved with MINOS, and for those who are interested the colloquium next week is on neutrino oscillation results from MiniBooNE). Mom teaches at Palo Alto High School (no, I didn't take journalism at Paly my junior year - I took German, but I did get a 5 on the English AP the following year). Anne herself went to Yale and majored in biology and met her future husband when Google rented their garage - there's that Stanford connection again. The only thing missing here is the Stanford sports alumni networking dinner (my dad is a Stanford baseball alum, so we all went to the Fall football kickoff BBQ. And yes, I'm a Cal alum. Go Bears!).

So what's the big deal? Apparently Anne has launched a startup on genetic search, and Google has made a substantial investment. This has caused loud harrumphs among the old guard, because she's his wife and that's so unfair!

Funny thing, I never hear these whines when it works in a person's favor, like one guy I know who's only claim to fame for a plum VC job was he was a drinking buddy in college of the firm's founder, or the architect who brought his brother-in-law into the firm and got him hired because he knew what the firm wanted (inside information), or the investor who launched his son's company. I hear these stories all of the time ! I've also hired many engineers on the basis of personal recommendation myself (yes, they were qualified - we had to build something). There's nothing better than having someone vouch for you and put their reputation on the line to get the job done. The truth is, personal recommendations go a lot further than cold calls, and the odd luck of getting a room assignment with a future IVB or CEO means a lot of lesser lights going along for the ride. And this is one reason why it's harder for men who are qualified but didn't go to the top schools, and African-American men in particular, to get that inside edge.

But when it comes to women, it's doubly hard. You see, women don't usually get room assignments with future CEOs in college (and if they did, they'd probably get called lots of nasty names that equate their placement with promiscuity and prostitution). Smart women know that a drinking buddy relationship with a man isn't necessarily a good or safe one (witness the recent De Anza gang rape case). And women who marry into a business, no matter their qualifications, still face ridicule and envy precisely because of the sexual access (remember the "pillow-talk" buzz about Bill and Hillary or FDR and Eleanor? Why couldn't they be more like Ike and Mamie for goodness sakes, pundits would moan).

I view this investment as a watershed moment for Silicon Valley. Not because this is specifically a perfect investment - all investment is risk, and personally I'm not too enamored of knowing too much about who is genetically related to me. But if "Anne" had been "Albert" there would have been no breathy press reports in the major papers and hand-wringing over this investment. And Google is openly sticking to their investment and making no apologies about it or the woman who has received the investment. Yes, she has access, just like many others. And yes, she's married and their relationship is disclosed.

I remember when Melinda French got involved with Bill Gates, there was much ado on the back channel about her influence on him. I remember a trade show back in 1995 (we were doing a talk for Dr. Dobbs Journal on 386BSD and Jolix at the time) watching a coffee-swilling dinosaur at a Microsoft display and having a couple of very puzzled Compaq engineers who knew me tentatively ask if I thought this was a great idea or a bad one - after all, it was Microsoft. I believe they decided I was a technologist and a woman so maybe I could figure this out (and no, I was just as puzzled as they were). Well, this strange apparition who's claim to fame is that he may have been the inspiration for Scott Adam's "Bob the Dinosaur" in Dilbert was also reputed to be a Melinda French special (actually, it came from her group at MSC that also did other products like Encarta, but she was the manager). It was a failure, of course, and it came out right after her marriage (she had worked at MSC for 7 years prior), so of course she became the target of a lot of disproportionate derision and envy. Yes, I'm sure she's very happy to be Mrs. William Gates, but I'm also sure she's probably still annoyed by the fact she was tarred for a group's marketing failure with substantial buy-in when MSC has them all the time - big and small - and execs often get promoted even if they fail because they are supposed to execute initiatives and not just sit on their hands and hide in their offices. After all, risk means failure most of the time, doesn't it? And Silicon Valley is all about doing startups and gaining experience until you succeed, right? Unless you're a woman.

So, speaking as a woman in technology and a Cal Berkeley physics alumna and a woman who is very happily married to a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I'm pleased to see Anne get funded and I'm pleased Google (along with others) funded her. Because it is no fun getting a business plan refused purely because you're married to someone who's invested in you and not on the basis of the business or customers or your track record or line management background or degree or all those things they tell you in biz school are important. Believe me, I know how it feels. And you know what it feels like? It feels unfair.

What are they saying about you, girl?

Stanley Fish of the NYTimes today explored the "hate Hillary" movement, something that he said he was reluctant to do "because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target", in other words, embolden Hillary haters into sending him more trash email of the type where "the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity" in comparison. He was not arguing with people who genuinely prefer other candidates on the issues. Instead he was examining those for whom "the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts" has become an all-consuming hatred that he felt was akin to that vehemence expressed by anti-Semites.

What I found interesting was a thoughtful comment from "J" (number 176):

Thank you for this piece. As a woman working an a male dominant field, I’d like to think I am equal to my fellow co-workers and am a welcomed member. But with the development of this campaign you can not imagine the vitriol I hear in my office. In my professional office I hear men talk about the size of her thighs, how grotesque they find her, stating that they would never “allow” their wives to wear pantsuits, that a woman will never make a good president and continually pick her apart physically. This is in loud voices as though I am expected to join in, not a private conversation by any means. It often makes me wonder what they think of me in this office and what would be the effects of my being promoted.

"J's" note reminded me of something a very wise older male African-American executive once told me in assessing your standing and value to a company. He said that it was very important to listen to your co-workers when they talked about others without managers present. If it was disrespectful and unfair, than he said that's exactly how they talk about you behind your back. If they spoke about others with respect and fairness, then that's how you were spoken of.

So "J" is right in her concern about how she is perceived of and spoken of when she's not around, because this vulgar conversation could indicate she's not considered part of the team. If she were, then her co-workers would be much more aware of how a fellow member of the team feels about their vulgarity (and believe me, a lot of men loathe this kind of stuff too). Professional men and women are quite capable of self-control if they believe it is demanded by the team to get the job done.

Silicon Valley attracts the best and brightest in innovation of all religions, creeds and colors. The thing that unites us is our dedication to the creation of new technologies, products and businesses -- workstations, operating systems, networking, enterprise software, and Internet. The key to success with such a diverse workforce is building the team to accomplish the mission. "Outing" members of the team imperils their ability to do the job and diverts resources when focus is needed to survive in a "world is flat" global economy.

So what would be the best advice for "J"? The direct way (and the best to clear the air and refocus the team) is to find the manager and point out that the team isn't focused on building the product but instead involved in indulging individual whims. I wish I could say it will work -- there are a lot of bad managers out there who don't get held accountable when their teams fail to achieve -- but sometimes sanity prevails.

But what if "J" fails to get satisfaction? In this case, she'd have to do what a lot of women are forced to do -- try to find another job and pray she isn't "too old" (for women I'm told it's now 40, for men I'm told it's 50, and yes it's discriminatory but as an SV attorney said not so long ago "You can't prove intent"). "J" can't ignore that a lot of men (and women) agreed with Rush Limbaugh when he said nobody would want to watch a woman, no matter how smart or experienced or good at her job, grow old.

Would be safer for "J" to keep her mouth shut, hunker down and try to last a few years longer? Perhaps. In a recession, taking a risk like this, even if it's right and good, may require "J" to pay too high a price. It isn't fair, but what if nobody is either?

I can't see a good answer here. Is there one?

Estrin on Innovation - A Change of Heart?

Judy Estrin and I have both been around in Silicon Valley. I was at Symmetric Computer Systems soldering the first five motherboards for the 375 while she was at Zilog with Bill Carrico (who was the product manager for the Z80). Paul Baran, a great influence on my work in layer-4 switching using dataflow techniques (InterProphet patents) was a student of her father's at UCLA (where my son is off to in a couple weeks, but in physics, not computing). 386BSD Release 1.0 was launched about the same time Precept was launched (based on multicast, not TCP, using video streaming as a demo platform for the technology). Like Judy, I didn't get to the Ph.D. stage, because I was impatient to get into the big start-up boom of the 1980's. Judy worked with Vint Cerf at Stanford (where she got her master's) on TCP, while Vint vetted my work on SiliconTCP and was on the Board of Directors of InterProphet. We're both moms who juggled diapers and meetings, and suffered a lot of "can you do this" incredulity. Judy and I both received the coveted and unusual Geek of the Week award, but they spelled her name correctly on the nameplate (it's Lynne with an "e").

Judy and I have had our differences. Packet Design, now Judy-Lab (JLAB) was launched as a rival to InterProphet in 2000 (we'd already done our first patent, prototype and product by that time), and while it was far more successful in fundraising than InterProphet ever was, it didn't get nearly as far. Perhaps there is something to be said about running lean. Egos cost big.

But all that said, I salute her for daring to write a book that indicts Silicon Valley's disregard for investing in innovative or risky technology. This cult of "renovation, not innovation" as espoused by Ray Lane has, as Judy puts it "created a kind of root rot in the valley and the nation as a whole." Judy herself I am sure has suffered from this bottom-feeder mentality. It is impossible to run a small research lab like Judy does when the ideas developed are ignored. Think it was tough in 1998 when InterProphet was launched? At least we got a million on a handshake then to develop the concept. In 2008 it is literally impossible to finance any semiconductor company for any reason unless you have an inside deal with Intel - something innovators just don't tend to cultivate in the rush to actually build something.

So bravo, Judy, for writing how this "non-strategic time" (remember when you warned everyone about this in response to one of my questions way back in 2001?) is merely catabolizing Silicon Valley and not giving back. I've been discussing this for years, and put my life on the line for this cause (in open source), just as you do now. Who would of thought that the two of us would be fighting side-by-side?