Why including women matters for the future of technology and society
The "Women of ENIAC." For their history, read "Programming the ENIAC."
Some issues trigger a deeper response than others within communities. In the technology world, the education, opportunities and inclusion of women holds unusual resonance.
In the U.S., as Nick Kristof wrote, “schoolgirls are leaving boys behind in the dust.” After graduation, the narrative evolves further. As Claire Cain Miller wrote in the New York Times on Friday, “women now outnumber men at elite colleges, law schools, medical schools and in the overall work force. Yet a stark imbalance of the sexes persists in the high-tech world, where change typically happens at breakneck speed.”
Why the disparity in the world of Silicon Valley startups, venture capital and high technology? Why are so few women in Silicon Valley?
At least some of the issue runs deep, far back into the educational system. As Miller writes:
That attitude is prevalent among young women. Girls begin to turn away from math and science in elementary school, because of discouragement from parents, underresourced teachers and their own lack of interest and exposure, according to a recent report by theAnita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Computer Science Teachers Association.
Just 1 percent of girls taking the SAT in 2009 said they wanted to major in computer or information sciences, compared with 5 percent of boys, according to the College Board.
Only 18 percent of college students graduating with computer science degrees in 2008 were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
So what can be done? How could including women in FOO Camp or making a list of women in tech or unconferences matter?
As computer scientist Hillary Mason tweeted tonight, “We don’t need affirmative action. We need meaningful culture change and support.”
Based upon the research a colleague gathered tonight, some actions could make an important difference in three ways:
(1) It’s good for men. Inclusion of women and minorities reduce stereotypes, and promotes second-order reflection on latent stereotypes, by providing real, first-hand experience. (Mahzarin R. Banaji and Curtis D. Hardin, Automatic Stereotyping, 7(3) Psychol. Sci. 136-41 (May 1996).)
This leads to better, more accurate evaluation of people’s work – because when people unconsciously use stereotypes, they mis-evaluate work. For example women’s presence in high-level orchestras basically doubled once auditions started to be done gender-blind, focusing only on the music.
(Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians, 90(4) American Econ. Rev. 715-41 (2000).)
(2) It’s good for women. The absence of women (or very low numbers of women) signals to women that they aren’t welcome or don’t belong, which can in turn cause them to leave the field or choose not to enter it in the first place. (William T. Bielby, Minimizing Workplace Gender and Racial Bias, 29(1) Contemporary Soc. 120-29 (2000))
Research also suggests that when women are invited to the table, they have more energy free to do good work, instead of using half their energy just breaking down the door. Reducing cognitive load on subjects who have to work to overcome stereotypes is not a minor factor.
(3) It’s good for business & technology. Whatever the vertical, the entire industry benefits when the best work is being created and presented. As Miller writes:
Analysts say it makes a difference when women are in the garages where tech start-ups are founded or the boardrooms where they are funded. Studies have found that teams with both women and men are more profitable and innovative. Mixed-gender teams have produced information technology patents that are cited 26 percent to 42 percent more often than the norm, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
In a study analyzing the relationship between the composition of corporate boards and financial performance, Catalyst, a research organization on women and business, found a greater return on investment, equity and sales in I.T. companies that have directors who are women.
The number of senior women doing major research and running labs in traditionally male-dominated fields like physics also offers insight into how efforts to include women can lead to merit-based selection across the broadest set of the best candidates. For instance, consider Lisa Randall, one of the most cited theoretical physicists of the last half-decade. Or Marissa Mayer, a senior Google exec who, as Miller wrote, many women she interviewed cited as “someone who gives them hope.”
Where to learn more
I don’t believe that most people are consciously biased, nor that they intend to be biased. Research into implicit bias suggests, however, that the most pervasive forms of bias are unconscious. Those biases can have tremendous effects on how we evaluate others, mostly to our own detriment – but also to our communities and industries.
Does the issue of women in tech matter to the bottom line? Miller’s reporting suggests that’s so:
Studies have found that teams with both women and men are more profitable and innovative. Mixed-gender teams have produced information technology patents that are cited 26 percent to 42 percent more often than the norm, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
In a study analyzing the relationship between the composition of corporate boards and financial performance, Catalyst, a research organization on women and business, found a greater return on investment, equity and sales in I.T. companies that have directors who are women.
Fortunately, there are a growing number of conferences, groups and networks that celebrate and honor women in technology, including:
- WomenInTechnology.org
- WomenWhoTech.com
- Girlsintech.net
- Women2.org
- Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives
- Shesgeeky.org
- ncwit.org
- DotDiva.org
- Women’s Internet History Project
- Cloud Network of Women
- Web Start Women
- Girls Who Code (via Twitter)
- Ada Initiative
- National Center for Women & Information Technology
O’Reilly Community also features an excellent series of essays on women in tech. For the fascinating story of how women were involved in “hacking” the world’s first programmable computer, pictured at the top of this post), read ENIACprogrammers.org. And the recent Ada Lovelace Day listed dozens of inspirational women who are innovators, inventors and educators.
Finally, Nick Kristof has done the world a mitzvah by writing eloquently about womens’ rights in his most recent book, “Half the Sky.” Learn more at HalfTheSkyMovement.org.
Filed under blogging, research, technology
Privacy Camp DC 2010: 3 words [#privacy2010]
Today I’m at the 2010 Privacy Camp unconference in Washington, D.C.
As with every unconference, it kicked off with each participant introducing him or herself with three words that offer insight into their work, identity, passion or wit. Combining them all created the “word cloud” above.
You can follow DC Privacy Camp 2010 in real-time on Twazzup on Twitter.
Filed under poll, social media, technology
Hired: I’m the new #Gov20 DC Correspondent for @OReillyMedia!
I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new job! Earlier today, I accepted an offer from Tim O’Reilly to be the Washington, D.C. correspondent on Government 2.0 for O’Reilly Media.
I’m hitting the ground running here in the District of Columbia, since O’Reilly’s upcoming 2010 Government 2.0 conference is only a few weeks away — and there’s plenty to do.
Over the following months, I expect to write – a lot – about how technology is being used to help citizens, cities and national governments solve big problems.
I also expect to frequently explain what “government 2.0” is, since the term is in my title! I’ve written before about the language of government 2.0, the history of disruptive innovation and the ways government adapts to technological change. That’s part of it. So is Tim O’Reilly’s concept of government 2.0 as a platform, naturally.
And so is writing about government transparency, the Open Government Directive, relaunches of .gov websites like SupremeCourt.gov or Reboot.gov, and the people behind the technologies that are driving change and innovation.
There’s no shortage of case studies to highlight, from the local town green right on up to the federal or international level. Just listen to the voices from the Gov2.0 LA unconference for a small sample of the perspectives on the issue.
O’Reilly’s goal in Washington D.C. is to “create a context in which people can think” differently about the role of technology in government, and the role of government in society. I look forward to helping to create that context.
In service of that goal, I’ll be blogging, conducting short interviews with government officials and industry participants, writing features and using the rest of the tools for digital curation I’ve been honing in the past several years.
I’m very excited to get started. I expect my new position to be challenging, engaging, rewarding, occasionally frustrating and never dull.
I also expect the process of writing about government 2.0 case studies to be a reciprocal process, as readers help me to understand more about what stories are important to them and which voices deserve to be heard.
I hope that in the days and months to come that you’ll share your perspectives, ideas and suggestions with me.
The story of government 2.0 is already being written every day by citizens, civic hackers, advocacy groups, government employees, researchers and technologists.
As a digital pilgrim, I look forward to chronicling that progress.
Filed under journalism, personal, technology
Is it ethical for journalists to “friend” sources on Facebook or LinkedIn?
In this video, Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs & professor at the Columbia Journalism School, answers my question about whether it’s ethical for journalists to friend sources on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn. Sreenivasan was speaking at a workshop on social media tools and tips hosted by the Online News Association in Arlington, Virginia.
Sreenivasan has posted many useful social media resources.
Filed under journalism, social media, technology, Twitter, video
Sounds of Spring in Dyke Marsh
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Federal court rules against @FCC in Comcast case, lacks authority to regulate net neutrality
As reported by the Associated Press, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia has ruled against the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) failed to show it had the Title 1 authority under the Communications Act of 1934 to tell Comcast what to do to enforce network neutrality rules over broadband Internet providers. The ruling is a significant victory for Comcast Corporation, which had been involved in a dispute with the FCC over network filtering of P2P filesharing software after its customers complained that the cable giant was interfering with P2P apps.
“The commission has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any statutorily mandated responsibility,” stated a three-judge panel of the DC U.S. Court of Appeals.”
The FCC made the following statement:
“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet and to policies that will bring the enormous benefits of broadband to all Americans. It will rest these policies — all of which will be designed to foster innovation and investment while protecting and empowering consumers — on a solid legal foundation.
“Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open Internet. But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open Internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”
Today’s decision followed a January hearing where the federal court judges showed skepticism of the FCC’s authority to require broadband Internet providers to give equal treatment to packets as they moved over telecom networks. As Karl Bode writes at DSLreports, before Comcast’s win over the FCC:
Again, no FCC fine was levied, no new rules were imposed, and Comcast barely saw a wrist slap for lying to consumers and the press multiple times, in both filings and in print, about throttling all customer traffic, 24/7 using user packet forgery.
Comcast ultimately shifted to a clear 250 GB monthly cap and a more intelligent and less blunt force method of targeting network congestion. Still, Comcast never much liked the precedent the FCC’s actions set, so Comcast lawyers have spent the last few years trying to argue that the FCC never had the authority to dictate how Comcast manages its network. The FCC found themselves on uncertain legal footing because the rather flimsy network neutrality principles (pdf) created by previous FCC administrations were painfully vague.
The decision creates a roadblock in the FCC’s path towards moving forward with elements of its national broadband plan. The decision might mean, for instance, the FCC lacks the necessary powers it requires to shift spectrum from TV companies to wireless providers.
As a result of the ruling, Comcast and other broadband service providers may reasonably be expected to filter P2P filesharing again. As Cecilia Kang reports at the Washington Post the FCC’s loss in the court “comes just days before the agency accepts final comments on a separate open Internet regulatory effort this Thursday. And the agency will be faced with a steep legal challenge going forward as it attempts to convert itself from a broadcast- and phone-era agency into one that draws new rules for the Internet era.”
The full text of the Comcast vs FCC ruling is embedded below. As comment from the FCC and Comcast becomes available, I’ll post it here.
Filed under article, technology
Transparency Camp 2010: Government, Transparency, Open Data and Coffee
Some unconferences are codathons. Others focus on citizen engagement and Congress.
This weekend’s Transparency Camp in Washington, D.C. brought together technologists, journalists, developers, advocates for open data, open government and open data for discussions, case studies, workshops and even, as Micah Sifry put it, some secular colloquy.
Transparency Camp came at a time of immense foment in Washington and the country beyond. A historic healthcare reform had just been signed into law, including an overhaul of student loans. Midterm elections in Congress loom at the end of the year. And the nation’s economy continues towards an uncertain future, perhaps of jobless recovery, after the Great Recession.
The Sunlight Foundation’s engagement director, Jake Brewer, kicked off the morning by asking how much had changed around government transparency since the last Transparency Camp. Make sure to read David “Oso” Sasaki’s notes from Transparency Camp for a superb narrative of his Saturday. (Sasaki is the Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online.)
There have been no shortage of transparency wins over that time, as the video embedded below attests. Projects like Earmarkwatch.org, OpenCongress.org or Punch Clock Map all show the potential for the Web to enable government transparency.
In 2010, there are more reasons to believe government transparency and open government will see more rapid advancement. As the co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, Ellen Miller, pointed out in her introduction, there are more significant legislative efforts underway around transparency. The The Public Online Information Act (POIA), HR 4858, introduced by Rep. Steve Israel, would embraces a new formula for transparency: “public equals online.” And an omnibus ethics bill, HR 4983, would “amend the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the Rules of the House of Representatives, the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to improve access to information in the legislative and executive branches.”
In looking at the role of this unconference in that context, the Director of Sunlight Labs, Clay Johnson, posed three big challenges for Transparency Camp:
- An Open Data Playbook. Clay described that as “an instruction manual for people inside government to teach them how to open their data
- A list of all jurisdictions and elected officials around the country
- A data exchange format for data catalogs, in a model like Google did with GTFS.
The success or failure of Transparency Camp can’t be measured by those metrics alone, however, although whether Johnson’s challenges are met by the community are absolutely part of the story of this weekend.
Identity and Government
Another excellent session at Transparency Camp came from Heather West and Kaliya Hamlin, aka @IdentityWoman. I had considerable context for their talk, given my coverage of OpenID and the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) and trust frameworks, specifically regarding the OIX trust framework as used for citizen-to-government authentication.
A key element of OIX, as Hamlin pointed out, was the standardization of online privacy principles promulgated though IDManagement.gov. Another important part of the identity picture is Microsoft’s release of part of the intellectual property for its U-Prove ID tokens under Open Specifcation, as detailed at credentica.com.
The Open Government Directive, Datasets and Data.gov
When the “three words” from the unconference were synthesized into a “Wordle” for Transparency Camp, four words emerged as the most powerful themes:
Open, government, transparency and, most of all, data.
The Open Government Directive (OGI) was a significant moment in American history, in terms of putting the data of operations into a format and venue where developers could access and parse it: data.gov.
Now that the resource is up, however, there are outstanding concerns about data quality, frequency and, most pertinently, utility. Andrew McLaughlin, the “Deputy Chief Nerd @ the White House” (aka deputy US chief technology officer), suggested that “to get reluctant agencies to embrace data sharing, focus on “high-reward”, not “high-value”, datasets.”
When asked if new guidance was needed, since “high-value datasets” for Data.gov are written into the OGI, McLaughlin responded that “some agencies will use a citizen-utility metric for prioritizing scarce resources. Others will focus on datasets that will are rapidly doable, to help overcome resistance and ease culture change. Both ways of defining “high-value” make sense.” The Venn diagram above illustrates how that might look.
McLaughlin also acknowledged a feature request for data.gov and apps.gov from the Transparency Camp community: more and better metadata, like data quality qualifiers or FISMA compliance status.
At the In Code We Trust: Open Government in New York
My favorite session for the day was a case study of open government featuring the New York Senate. With a nod to Lawrence Lessig, Noel Hidalgo, Sheldon Rampton and Mark Head showed precisely how law could be turned to code. I livestreamed “In Code We Trust” on uStream. After poor transparency ratings, a broad swath of changes to the New York state senate websites was implemented over the past year. New York was the first state senate to adopt Creative Commons for its intellectual property.
Photo Credit: Sheldon Rampton by Noel Hidalgo.]
The New York state senate is integrating open government with social media (see @NYSenate), live video, YouTube and code, at Github.com/NYSenateCIO. I saw Mark Heead, a developer, looked up a bill using the New York Senate API with an application on his smartphone. That API is behind a law browser for New York state legislation. The In Code We Trust Transparency Camp session is archived at uStream.
Health Information Technology
One of the basic principles of an unconference is the “law of two feet.” If you don’t like a session, you move. You own your own experience. Given that livestreamed parts of Transperency Camp, I also “voted with my feed,” moving my window to the Internet along with my body. After a session on the relationship of open government descended into somewhat unproductive discussion about open policy, I moved over to the healthcare information technology (HIT) session, which I recorded in part. Given the billions of dollars that will be flowing into healthcare IT over the next few years, as provisions of the Recovery Act are implemented, this was an important discussion.
Brian Behlendorf, a notable open source technologist, led the session. There’s now an Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to direct action, available on the Web at HealthIT.gov or on Twitter at @ONC_HealthIT. As Andrew McLaughlin noted, Brian Ahier maintains a great blog on health IT, including details on how the healthcare reform bill affects HIT.
Local Government and the Digital Divide
Another excellent session featured discussions about how transparency is coming to people closer to home.
Literally.
OpenMuni.org provides some perspective on that effort. The Ideascale model of crowdsourced recommendations for better efficiency and governance has been applied to local government, at least in beta, at Localocracy. The first pilot has been put into action at Amherst, Massachusetts.
The local government session at Transparency Camp was also fortunate to have the D.C. CTO, Bryan Sivek, and staff from @octolabs present.
Sivek defined his role as integral to both enabling better services online, like the city resource request center at 311.dc.gov, finding efficiencies for government through IT, and in bringing more citizens the benefit of connectivity. He illuminated a yawning gap in Internet use, observing that “DC has a huge issue with the digital divide. In Wards 5, 7 and 8, 36% of the people are connected.”
One of the stories of the digital divide in D.C. is told at InternetForEveryone.com. The importance of offering technological resources to those without access at home was evidenced by recent research showing that nearly one third of the United States population uses public library computers for Internet access.
Bryan Sivek is now looking for feedback on how to use technology better in the District, elements of which are evidenced at track.dc.gov.
Odds, Ends, Resources and Takeaways
I was reminded of a great travel resource, FlyOnTime.us, and learned about a new one for Washington, ParkItDC.com.
I wish the former existed for Amtrak.
I learned about data and visualizations of local campaign spending at FollowTheMoney.org and government transparency at OpenSecrets.org.
Most of all, I was reminded by how many brilliant, passionate and engaged people are working to improve government transparency and efficiency through technology, collaboration and advocacy.
The Flickr pool features many of the faces.
I look forward to learning more from others about what happened on day two of Transparency Camp.
Update: The Sunlight Foundation posted a video of Transparency Camp attendees on April 1.
Filed under article, photography, research, technology
Transparency Camp 2010: 3 Words from the D.C. unconference
You can access and embed this Wordle for 3 Words from Transparency Camp 2010 at Wordle.net.
Learn more about Transparency Camp at TransparencyCamp.org. There is a Transparency Camp livestream.
Here’s a second Wordle for Transparency Camp 2010 that removes the transparency duplicate, since Wordle.net dupes words when they’re capitalized.
Finally, there’s a final Wordle for Transparency Camp 2010, with all capitals removed. Fittingly, I had to clean my data to get a good visualization that accurately represented the data I reported upon.
Here’s a fourth Wordle, with a more vibrant take:
Filed under technology
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