#YesAllProfessions

Recently, I've seen an uptick in articles about how people in various non-engineering/science professions should learn to code. From MBA students learning to code to know their business better to law students learning to think like a lawyer by first learning to think like a system designer, the cognitive benefits of learning to code are obvious. Fields such as finance are so heavily tied to data-driven processes that one venture fund actually put an algorithm on its board.  

While simply knowing how to program has myriad benefits even if you never write another line of code in your life, once you know how to code you are more likely to identify ways in which writing code can help you do your (non-tech) job.

You won't find writing software anywhere in my job description, but if I were to list all of the times I've written a computer program to help me better perform my job, I'd be writing all day. Writing code allows me to sift through large amounts of data to help myself and my colleagues make better decisions.   I make maps, graphs, lists, and summaries by writing short programs that we would otherwise either enlist interns to devote time making or would otherwise be unable to do entirely.

These programming tasks are often very small - sometimes taking just minutes to complete, and rarely more than a few hours.  Just to explain the problem to a non-lawyer developer would often take as much time as it takes me to write the program because I have the benefit of having both a complete understanding of the problem and the skills necessary to solve it.

This is, I'm sure, part of why V. David Zvenyach is writing a free online Coding for Lawyers book. While computer science is a complex and challenging field, learning to write simple programs it not hard.  I encourage everyone to take advantage of various free online resources to learn to code, such as the Code Academy or the Hour of Code exercises on code.org.

The Clogged Pipeline

Following up on the last post about why women leave tech, I decided to take a look at my network and see if the leaky pipeline theory holds.  That is - are women who are studying engineering and taking jobs in the field dropping out at a significantly higher rate than men?  I looked at women and men with degrees in either Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) or Computer Science (CS) from my alma mater.  The results?

1. 30% of the women left the tech world, while 8% of the men did.
2. Among those still in the tech world, the men who work at the staff are 50% more likely to have a "senior" title (66%) than the women (42%).
3. The men are also 50% more likely to make it to management roles - of the women still in the tech world, only 25% are in management at any level, while 36% of the men are.
4. While four of the men founded startups, none of the women did.
5. The only place I see parity is that women who stay in tech have essentially the same likelihood of landing a senior management role at a company they didn't found (12.5%) as the men (12%).  But those women took larger steps outside of their field than the men did to get them.

More details and an info-graphic after the jump:

Why Do Women Leave Tech?

Getting girls and women interested in tech is only half the battle.  My friend Krista sent me a link to a TechCrunch article titled "Women in Tech: It's Not Just a Pipeline Problem."  It points out that while we can clearly do more to encourage girls to pursue tech classes and major in STEM fields, that's not the only problem.  Women leave tech jobs at a rate substantially higher than their male counterparts.

Why?

The article suggests it's due (at least in part) to blatant sexism that exists in the industry.  And it does - a significant percentage of women report being sexually harassed.  The story that came out earlier this month about a woman founder being groped during a meeting with an investor was sadly not a surprise. However, for each of these major acute issues, there are hundreds of tiny issues that weigh on women.

It's things like:

No Google, no I didn't. pic.twitter.com/9BtO4IjBTE
— Emily McManus (@emilymcmc) August 7, 2014

It's not getting to have a one-on-one meeting with a male supervisor because they are afraid you (or someone else) will take it the wrong way.

It's every time you meet new people and have to dispel their assumption that you have no idea what you're talking about.

It's getting recognized for good work and then worrying that others will think the only reason is because you're female.

It's not getting recognized for good work because you didn't claim credit for your work, but fearing that if you did claim credit, you wouldn't be liked.

These problems are hard to solve, but as the TechCrunch article says - the first step is admitting there's a problem.

Blind Auditions

Is this how we should conduct interviews?

SFGate's recent article, Gender gap? Tech could take a cue from orchestras, highlights parallels between orchestras in the 1970s and the tech industry.  The similarities are eerie.  In the 1970s, women were widely considered unsuited to performance at the top levels of orchestra.  Women just didn't get music, or didn't want to devote their lives to it, or something....  It was rare to see a woman in an orchestra playing anything but a harp.  In fact, only 5% of the top symphonies' performers were female.  But now the gender gap has shrunk substantially - those orchestras are now 40% female.

How did they do it?  Blind auditions.  Candidates were behind a screen while demonstrating their skills, such that the judging panel had no idea who the candidate was or what they looked like.  Can the tech industry accomplish the same thing with gender-blind interviews?  Sounds simple enough.  Would that work for tech?  Probably not, for two reasons.

1) Interviews tend to be less of a technical exam and more of a real-time interaction between interviewer and interviewee to get a sense of the applicant's problem-solving and communication skills.  To truly mask the candidates gender, you'd have to prohibit the candidate from speaking, which would make communication much more difficult.  At least until we have surrogates or scramble suits that mask our true identity in the workplace while allowing us to communicate and interact naturally, we won't be able to judge a candidates aptitude without learning their gender.

2) It seems that candidates are getting excluded before the interview stage.  Based on my experience and that of many of my friends throughout the industry, we rarely see women interviewing, even adjusting for the gender imbalance in STEM education.  So we probably need to address whatever is blocking the pipeline before radically reforming the hiring process.

So what can we do?  I have a few thoughts:

Mask applicants' gender where we can.  There's no reason to see gender-identifying information at the initial resume screen, nor when looking at writing or code samples.  An organization committed to leveling the playing field should consider masking names and other information that would tend to reveal gender, race, ethnicity, or national origin in the early stages of review.

Convince women to apply. Studies show that women don't apply for jobs at the rate that men do.  Women tend to select out of the application process unless they meet nearly 100% of the job criteria, while men are willing to apply with only 60% of the criteria.  This fact needs to be repeated over and over again until women (myself included) actually come to terms with the fact that we don't need to reject ourselves before we apply.

Bridge the confidence gap in resume writing. Women's resumes tend to be substantially less strong than men's.  That's because we tend to claim less of the credit for our accomplishments and use less-active verbs to describe our roles.  We "help" or "work with" or "assist."  Men "develop" and "lead" and "direct."  This is even true when describing the exact same task.

Ensure interviewers are aware of their own cultural blind spots.  When we do get to the non-gender-blind interview, we need to be aware of the subtle biases we all have. Cultural blind spots inadvertently exclude excellent candidates because they don't have the same hobbies, interests, and backgrounds as the main team.  This excludes not only women, but men who don't fit the exact image of the team - too old, from a different socioeconomic background, of a different race or national origin than the more common in the field.  Companies should take care to train those who play a role in selected candidates to be aware of their own biases.

Those are my thoughts - but I'd love to read yours in the comments.

Science is Natural for Everyone

Someone's been reading this blog.

Well maybe not, but Girls Love Science. We Tell Them Not To. from The Daily Beast echoes the points I've been trying to make - that so many of the attempts to get girls interested in STEM start from a premise that science is unnatural.  The article quotes astrophysicist Katie Mack who says "Gender-based socialization, and messages [ ] that tell girls that science is an unnatural thing for them to do, are incredibly pervasive in our culture."

The article is a spectacular take-down of the idea that science has to be made "girly" to be appealing to girls.  It tells us to toss aside the notion that "[g]irls will love science, [as] the EU has suggested, because Bunsen burners look like lipstick and fiber-optic cables are sort of like powder brushes."

Finally, the article quotes another female astrophysicist, Meg Urry, who notes "Discrimination isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success."

A+++++ would read again!

This is how you profile a woman in tech

A different security princess...

Meet Google's Security Princess, profiling Parisa Tabriz, is probably the most amazing article about a woman in tech that I've ever read.  I'm astonished that this piece of journalistic perfection came from Elle, a fashion magazine.  By the end of the first page of this five-page article, you almost forget that there's something weird about the fact that Google's top security person is a woman.  You get a real three-dimensional look at someone in the tech field, what motivates her, what she does in her spare time, lessons she has for developers to put them into the security mindset.  It's refreshing.

The Intern Hiring Conundrum

When I say "STEM is for Everyone," I mean it.  STEM is not just for people who do STEM - problems that come up in our daily lives can be solved with the techniques we learn by studying STEM.  When you hear "economics," don't think "price of wheat in a drought," think "hiring interns."

Here's why.  A friend came to me with a problem her organization is having hiring interns. There are 7 divisions in her organization, and it used to be that each division handled intern hiring independently.  Too often multiple divisions would end up giving offers to the same candidates, which confused the candidates and made it harder for the divisions to predict yield (that is, the percentage of candidates that will accept offers).

So a couple of years ago they switched to a coordinated hiring process, where each of the divisions would select their preferred candidates and representatives from each of the 7 divisions would sit in a room to resolve any conflicts.  But these meetings could get very heated and led to inter-divisional conflicts.  So they want to take emotions out of the process and develop a fair system allocate candidates between the divisions.

Economists will recognize this as a matching problem.  Matching is a very complex problem - indeed, a matching algorithm was one of the accomplishments that led to the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth.  For various reasons, the organization is not going to use candidate preferences in making division assignments, which helps simplify the system to a more traditional resource allocation problem.  Drafts, lotteries, and auctions are all mechanisms for allocating scarce resources.  Picking the right system will help you get the right interns to the right groups.  To figure out which is the right system, you need to understand your objectives and constraints, and how each system handles your situation.  After the jump, I go through some of the possible intern assignment systems and their pros and cons.

I should point out that I have not studied either economics or game theory extensively - I find these issues fascinating, but true experts would have a lot more to say about this.

Have Confidence to Learn by Teaching

JennyxYoung

Lack of confidence is one of the biggest roadblocks to success, especially in STEM fields.  By now, it is well known that Impostor Syndrome, which disproportionately impacts professional women (but affects many men as well), causes the affected to doubt themselves and ultimately under-perform their potential.  Related confidence deficiencies cause women to downplay their successes in performance reviews, not apply for positions unless they are certain they meet 100% of the qualifications, and dwell on any minor shortcoming.  You don't have to get to the workforce for these confidence issues to crop up - they happen in school as well.

In Math is Hard, But So Is Everything Else, I wrote about how it's natural to feel stuck at times.  But how can we get unstuck?  One way is to try to teach someone else the concepts you barely understand.   Doing this requires healthy dose of confidence, but it doesn't require you to actually be an expert. 

Cultural Blind Spots

This excellent article puts into perspective how 'geek culture' can exclude otherwise very capable individuals who do not fit neatly in its bounds. This is one of the forms of subtle bias I commonly refer to - it's not that someone makes a conscious decision to hire only young white men for their tech startup, but it tends to happen anyway.  It's difficult in an interview to identify the kind of spark that makes someone a good engineer - you want to find people with the right mix of technical know-how, creativity, problem-solving skills, and dedication to make great things.  You can test for technical know-how, and references can help determine dedication, but creativity and problem-solving skills are a lot harder to identify.  So it's no surprise that companies come up with questions about superpowers and surviving a zombie apocalypse because they are fun scenarios that can demonstrate creativity and problem-solving skills.  However, these scenarios play off of fiction genres that tend to appeal much more to men than women.  These scenarios aren't relevant to the work in the company (unless the product is related to zombies or superpowers in some way), so tying hiring decisions to these kinds of questions unnecessarily biases hiring against women.

Many women who succeed in heavily male dominated tech fields have adopted the culture - whether out of genuine interest, feigned interest in an attempt to fit in, or cultivating an actual interest upon making an attempt to fit in.  But for many others who have the aptitude and interest in the science and technology of it all, but are unable or unwilling to adapt to the culture, the existence of this culture serves as a barrier to entry.

This is the kind of thing that all of us need to be conscious of - on the hiring side to reflect whether we are inadvertently missing great candidates and on the job-seeking side to make sure we don't get caught in someone else's cultural blind spot.

2^11

Sometimes the best way to learn is to not realize you're learning.  The game 2048 is like that.  The goal is very simple - you combine merge blocks of the same number into one with the combined value.  For example, if you combine two '4' blocks (2^2), you make one '8' block (2^3).  Two '8' blocks make a 16 block (2^4) and so on.  The goal is to create a 2048 block (2^11).  After each move, a block appears randomly somewhere on the board - usually a 2, but sometimes a 4.

This is a very fun and natural way to get comfortable with powers of 2, which is an important concept in computing.  I'm sure the creator of this game did not intend it to be an educational game, but it's just one of the little ways that you can pick up important concepts in unconventional ways.

No, I'm not writing a blog post solely to justify the hours I've wasted playing this game.  Why do you ask?

Targeted Programs and Backlash

The Don't Look Down post explores the message that targeted programs can send to the targets.  In this post, I take on the message that targeted programs send to the non-targeted.  As a reaction to these programs, men can develop resentment and prejudice against women.  Below I discuss this phenomenon, why that belief is a problem for all of us, and what programs I prefer because they don't foster this reaction.

Meeting Our Future Engineers

Last week I had the honor of meeting about a dozen students from my alma mater at a networking event.  They were visiting Washington, DC to get a sense of what engineering is like in the "real world" (if you can call DC the "real world") by spending a day shadowing hosts (including myself) at various government agencies, research labs, and companies.

At the networking reception, I had the opportunity to speak with engineering students in several different programs.  Most of these students are sophomores and are just starting to figure out what they want to do with their lives.  I spoke with one young woman studying mechanical engineering who is interested in designing roller coasters.  One young man studying chemical engineering is trying to decide between going into manufacturing of pharmaceuticals or entering the growing field of natural gas extraction in his home state of Pennsylvania.  One young engineer is on her way to a career defending networks from cyber-attacks, another is looking to use his background to help shape policy.

Talking to these students, I'd have no idea there was a shortage of women engineers.  The group was evenly split between men and women, and all of the students impressed me.  The statistics show we have a lot of work to do still, but it was nice to be in a room of engineers and not be heavily outnumbered.

Making STEM Interesting: Programming Edition

As careers go, being an engineer is pretty great. Engineers tend to work fewer hours than other comparably paid professions, and engineers report a higher job satisfaction than most other professions as well.  But the problem is that while being an engineer isn't that hard, becoming an engineer can be.  Engineering is considered one of the hardest majors at college, and it's even harder without a strong foundation before that.  It's not easy to convince a teenager that it's worth all the extra work now for a payoff in the distant future.

So the payoff needs to be immediate.  And it can be.  In this post, I'll focus on programming.  What really motivates me to write computer programs is the ability to do something useful and/or fun.  In particular, I like to be able to see immediate visual results as proof that I am doing something.

Some examples of relatively easy projects with high visual impact after the jump: