Breaking Into the Boys' Club: How Diversifying Your Team Can Expand Your Market Elizabeth Lawley, Rochester Institute of Technology http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4706 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004 2-10-04 San Diego, CA Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- RIT is struggling with enrolment, but the enrolment is overwhelmingly male. Why not bring in more women? It's an untapped field and it makes men happier. People say that women don't want want to be there, why are your forcing them to go? But this is what people said about math 30 years ago. Today there's gender parity in math classes, but subtle pressures steered them away. We design products for men -- women get killed by airbags. If you include women in the devleopment of product, you diversify the view. Women aren't the only viewpoint you need to include, but it's half the potential market. Anil Dash: It's no coincidence that the two popular blogging packages (Blogger and MT) were co-developmed by women (Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott). DoCoMo in Japan co-designed these days by Mari ??, a woman who helped push child cellphone penetration to near 100 percent. The Sims co-designed by a Amy-Jo Kim (?), and one of the few games extremely popular across genders. eBay captained by Meg Whitman, outperforms dotcom industry, continues to be popular across multiple populations. Lily Chang (?) and Linda Stone at MSFT Research ar developing social software apps -- IBM has women involved in their SoSo groups. Brenda Laurel: started a girl-centric software company and ran out of money and never shipped. They did the flipside: just women thinking about tools just for girls instead of a balanced viewpoint. Anne Mulchahey, CEO of Xerox, a company that is rebooting successfully. What they have in common is a workplace that has community. 40 years ago, "women can't be successful execs because of having open door policies, being accessible, personalizing the workplace" -- all stuff now characterized as success-predictors in the workplace. O'Reilly: FOO Camp had great gender balance, and a lot of them were from women, who run the conference, product development, conceptual aspects of what O'Reilly does. That's part of why ORA products are successful So, it's good to involve women. How do you do it? -- Tom Melcher, there.com: If you can build a place that women love, the guys will show up, but the reverse is not true. Women in tech often come to it accidentally -- LIS majors who took one Pascal course, etc. Self-taught. My faculty is 30 percent women -- we got there by ignoring traditional qualifications. Prior experience in programming is a much worse predictor of future success in programming than compelling interest in programming projects. People who show up wanting to write code who haven't learned any bad habits are very successful. You get a different population when you encourage a focus on ends, rather than tools. -- Dori: Don't encourage women to do tech work, because there's no market for middle-aged programmers Anil: "Jobs go to young people" lament isn't different from "Jobs go to India" lament -- Practical steps: * Classes in how to complete projects, not how to use a language * Focus on human and organizational settings * Offer classes in how to speak programmer * Rethink qualifications for positions: "Someone with 5 years' of Java" is going to get an overwhelmingly male response -- look instead for strong aptitude and passion for the areas. A motivated student can learn in a week what another student will spend a year at. * Offering in-service training can bring women with domain-expertise from one part of the org into another part of the org * Once you've hired a women-geek, thye know other geeks. Have women interview other women. * Make requirements stricter in areas like good communications and writing skills * Get women to write job-ads