Women, powering their way in technology
I truly enjoy chatting with young professionals. Their point of view is so refreshingly different that it compels you to question your own. On my way back from New York last month, I met a spirited young woman who made me do just that. I had stopped at the airport bookstore to pick up some in-flight reading. In the check-out line, the young lady in front of me had a bunch of books on programming. I asked her if those were all for her and she said yes. She was a software developer and enjoyed reading about the exciting new trends in her field. I have often rued the woeful shortage of women in the tech space and told her how delighted I always was to see a young woman embrace technology. “There just aren’t enough of you,” I said. “That’s not completely true,” she said, ““everyone seems to be searching for quantity and miss the quality right under their noses?”.
She was right for sure. While the number of women in the technical fields may be low, the impact that they are making is markedly higher. Its only fair therefore that we continue to highlight the disproportionate contribution that women are already making in the world of technology
The problem of lack of women in computing has been dissected into many different parts. According to an analysis by Laurien Vega at the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, these could be broken up into recruitment, retention, gender biases, stereotypes, threat, attrition, even biology.
However, it is indeed refreshing for a change to dwell instead on how women, in their own quiet way, have taken the world of technology by storm in the past few years. I am not going to dwell upon the big names such as IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, or even Robin Abrams who, having led several tech companies such as VeriFone and ZiLOG, is now making invaluable contribution as a director in our company. For sure, they have made a significant contribution in the technology business but we are all aware of these iconic women.
There are several other women, who may not be leaders in the conventional sense of the term but have led trail blazing developments in technology. Let’s look at some of these amazing women.
We often take Flash video animation as a given on our computers today, but few of us know that it was a woman, Sarah Allen who led the team that developed this now seemingly omnipresent technology.
A software engineer par excellence and a serial innovator, Sarah Allen has a history of developing cutting edge and compelling products. In an interview with the National Center for Women in Information Technology, Sarah dismisses the stereotypical technical mind-block attributed to women, stating simply: “I didn't see a big division between technical things and non-technical things.” She thought the Apple II her mother brought home was “just a toy” and self-taught herself the computer language Basic through a manual that came with the computer. She was just 12 years old at the time!
While uploading a presentation on SlideShare, are we aware of the fact that CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha played a major role in bringing alive this revolutionary new platform for collaboration? Rashmi left a PhD program in cognitive neuropsychology to become a technical entrepreneur. The result – SlideShare – which many refer to as the "YouTube of PowerPoint presentations." Raised in a family of professionals – neither technocrats nor entrepreneurs – she grew up in Kolkata and Allahabad before heading to the US for her PhD. So how did she turn to technology and entrepreneurship? “I like independence. I like to build things,” she told India Knowledge@Wharton in an interview. And SlideShare allowed her to do both.
Sarah and Rashmi are just the tip of an iceberg. Look a little deeper and you will find that women have a big role to play in building some of the apps and software we use every day. Did you know for instance that women have been instrumental in building the immensely popular News Feed and Photo Viewer at Facebook? Incidentally, the director of engineering at Facebook too is a woman, Jocelyn Goldfein.
And, have you heard of Chieko Asakawa and her contribution to making the internet and other web resources available to the visually impaired by automatically converting text and icons on the screen to voice.
Thinking about all the remarkable achievements of these inspiring women, my thoughts went back to the young lady at the bookstore. Her parting words still resonate in my mind as she said: “Stop worrying about how many women there are in technology. Just create a level playing field. The numbers will follow.”
Interestingly, she is not the only voice of change. According to Professor Knut Holtan Sorensen of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who has co-authored the book Technologies of Inclusion: Gender in the Information Society, “It’s about time that we explore what includes women in the ICT field and stop focusing on what excludes them.”
Would this then be a more effective approach to bringing about a change we have all been seeking? I am riveted with the possibility. What do you think?