Goodbye to the Bye for Men in Technology

Being a weekend in Fall, when football is on many people's minds, I got to thinking about "byes". A bye, in sports and other competitive activities, is the practice of allowing a player or team to advance to the next level without playing. In my career (though rarely at my current company where diversity is valued as a business advantage), I've seen numerous men get jobs because of who they know, not what they know. They're given a bye. They are allowed to advance despite marginal skills, education, or experience simply because they are on the right team, the mostly male team. I call for an end to this practice, and I'm not alone!

Last week I joined approximately 3,000 people (mostly women) from 34 countries in Portland, OR for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. It was a wonderful celebration with terrific speeches, panel discussions, and opportunities to hobnob with women of all ages. I was especially impressed by the college students and recent graduates. The young women I met are brilliant, poised, easy to talk to, and interesting. Their knowledge of hard-core computer science astounded me. Their college studies result in skills that are very much in demand: computer programming, software engineering, data mining, statistics, hardware design, bioinformatics, medical informatics, computer networking, etc.

Every major company was at this conference interviewing for new talent (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Apple, Pixar, Cisco, Intuit, Symantec, State Farm, Bloomburg). Numerous universities were also interviewing for professors and for PhD students. These organizations aren't waiting for privileged men to waltz into a position after getting a bye. By the time men schmooze the old boys club, the jobs will be gone, taken by brilliant young women who earned their way into the interview. Good bye to the bye for men in technology. It's time for technology to be a meritocracy and for men and women to compete on equal footing. OK, back to your regularly scheduled program. (Go 49ers!)

Not the end of an era

In the last month both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died. Is this the end of an era? Does it mean that innovation is dead? I don't think so. Have you seen kids with computers? The other day I watched a girl try over and over again to take a picture with her mother's digital camera. The girl appeared to be less than a year old! Granted she didn't succeed in taking a picture, but that didn't stop her from continuing to try!

According to Ray Kurzweil, "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)." He calls this the law of accelerating returns. I'm excited for the future. I just wish somebody would figure out this death thing so I can be around for it! :-)

I drew the picture by the way, which is a self-portrait, on my first Mac in 1984. One of the more amazing things about it is that my husband still had a copy of it in a format that we could still read, and on a medium that we could still read, on our modern-day Macs.

The Next Steve Jobs Could Be Female!

I'm sad that Steve Jobs is stepping down as Apple's CEO, mainly because I think it means that he will be leaving this earthly reality distortion field soon. When that time comes, my blog will be all about him. In the meantime, there's still time for hope and joy. I find myself hopeful that, despite Steve's unique genius, another genius will arise, and I think she'll be a she!

Think about what Steve gave to the computer industry:

• An uncompromising insistence that products must be beautifully designed
• A vision of how computers can help people enjoy life and make a difference in their local and global communities
• Empathy for "the rest of us" that results in easy-to-use computers, cellphones, tablets
• Collaboration skills that help tekkies and artists work together, for example to make blockbuster animated movies
• Advertising genius
• Fantastic online and in-store shopping experiences

He sounds female! Those are all capabilities that people cite as reasons that we need more women in the computer field. Sure, I know that many men have those qualities too. But most men in the computer field are better implementors than designers. They tend to jump right into coding and to ship products that are not fully debugged or easy to use.

In addition, in theory I agree with many post-feminists who say that the sex of a genius shouldn't matter. But girls and women need role models. (If you don't understand the importance of having role models that look like you, I bet you've never needed to consider it. You are probably white, male, straight, and from the middle or upper classes. Please develop some empathy. You're going to need it.)

But back to my main point, another reason I think that the next Steve Jobs could be female is that there are so many programs to encourage girls and women to go into the computer field. There's the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, AAUW, CompuGirls, and my new favorite, Dot Diva. We women are coming back!

The next Steve Jobs is going to be brilliant, dynamic, collaborative, empathetic, and able to think different. I can't wait to meet her.

Lift Off!

It's sad that the last space shuttle launched today. I find myself remembering the class I taught at Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s. Everyday I drove past the shuttle on its launch pad. What a commute! They put me up at a beach hotel where the door to my room was only a few feet from the ocean. I worked at Network General at the time, the makers of the Sniffer. The class was "Ethernet Network Analysis and Troubleshooting."

I kept telling my students, "It's not rocket science." Finally one student said, "Priscilla, will you stop saying that? If the network's not working, the shuttle won't launch. It is rocket science." Good reminder that we IT folks serve the organization's mission, not the other way around, whether the mission is selling widgets, governing citizens, educating students, or exploring space!

0x19

I have a tradition of writing a blog post to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Well at least I wrote a post a couple years ago and one last year. Does that make a tradition?

This year we will be busy on our anniversary so I decided to write the post a little early. On June 1st, we will have been married 25 years! I thought I would focus my writing this year on comparing technologies then and now.

1986: We were excited to get our first VCR and thought we were so naughty to buy that before we bought a washer and dryer.

2011: Today we have multiple DVRs and a washer and dryer, though Alan doesn't seem to know the location of the washer or dryer. That's OK. Priscilla can't find the DVRs.

1986: One of our first purchases was a CD player so we could listen to Huey Lewis and the News, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol, and The Pretenders.

2011: Priscilla still listens to those groups on her iPod nano, well except Huey Lewis. She's not that square.

1986: Our wedding photos were analog.

2011: Alan just got a 12.1-megapxiel digital camera with 12x optical zoom, wide angle equivalent to a 25-mm lens, 3-inch 460K-pixel LCD, and a built-in GPS.

1986: Our wedding video was analog.

2011: Today our video camera is an iPhone that does 720p HD and 30 frames per second.

1986: Priscilla came home from work one day shortly after the wedding to discover a long coax cable snaking from the living-room TV, down the hallway, into the office, and attached to a 1-bit digitizer connected to the RS-422 port of a MacPlus.

2011: Alan still engages in strange projects involving long coax cables, serial ports, and obscure contraptions from RadioShack.

1986: Alan used the 1-bit digitizer to grab individual frames from our wedding video to make digital "photos"!

2011: Today we have to think about what 1-bit actually means... :-)

1986: We had no way to send emails to our family on our honeymoon.

2011: These days lots of relatives send us email, too many emails. Just kidding!

1986: In theory we could have sent AppleLink emails to our co-workers, if we could have found a computer to use.

2011: Our co-workers today use iChat and WebEx.

1986: We would have had to use a hotel phone or pay phone to call relatives on our honeymoon, if we had wanted to call them, which we didn't. We were a little busy. :-)

2011: These days we travel with two iPhones, two iPads, and a MacBook Air. We still don't call relatives, though.

1986: No Google maps. No Google. No Web!

2011: What, no 3G, no WiFi!? (while traveling to 3rd-world countries, such as Indiana). We are lost!

1986: AppleTalk, of course, some IPv4, no IPv6.

2011: Priscilla: "Are we ready for IPv6 day?" Alan: "Yawn."

1986: No Twitter! No Facebook!

2011: Priscilla: "Argh!" Alan: "Yawn."

1986: No digital toys for the bedroom.

2011: Still no digital toys for the bedroom, just digits, decimal and hexadecimal, and no yawing, hopefully.

1986: No blog posts.

2011: Lots of blog posts. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

BASIC Principles

When trying to understand life and death, it's a good idea to consider basic principles. One basic principle is that you should never underestimate your Mother!

Recently my sisters and I found a book that my Mother used to teach BASIC programming in the 1980s. My mother was an Economics professor at Lake Michigan College and other institutions. I knew she taught her students BASIC, but I assumed she just taught them basic BASIC, so to speak. I figured a simple PRINT, and maybe a READ and DATA statement or two, along with an END of course, would be good enough for her students.

By the 1980s I had escaped the bitter cold of Michigan and moved to sunny California. I thought I was hot stuff. I worked for Matson Navigation writing assembly language software to control automated overhead cranes in container shipyards. I worked for Apple Computer writing Pascal software to allow the Lisa Computer to access mainframes. My Mother couldn't possibly know as much as I did.

Now, looking at the programs in her BASIC textbook, including her hand-written notes, I realize I should have paid more attention. Notice the program in the pictures above. Not only does it have READ and DATA statements, but it has a subroutine and loops. Plus it solves an important business problem regarding the expected probability of demand and how much product to produce to be profitable.

I should have paid attention to Mark Twain who so famously said, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." I was way past 21 before I realized how knowledgeable, smart, and downright fun to have around my Mother was.

Now it's 2011, and my Mother passed away on 03/06/11. Today I return to basic principles and I remind people to really talk to their Mothers. Find out her areas of expertise, her passions, her intellectual capacity. See her for the unique individual that she is, not just the person who gave life to you and your siblings. You might be surprised! Never underestimate a Mother.

Where are the female Wikipedia contributors?

According to this New York Times article, only 13% of the Wikipedia contributor base is women. What's up with that? The article quotes one of my heroes, Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse." Margolis says that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems as the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. What has happened to us women? Why have we become such wimps?

Is the Wikipedia contribution process so fraught with competitiveness that women are intimidated? Are women less interested in showing off how much they know? Are they too busy in the real world with jobs, families, and social lives? Do they object to writing articles for no pay? I don't know. I'm really baffled.

I admit I don't contribute to Wikipedia either, though I'm an avid user. My excuse? Um, the process actually does intimidate me a bit. Plus I'm not interested in getting into arguments about the typical things that get argued in my field. Who really cares what OSI layer ARP runs at, or whether ping stands for Packet Internet Groper? Also, if I spend a lot of time researching and writing on a topic, I don't want my work to get edited by somebody who likely knows less than me. Sorry if that sounds arrogant. It sounds a little like a man, actually, doesn't it? :-)