The gender gap in IT will take many years to balance out because the pipeline has to be built through early education but that doesn’t mean that women’s voices can’t be heard until there is parity in numbers, pay and expectations. 

The best way to teach others is by example and there will be plenty of inspirational stories told at the event and plenty of speakers showing that woemn can be successful at large tech companies despite their lack of numbers in the workforce. 

The conference certainly lives up to its title. Top female executives from Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce and American Express, will be joined by peers based in Berlin and Dubai. 

Ulyana Zilbermints, vice president, at conference organizer Avenue Code, said the event will “celebrate the movement of women leadership in technology.”

Zilbermints says she has successfully managed a life as a Silicon Valley executive, a business owner, while being a mother to twins -- now seven years old. She’s mentored many women based on her experiences and the challenges that came at different stages of her life. She says that now she is nearing forty she is able to approach leadership much more authentically. 

Fariba Rawhani, CIO ofTeranet, and one of the conference speakers, said. “It’s very important that we women support one another and send the message that it’s okay to be successful and ambitious; it’s okay to want to expand our horizons and do more. Always remember that women have a sisterhood.”

The conference grew out of a webinar series that interviewed female business leaders from the US, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the Middle East.

The event will have a Startup track where VCs and Angel investors will hear new business ideas. And a track where women can find mentors and advisors. 

The overall goal is to provide opportunities for women to create connections with their peers and with influential executives. It’s the best way to fast-track a career that’s been likely delayed by COVID-19 measures that have resulted in the absence of meetups and conferences -- for more than 20 months -- by the time this December conference arrives in San Francisco. 

There’s a lot of catching up to be done. 

.

The number of deals edged up to 4.4%, a record number of 368 compared with 5,588 for all-male startup teams.

Valentina Zarya reports,

The size of the gap is staggering, but there is a sliver of a silver lining: It's smaller than last year's. In 2016, female founders raised just $1.4 billion--or 1.9% of total VC funding. In fact, with the exception of 2014, 2017 marks the largest percentage of total venture dollars that has gone to female founders since PitchBook started tracking the data in 2006.

Mixed gender teams represented 12% of total funds and the remaining 7% of startups were undefined. The average deal size for all-female teams was about $5 million compared to $12 million for men.

What was not calculated was how many female-led startups applied for funding and were rejected.

While the largest round invested in a woman-led startup was $165 million (Moda Operandi's Series G), the largest that went to a male-led company (WeWork, also a Series G) was $3 billion. And the co-working space is not an outlier. Even the tenth-largest deal on the list comes in at half a billion dollars, or more than four times larger than the largest round raised by a women-led company.

http://fortune.com/2018/01/31/female-founders-venture-capital-2017/

Fortune reported on the gender funding difference a year ago. In that story female founders pointed to the lack of women VCs, which represent about 8% of VC partners.

Please see:

Rent the Runway CEO: Gender discrimination is larger workplace issue than sexual harassment

Solving Silicon Valley's diversity problem

It might seem strange that The Atlantic, an East Coast organization is trying to solve Silicon Valley’s inclusivity problem. But clearly Silicon Valley needs help. It is doing a very bad job. Countless Uber scandals, countless office harassment scandals, countless venture capitalist scandals… and stubbornly low counts on the recruitment of women and minorities.

Inclusivity in Tech…

It was a good turnout and each one the speakers and moderators had something good to say. The audience was just as interesting as the podium when they shared questions and many of them were members and leaders of a variety of activist groups.

I’m positive that the organizers could have picked people at random from the audience for the panels and we would have a great conversation.

- The conference “Inclusion in Tech” is part of AtlanticLIVE events. It began with a town hall discussion on the topic “Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women, And What’s Being Done About it?”

I did not catch this session. But my observation is that many Silicon Valley workplaces are awful and the addition of gender discrimination must makes it far worse.]

I caught all of the afternoon sessions: Here’s some of my notes… [My comments are in square brackets.]

- Executive remarks:

Yolanda Mangolini, (above) Director, Global Diversity and Inclusion, Google spoke about how diversity on its teams makes for better products. She showed a video of how a Google camera product had a bug in taking photos of dark-skinned people. The narrator said technology is not racist. The error was due to inadequate product testing against the Google team’s unconscious bias!

[Technology is neutral and independent of its user or developer — this is a running theme in the Google credo — that culture is a factor that can be abstracted and quantified.] 

[The Google video had a confused message: it showed the camera bug being discovered at a party and not by a diverse product team at Google. It did not make a distinction between the value of diversity in product development teams versus and the value of customer usability testing. Also: she made no mention of the infamous email by a Google engineer earlier this year that questioned female attributes in relation to tech jobs! It was a very short presentation and it should have been much more. ]

- Fireside chat: 

Amy Weaver, President, Legal and General Counsel, Salesforce spoke with Steve Clemons, Washington Editor at Large, The Atlantic — mostly about what a great guy Marc Benioff, the CEO and founder of Salesforce is and how Salesforce employees donate so much time to charitable work. Salesforce staff are paid to give seven days of charity work. [If they are paid does this count as volunteering?!] They’ve made a big difference in San Francisco’s middle schools.

[I’m a big fan of Marc Benioff. Charity begins at home and he and Salesforce have made massive contributions locally. Let’s make sure that San Francisco and Silicon Valley public schools become showcases and not basket cases — as many of them are with insanely high drop-out rates. The future is bright but our infrastructure is failing?! It doesn’t add up.]

- Tech in the Heartland

Chris Olsen, Partner, Drive Capital, Mark Orttung, CEO, Nexient chatting with Alison Stewart, The Atlantic.

This was a very awkward session. [Two white middle-aged middle-class guys working as venture capitalists — these are the models for voodoo dolls in this community.]

The VCs talked about working with entrepreneurs in places outside of Silicon Valley and how great it was. The conversation had little to do with the key issues of the conference. When they did fleetingly discuss inclusivity, a person in the audience took them to task on their use of language and asked them to “own” the problem of diversity in the words they choose.

[Language was a key theme here. Time and again speakers and audience would question the words being used in reference to a wide range of diversity issues. This is an incredibly important point. Words matter and they matter more than most people realize. Words make this world and we need to use the right words — and in the right order.]

- The Black Coders of Tomorrow

Kimberly Bryant, CEO, Black Girls Code spoke with Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic. Bryant is a dynamite speaker and immediately hit back at the use of “pipeline” as an excuse by tech companies on their low diversity numbers. Pipeline refers to the small percentage of qualified job applicants that are women and/or minorities. She said there are plenty of qualified people available but they are not being offered tech jobs.

- In Our Own Backyard - 

Mayor Libby Schaaf, City of Oakland with Steve Clemons, The Atlantic. They spoke about Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, who had died that morning. They said he was a champion of diversity.

The mayor said she refused to give Uber a tax break when it announced its HQ in Oakland — unlike Ed Lee with Twitter. She expressed frustration with dealing with the tech community. She said that voters believed she controlled “tech money” which she does not.

She said she wants the tech jobs to go to her community. Oakland kids should be the ones that grow up ajnd take those Silicon Valley jobs.

[Good luck with that, mayor. It’s a marvelous ambition and totally fair but Silicon Valley companies have no connection with their local communities. They hire people based on where they themselves went to school and where they grew up and that wasn’t any place like Oakland. To put it simply: they hire from within their social-economic class — more on that subject later.]

- Where Do We Go From Here? A Town Hall Conversation:

Natalia Oberti Noguera, Founder and CEO, Pipeline Angels; Tariq Meyers, Head of Inclusion and Diversity, Lyft; Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Atlassian, Tom McLeod, Founder and CEO, Omni; Stephanie Lampkin, Founder and CEO, Blendoor; with Alison Stewart, The Atlantic.

A fabulous panel. Natalia Oberti Noguera CEO of Pipeline Angels had a lot of great points to make. I especially liked: “When you see minorities leading the discussions on diversity that’s when we’ve made progress.” [Was she describing the panel?!].

- Stephanie Lampkin told a story of how she taught herself programming as a teenager, studied engineering at Stanford university, post-grad at MIT and was told by Silicon Valley firms she wasn’t technical enough. She started a company so that she could employ her own technical skills. [Pipeline is not an excuse.]

- Tom McLeod shared funny stories of his look being accepted in the mainstream business world yet he is a black man. He understands what makes people comfortable.

- Tariq Meyers spoke about needing to recognize 400 years of American history and how that legacy affects people in the office.

- Aubrey Blanche said she was fed up with the word diversity and that people kept telling her that they were not diverse enough. She said an individual cannot be diverse. However, she did admit to being a “secret Mexican” as if to explain her mainstream look.

[Good point that diversity is found in teams and not individuals. But each of the“ diversity” executives from various companies at the conference was clearly representative of at least one minority, and sometimes more. Employers are clearly choosing people for the job that look diverse.]

Foremski’s Take: The conversation on inclusivity is a tough one and it is a necessarily long one because education and cultural change are hard to speed up.

But also, the conversation needs to add additional dimensions. There was no discussion of class — the social-economic status of job applicants is important.

The subject of class was color-coded but not directly addressed at the conference. When people spoke about minorities, people of color, and other terms they referred to social-economic issues but not directly. Words matter and it matters in understanding why there is a problem of diversity in tech companies.

Tech recruiters hunt in the talent pools of their class environments because they have none other.

If class is not discussed in the context of diversity there will be problems later.

A tech company might look diverse — with Chinese, Indian, African and Argentine software engineers and they might represent a rainbow skin-colors and countries. But they all come from the same class — an international class of privilege. What diversity can be found from their shared experience of private schools and the same middle class values?

Recognition of economic classes and the measure of social mobility is important in understanding the lack of progress on inclusivity in tech.

The Atlantic warns of backlash against more diversity in tech

Rent the Runway CEO: Gender discrimination is larger workplace issue than sexual harassment

Jennifer Hyman, CEO of Rent the Runway clothing service said that she was the victim of sexual harassment but that gender discrimination is the larger issue and it’s not being addressed.

Hyman was speaking to 200 female startup CEOs at the Project Entrepreneur Summit in San Francisco.  The conference had to turn away more than 500 applicants.  

Project Entrepreneur is a joint venture between Rent the Runway and financial services giant UBS with the goal of creating a pipeline of highly effective female startup CEOs with the skills to build fast growing companies. 

Sexual harassment can happen at anytime, she said. “It happened once when I had already raised $8m and I had revenues. He then went to my board and tried to get me fired. He tried to destroy me and my business.”

She had immediately reported the incident to her board. “I was lucky in that I had great relations with my board and they supported me completely.”

She advised female CEOs to speak about such incidents from the very beginning. They should not feel trapped or alone. She said that gender discrimination is the larger issue and urged her audience to pay attention to gender diversity within their companies.

The gender pay gap is substantial and discrimination is found in the latest tech jobs. A report in 2016 from Glassdoor found that many tech jobs have wider gender pay discrimination than other professions. 

She said that male CEOs are treated with more respect by investors and by their own staff.  And male CEOs have a greater margin to make mistakes. She also criticized the lack of female visionaries quoted in the media. 

Some organizations such as Silicon Valley Forum do name female visionaries in their annual awards which honor four recipients. Over the 20 year history of the SVForum Visionary Awards the majority have been male but in 2017 the majority were female.

Three women were named a 2017 Visionary: Linda Rottenberg – CEO and Founder of Endeavor; Neri Oxman professor at MIT’s Media Lab; Megan Smith U.S. CTO. The fourth is Steve Jurvetson partner at venture firm DFJ. 

Hyman co-founded Rent the Runway with Jennifer Fleiss and launched in November 2009. The company has funding of more than $176 million — the latest Series E raised $60 million in December 2016 followed $60 million in December 2014.

Project Entrepreneur organizes half-day conferences for female founders of very early startups. They are taught many skills such as: how to pitch their ideas; the metrics that investors want to see; how to recruit a board of directors. Most of the teaching is done by female executives. 

The organization also hosts a startup competition with 200 applicants and five winners offered $10,000 each and a five-week intensive accelerator program in New York City in April.  Application deadline is November 27 and the startups must have one woman founder, be at least 50% female-owned with less than $100,000 in funding.

- - -

Please see: Big jump in women on tech company boards

Crunchies Awards for Silicon Valley startups focus on diversity

Large gender bias in US tech salaries reports Glassdoor

Chelsea Peretti (above) a comedic actress, introduced the 10th Annual Crunchies — awards celebrating startups and VCs in Silicon Valley — and managed some decent jokes poking fun at the techie audience and coming up with some great app ideas. (The final one is a killer app — people will need full-cycle tracking of nutrients to create total body datasets. See my video here.)

Diversity was once again the bold theme of the event as seen in the careful selections of the nominees for the awards. Time and again the stage was filled with winners: startup teams of mixed color and gender. 

People viewing from outside Silicon Valley would be tremendously impressed that our young startups are so progressive and clearly want to build the future the right way.

But the staged diversity of the Crunchies is far removed from actual reality — the audience of young techies and VCs looks nothing like them. Startup teams continue to be predominately: male, white/Asian; from privileged backgrounds.

The Crunchies are clearly trying to push things forward in the right direction and it takes time. The message needs to be repeated many times.

Soon the startups will get a clue: if you want to be nominated to win a Crunchie you’d better show significant diversity in your teams.

The TJ Miller effect...

The Crunchies has changed a lot since 2015 following a stunning performance from TJ Miller, a standup comedian and one of the actors in HBO's Silicon Valley sitcom. During a long evening of superb improv with the audience he called someone a "bitch." It was scandalous. It was disruptive. It shocked an audience more comfortable with unspoken workplace misogyny.

The organizers apologized and since then they bend over backwards, and they would bend even further if they could, to present an awards show that is all about diversity in capital letters and in bold typeface but without spelling it out because that would be tedious.

The Crunchies show highly diverse startup teams being successful. Success at winning awards equates with likely future success in business.

Monkey see monkey do. The Crunchies award consists of a black monkey holding a stick. The message will eventually get through.

It was a dark and stormy night...

I've been to nearly every Crunchies but these last two have attracted smaller numbers of key people. I would normally run into a lot of high level contacts, a lot of top Silicon Valley CEOs would show up -- but now they don't -- with the exception of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, who was presenting an award.

Lots of no-shows: Michael Arrington, the co-founder of the Crunchies, always presents an award with sidekick GigaOM founder Om Malik, also absent.

There were a hundred or so empty seats in the front rows reserved for extra important people who didn't turn up.

It might have been the weather. Or it might be that the new format of the Crunchies is not compelling enough for Silicon Valley’s A-list; or maybe the Crunchies are running out of steam.

Ten years ago the Crunchies held an electric energy and celebrated scrappy startups and unique thinkers. The Crunchies will have a much brighter future if it can recapture some its past.

- - -

And the winners of the 10th Annual Crunchies are... | TechCrunch

The Crunchies' Bitchgate: High Horses With Fake Unicorn Horns Ignore Decades Of Silicon Valley Misogyny -SVW

 Chelsea Peretti introduction: https://youtu.be/jpSH6HS45EI

And the winners of the 10th Annual Crunchies are… | TechCrunch

The number of women on the boards of tech companies has more than tripled since 2013 according to analysis of 100 public technology companies by Redfin, a national real estate brokerage.

The study says that tech company boards began to change because of a newspaper story. The New York Times pointed out that Twitter, which was preparing to go public in 2013, had an all-male board.

Over the past three years, tech companies filing for an IPO have tripled the number of women appointed to their boards. The national average is one woman for every six men.

But in the space of three years, this ratio for the technology industry changed threefold, to one woman for every two men: not at parity, but evidence that the technology industry's gender diversity can increase significantly.

In a blog post, Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO, and Bridget Frey, Redfin's CTO, argue that even though women will continue to be in the minority on boards, their influence will be larger than their numbers.

It's worth noting that the presence of just one different perspective affects a group's decision-making. This effect, known as a "panel effect," is well-established ... the influence of the member in the minority is strong: what matters is just hearing another point of view.

They point out that, "Boards hire CEOs, set executive pay, investigate high-level discrimination complaints and approve executive promotions."

The rise in diverse appointments could re-shape an entire generation of new businesses in profound ways

Read about Redfin's recent appointment of board directors Julie Bornstein and Robert Bass.

How to Triple the Number of Women Appointed to Boards in Three Years - @Redfin

Robert Hohman, CEO of  Glassdoor announces gender pay gap study at Stanford University

Many US tech jobs show high levels of gender pay discrimination, well above other professions reports online jobs site Glassdoor in a study of more than 500,000 salaries.

The report listed the widest gender pay gap as 28% for computer programmer, 16% for game artists, 15% for information security specialists, 11% for software architects, and 10% for SEO strategist. A further 11 jobs were singled out for gender pay gaps, the lowest 2% for hardware engineers.

For 12 of the 16 job titles the gender gap was well above the national average across all types of jobs — highlighting the size gender pay gap in tech jobs.

Andrew Chamberlain, Chief Economist for Glassdoor said,"The majority of the tech roles we examined for this analysis had male-female pay gaps well above the U.S. average--even after we accounted for differences in age, education, experience, and other important factors."

Chamberlain could give no explanation for why the gender gap exists in tech jobs.

"While there is no one simple solution to the gender pay gap in tech, we are committed to working to close the gender pay gap through greater pay transparency."

Chamberlain points to a welcome overall trend: the gender pay gap has narrowed from 41% in the 1950s to to 24% today.

Glassdoor is encouraging employers to use its statistical models on their payroll data to compare "apples-with-apples" and uncover any gender bias. The statistical models have been refined to account for many job factors such as experience, seniority, etc so that gender is the only factor left.

Foremski’s Take: What's missing from the data is the numbers of females and males in each job. Gender bias is not just seen in salary data but also in hiring levels. It would be interesting to see those numbers and it would certainly be compatible with Glassdoor's campaigns for greater workplace transparency.

But creating diversity in the workplace is difficult because employers legally cannot hire based on any qualities of diversity such as color, gender, sexual preference, etc. Hiring the best person for the job is the only legal requirement.

Is it OK to use the word “Guys”  when addressing a mixed gender group of colleagues? Should women celebrate their feminine qualities or seek to avoid those stereotypes entirely at work?

These were some of the things discussed at a recent event, “The Gender Gap and How to Defeat It,” organized by Thomson Reuters and hosted by Blurb, a self—publishing startup in San Francisco. It featured a panel of younger and older women working in the tech sector and primarily aimed at an audience of young women students preparing to enter the workplace.  

The panelists represented a wide range of experiences of women in tech: Sarah Granger, author and consultant; Rachael O’Meara, sales executive at Google; Judith Basler, Director of Project Management at Blurb; Marine Leroux Thibault, Head of User Experience Design at Thomson Reuters; Donna Boyer, Director of Product at Airbnb; Nono Guimbi, Senior Software Engineer at Jawbone; Kelly Currier, Director Agile Delivery at Salesforce; Nancy Dickenson, consultant. More information on the speakers is here. 

Here are some of my notes from the panel discussion:

- Women can manage teams of programmers without having to be coders themselves, said one of the panelists. But they do need to have some knowledge of the technology in order to give the right support to the engineers.

- Women managers tend to look at the psychology of the teams and how to ensure everyone works well together. Some try to “be human” and bring feminine values into the workplace. But this doesn’t mean you have to bring home-baked cookies to the office or feel pressure to clean up after meetings, etc. Don’t reinforce stereotypes. A woman in the audience said she did not want feminine qualities in the workplace and said she felt pressure to fulfill some of the social stereotypes.

- Just by being the only women in a room can change things for the better. Be authentic. 

- Fear was discussed. There were stories of overcoming self-doubt and succeeding. Am I good enough? Do I measure up?  Often, women will only apply for a job if they think they fulfill all the qualifications. Advice: Look at the job description as a wish list and still apply for the job (men will apply for jobs when they meet just 60% of the qualifications). 

- Some panelists wished for more feedback and mentoring when they were younger because it would have helped their careers and avoid common mistakes. 

- Recognition is important but women should ask for power in the workplace as they progress in their careers because that means they will be able to get things done, such as hire more women. Nothing will change unless you make the change happen and for that you need power. 

- Ask for help. You don’t have to know all the answers at work. Trust yourself.

- Not every tech company is the same. When looking for a job try to visit the company and see “what does it feel like?”

- Women who aren’t software engineers can still work in the tech industry in jobs such as product managers, leading teams of specialists. They are good with people. 

- A man asked, what are the expectations of men in the workplace? He was told to listen, to take part in the conversation over gender inequality. And to watch language at work. An audience member objected to the word “Guys” when used at work and referring to a mixed group. 

- There has to be more women to choose from in the hiring pool because startups want to hire the best they can find regardless of gender.

- A frustration with slow progress. Dialog on workplace issues is not enough, there must be a concerted push for narrowing the gender gap otherwise change will be too slow.

It was an excellent panel discussion and I almost felt like a fly on the wall and listening to a frank discussion between the panelists and the audience on the issues they face as women in the workplace and how they can best support each other.

Thomson Reuters and Blurb are hosting a special evening Tuesday June 28 in San Francisco, focused on the topic: Empowering women to work in technology.

Technology is everywhere around us and we all use it, both men and women equally. Yet if men build all the technology, then women’s needs won’t be considered through technology. We need both men and women to build the technical future of our world. But "I'm not technical", you say? What happens when we go on maternity leave? How do women survive the male dominated tech world? This event will answer all those questions and inspire the most non-technical minded woman to consider a tech job.

There will be a screening of the documentary CODE: DEBUGGING THE GENDER GAP. 

A panel discussion:

…with accomplished women leaders from Airbnb, Salesforce, Blurb, Jawbone and consultants. These amazing women will demystify the diversity of tech jobs and uncover various inspiring aspects of their career in technology: what inspired them to work in technology, obstacles they faced in their careers (like maternity), and their advice to young women.

Blurb Inc.
850 California Street @ Kearny
Suite 300
6-9pm

More info here.

PRWeek’s Lindsay Stein reports that Finn Partners has acquired Horn Group for an undisclosed sum to boost its tech practice.

After more than two decades in the business, Horn said she started thinking about selling, and Finn Partners was attractive because of its fresh thinking, independent stature, and culture. She noted that the deal will also expand its reach both in terms of geography and services. Horn’s security software clients may be interested in Finn Partners’ lobbying practice in Washington, DC, for example.

In 2014, Finn had 370 staffers worldwide and more than $52 million in global billings. Following the Horn acquisition, the agency will have about $70 million in annual fees and 500 employees.

Finn Partners boosts tech practice with Horn Group acquisition | PR Week

Foremski’s Take: Sabrina Horn is one of San Francisco’s top PR industry mavens, (even though she has been spending most of her time in New York these past few years). I’ve worked with Horn Group’s San Francisco teams on many stories over the past 15 years. 

Horn Group always had interesting clients and interesting people working there. I remember with fondness their old office space on Howard Street where I shot a video of a pilot for a show called “Fridays with Foremski.”  

And it is where I met BrightIdea, one of my favorite San Francisco startups, which started life in the basement of Horn Group’s office.  BrightIdea CEO Matt Greeley and his Head of Culture Michelle would organize fabulous monthly Friday Salons which became unmissable and where I made many good friends. 

The gender barrier in PR…

There’s still a few independent PR firms left in San Francisco and the majority are run by women (exceptions include Todd Defren’s Shift Communications - (Todd recently shifted to San Francisco from Boston). These women entrepreneurs have been very successful in the PR industry building sizable businesses of usually around 100 to 150 staff. Some have been acquired such as Outcast Communications by publicly traded Next15.  

But the world is dominated by much larger PR firms such as Edelman, privately held; and giant publicly traded conglomerates such as WPP, Omnicom and Publicis that each own dozens of big PR firms such as Weber Shandwick, etc.  And there’s very few women executives at senior levels in these larger PR organizations. 

There clearly is a barrier here that prevents successful women business leaders — such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s many women PR firm founders — to move up into large PR organizations despite their evident success in running their own business groups for many years through good times and bad.

Why aren’t those formidable business skills being recognized within the senior executive ranks of the PR industry’s largest firms? 

Updated: Aarti Shah at Holmes Report published a great report into this barrier to female PR execs earlier this year: Why Aren't There More Female CEOs In PR?

Among the 250 firms on the list — which spans agencies as big as $750m in fee income to those as small as $3m — 75 have at least one woman in its top post. This number, however, dwindles further when looking only at firms with revenue of more than $100m. 

 

 

SVForum CEO Adiba Barney.

This upcoming SVForum event comes at an excellent time for the gender discussion in Silicon Valley. Sooner than later, Silicon Valley investors and startups will realize that it is silly to compete on a global scale with one arm tied behind your back. 

Here's details on SVForum's March 7 Women in Tech Festival at Hewlett-Packard's Sunnyvale campus with the theme "Empowering Women, Enhancing the World":

The Festival will be a one-day celebration of companies and organizations that are dedicated to supporting women's efforts in STEM fields and entrepreneurship. Women from across the Silicon Valley technology ecosystem will be featured in keynotes, panels, and mentorship workshops; panelists will include leading CEOs, advisors, directors, technologists, and journalists from across Silicon Valley.

Keynote speakers will be Dr. Telle Whitney, President and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute, and Ingrid Vanderveldt, Chairman and CEO of EBW2020.

"We could not be more excited to be hosting the Festival," stated SVForum CEO Adiba Barney. "The future success of the startup ecosystem--and by extension, the rest of the world--depends on creating an environment where we encourage achievers, thinkers, and dreamers. The Festival will be dedicated to celebrating those bright, amazing women who have led the way, and encourage and support those who wish to create new pathways of their own."

"I'm looking forward to speaking at the Women in Tech Festival," said Dr. Telle Whitney, President and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute. "It's exciting to join forces with another nonprofit institution to build momentum and provide encouragement for women in tech and computing--especially those in leadership positions."

"I'm looking forward to both attending and speaking at the Women in Tech Festival," said closing keynote Ingrid Vanderveldt, Chairman and CEO of EBW2020. "My journey to Empower a Billion Women by 2020 has led me to connect with women in many different capacities, countries and areas. It's exciting to meet and share that goal with a new audience--I hope to inspire and to BE inspired!"

The Festival will also highlight the careers of women who have created a dynamic example of leadership and innovation, and provide education and inspiration for women who are on their way--or just starting out. All are welcome to attend. 

SVForum's Women in Tech Festival will open for registration at 8:00am, and conclude at 7:00pm with a cocktail and networking hour. Tickets and demo tables are on sale on the event page.

Those who are interested in sponsoring the conference, speaking, or joining a panel may email a bio and a list of past events to SVForum's Director of Programs Sepideh Nasiri (sepideh@svforum.org).

About SVForum
For over 30 years, SVForum has fostered innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in Silicon Valley. We function as a center of knowledge and connections, covering everything from the latest tech trends to the startup and investment ecosystem. We have a long history of creating successful events, programs and conferences that educate, train, inspire, and connect technologists, entrepreneurs, corporates, investors, innovation and startup hubs, and students--in Silicon Valley, throughout the U.S., and globally. We organize about 150 different activities per year, have over 20,000 subscribers/users, and work with over 40 countries worldwide.

The writers at Intel Free Press have prepared a fascinating profile of Ramune Nagisetty, one of Intel's top engineers. She's developing wearables with abilities for emotional communications. [It's designed not just for men.] 

By Intel Free Press

Ramune Nagisetty is a principal engineer within Intel Labs designing wearables that monitor biometrics as well as provide an emotional connection to others. 

Q: What are you working on?

Ramune Nagisetty: For the last couple of years, I have been specifically focused on wearable technology. When I say wearable, I’m talking about wrist-worn form factors and also things like rings and badges.

I’m starting a new project that has to do with maintaining an emotional connection between people through wearables. Every time technology has evolved, one of the first usages for technology has been for people to communicate with each other. 

That’s true whether we are talking about people writing letters and sending them across the country using the Pony Express, to sending telegrams, then telephones allowed people to stay in touch and communicate, and then came smartphones, and we can communicate using videos and more than just words. 

The next step is to actually be able to use wearables to allow people to be continuously connected.

Wearables that are being created for health and fitness can also be used for certain types of emotional connection as well because a lot of our emotions actually manifest themselves through different types of biometric signals.

We are just on the brink of a whole new set of usage models related to wearables. In the world of wearables, I don’t expect or want a wrist-worn wearable to do what my phone does, just like I don’t want my phone to do what my laptop does. All of these things have their distinct advantages.

Question: Why did you become an engineer?

My mother is an engineer. I was born in the former Soviet Union in Moscow and my mother is Lithuanian. My mother has a master’s degree in physics from Moscow State University. She also has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toledo. And her third master’s degree is in computer science, more specifically in artificial intelligence, and she got that while she was working as a full-time engineer at Ford.

My mom had two kids, three master’s degrees and a full-time career, and we lived 75 miles away from Detroit so she also commuted 150 miles a day. So if you want to talk about where you can find inspiration for hard work and being super-motivated, it’s not too far. This person, my mother, did all of this.

I think what is important is that in the former Soviet Union, women were considered to be equal in the workforce. Women in engineering, women in construction and women in all sorts of different fields – that have taken longer here for women to break into – in the 1950s, women were already breaking into those areas in the Soviet Union.

My father is a math professor and taught at the University of Toledo. And so between having a mother as an engineer and father who’s a mathematician, it seemed pretty obvious that going into engineering would be a possibility.

I wasn’t that interested in doing what my parents wanted me to do so I was more interested in things like architecture and philosophy. My parents basically said they would not appreciate it that much, and if I wanted to study something besides engineering, I would have to come home and go to community college.

Q: What was your first job?

I pumped gas in high school. I was one of those people wearing the Standard Oil blue jumper, washing your windshield, checking your oil and tires, and pumping your gas.

Q: What turned you on to engineering?

I actually didn’t like the course work for engineering that much. But what I found was that when I got my first summer internship, and I worked as an intern at a company called Chicago Laser Systems, it changed everything.

All of a sudden I was doing real hands-on work, I could see my results. It turned out that getting out of the classroom and into the more hands-on internship situations was a tipping point for me when I realized that I actually really liked engineering. I liked doing hands-on work; I liked seeing results.

I studied general electrical engineering, and that is how I got my first job at IBM in Essex Junction, Vermont. And that was also really eye-opening because having a general purpose engineering degree is one thing, and then going into the workforce, where it’s a very specific type of work, required a lot of learning as well.

What I did at IBM was work on device characterization, essentially characterizing transistors — that’s pretty specific — and I didn’t have that much training or theoretical background from college in that area, and so what I found was that after two years at IBM, I wanted to go to graduate school to get a better theoretical understanding of transistors. So I went to UC Berkeley and got my masters in electrical engineering there; my specialization was in transistor device physics.

Q: How did you get your job at Intel?

Intel was recruiting on campus for this thing called the Rotation Engineering Program and I was offered a position on the spot.

I started in the rotation program in New Mexico, and I worked three different rotations there. And when I took my final placement, my goal was to actually work on the leading-edge transistor technology development and that happens in Hillsboro, Oregon. Hillsboro is the epicenter of world-class technology development in the entire world, as far as I’m concerned.

I went to a conference called the IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting), and I met up, just per chance, with a bunch of folks from Intel in Hillsboro and explained that I was looking for my final placement. They were really interested in me because of my background in transistor device physics.

Q: How would you describe your time at Intel?

I have had three main phases in my career [at Intel]. The first one was working in logic technology development [LTD] in the Technology and Manufacturing Group [TMG]. In this phase, I did device characterization where I delivered several process technology nodes – 65 nm, 90 nm, 130 nm, 180 nm.

For 65 nm, I was the lead technology development engineer. I have patents in the area of high-performance transistors related to strained silicon.

Then I decided I wanted to see what else Intel does, I wanted to understand more about what makes products compelling and successful.

It was actually pretty difficult to leave technology development because I was really an expert in that area…but I really wanted to explore the new frontiers outside of transistor technology development.

So I went to Intel Labs in 2006, and I started running strategic technology programs.

These technology programs reported straight up into Intel’s executive management. It was kind of the opposite of transistor technology development because transistors are essentially very small, and you have to be very detail-oriented — the level you are looking at is the atomic level. And then you go to strategic technology programs, and you are essentially on the complete flip side, and you are talking more about things in systems integration and technology roadmaps and the future.

You are all of a sudden going from the carpet to the sky. I was exposed more to the long-term strategy, which was a very important phase of my career.

Q: What about women in technology?

I went to university into engineering school and it was always dominated by men and there weren’t very many women, but it never actually bothered me at all. It seems like if you have grown up this way, you don’t feel like you don’t belong because this is how it’s always been.

Until eight years ago, I didn’t really do a lot with women in technology and STEM because I always felt like these programs were for somebody else and that they weren’t really for me. I didn’t really understand the benefit of those programs.

About eight years ago, we had our first Women’s Principal Engineer Forum at Intel, and I was invited to attend this event even though I wasn’t yet a principal engineer.

I actually wasn’t planning to go, I just thought, “I don’t really need that,” but what happened was that Kelin Kuhn (below) was actually the person who sent me an email and copied tons of people on it saying, “these are the people I want speaking for the Women’s Principal Engineers Forum,” and she had this list of speakers and I was one of them.

I think Kelin is the smartest person I’ve ever met, and if she tells me that I’m going to be a speaker at this forum, well I’m going to the forum and I’m going to do what she tells me to do.

I had a chance to present work that I had been doing for a long time that I was really an expert in, but for the most part, it had always been presented at conferences by people other than myself, people who were more senior, people who were recognized as spokespersons for Intel.

So I really never had that chance to stand up and talk the data that I had been working on for a long time. I had this chance to get up and speak and what I found was that it was great!It was great to get that feeling that I actually am more than capable of speaking to this information; and this opportunity gave me some insight into how valuable that is.

I came back from the Intel Women's Principal Engineer (PE) Forum that first year and I thought, “you know what, I wonder if I should be a PE?”  

I went down the path to become a principal engineer, but it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had that opportunity to present at the [Women’s Principal Engineer] Forum. It gives you the courage to take that next step.

 

What I discovered was that these types of events are actually really important. And the other thing is, it’s really important to establish a network of women that can give you support when things aren’t going so well because a lot of times when things aren’t going so well there aren’t going to be other people who are going to relate to what you are going through.

 

One of the things I do tell people at these events if you can come away with one new friend…who can relate to the challenges you face because that friend will be someone you can rely on when things get tough.

I have attended every single Women’s Principal Engineer and Fellows Forum since that first year, and I work with anybody who wants to have any type of mentoring in their career.

Q: What advice do you have for people thinking about entering engineering?

There is something there about making connections between technology and engineering and the things that you love that sometimes doesn’t really come through when it is not presented in a way that you can understand.

And that same kind of comparison about finding a music teacher who can teach you according to how you would like to learn or how you would best learn is important. That same analogy works when you are trying to connect people with technology and engineering — finding ways to present these concepts is important for those students to grasp.

In my education, the most important thing has always been the teacher, and I can say for a fact that the teachers who resonated with me had the biggest impact on my career and that’s going to be true whether we are talking about teachers or role models, especially nowadays when technology is becoming so personal.

When they realize that can create things that are useful and that have a special place in their lives, then you are connecting the technology side with the human side with the emotional side. And when I think you can make those connections, you will appeal to a much larger base of people, including girls and women, in terms of studying engineering.

I do think that having a more diverse group of people, pursuing engineering, will result in more creative uses and solutions. You can have a lifetime career and never get bored. To encourage not just girls and women, but all sorts of people from all sorts of diverse backgrounds, to pursue engineering I think is a good thing.

It’s important to realize that engineering IS a creative outlet. The more that people can realize that it is creative, I think the more interested they’ll be in pursuing engineering.

Q: You starting playing music recently, what prompted you to do so?

I’ve always really enjoyed music, my brother is a professional musician, so I have been surrounded by music my whole life, but I never really had a talent or proclivity for it.

About five years ago, it was Presidents Day weekend, I was really bored, to tell you the truth, a little bit bored with my life. I felt like I had achieved a lot of things, I had a really wonderful career, a wonderful home life and husband, and had achieved a lot of those things that we strive for in our lives.

On a whim, I went to a guitar store with a friend and picked up an electric guitar. Within a few months, I was writing my own songs.

My first teacher wasn’t the right teacher. What I think that is really important and actually what makes a really good teacher is finding the way to teach that individual. Certain people are going to learn theoretically and other people will want to learn songs and mostly that’s what I do.

Some people are much more intuitive, some people will learn by seeing and reading music, some by hearing music. And so I think a really good teacher is actually one that can adjust their teaching style to what the student’s learning style is.

Q: What’s your favorite song?

I think, “Mirror” [by the Velvet Underground] is a great song that I’ll cover someday. And also, it ties into the importance of being able to relate to role models and teachers.

“I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.”

Cromwell Schubarth reports on Silicon Valley Business Journal that comedian TJ Miller won't be coming back next year as MC for The Crunchies awards following complaints about his "bitch" remark.

Miller started the show edgy and then went headlong over the edge after getting into a verbal joust with Uber founder Travis Kalanick's date, during which he called her a "bitch" more than once. Gabi Holzwarth, Kalanick's date, forgave Miller in a tweet right after the show.

Schubarth pointed to a far more troubling event in 2013 at a Techcrunch hackathon.

One of the pitches at that hackathon involved an app concept built around men staring at women's breasts. Another involved a guy simulating masturbation during his pitch.

Foremski's Take: TJ Miller played the role of a court jester, with daring spontaneity and many very funny lines. Court jesters have traditionally played a valuable role in keeping the high and mighty humble and connected with reality. 

He even told the audience he was their court jester! He mimicked an imaginary powerful VC saying, "That tubby guy in that Silicon Valley show, he can be our court jester. Bring him. Bring him!"

Court jesters are allowed to say things no one else is allowed to say.

But it takes maturity and self-awareness to appreciate the work of a court jester. Instead, we saw the thin-skinned Twitterati of Silicon Valley show-off their recently discovered sense of moral outrage against misogyny, in Miller's use of "bitch."

TC - train crash

Without Miller, the entire evening would have been a dull and endless experience. There was very little energy in the room or "startup" enthusiasm during the awards presentations.

Several companies such as Spotify have been around for nearly a decade and have already won prior Crunchies, yet they were still nominated for various awards as if there weren't any new startups to celebrate.

People can blame Miller for the "train crash" but he wasn't in charge of a very lackluster event, an event that he actually helped elevate with an edgy, bold, and risky performance. You'd think Silicon Valley would applaud risk.  

And the over-reaction to the momentary use of "bitch" by a comedian displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness by Silicon Valley to its own decades-long misogyny, which continues to flourish well into the digital twenty-first century.

It's high time for Silicon Valley to get off its high horse with its fake unicorn horn, and its opportunistic outrage at Miller, and join the modern world when it comes to including women in its ventures. It's ludicrous for Silicon Valley to ignore such a valuable resource --it's as if it were trying to compete on a global scale with one hand tied behind its back.

- - -

Photos from the event at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco:

The Crunchies co-founder Mike Arrington reluctantly banters with Om Malik of GigaOm, which pulled out as a sponsor this year.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick andTechcrunch UK Editor Mike Butcher.

Larger than life Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff wins a well deserved "CEO of the Year" for his philanthropic work.

Lots of people waiting to pose with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. 

Ben Parr shows-off his hot-off-the- press book "Captivology."

I'm with Denise Terry, co-founder and CEO of EmbraceHerHealth.com, who came up to me to express her support for my work as a journalist in Silicon Valley. This is the only kind of metrics that I pay attention to. A personal expression of support means far more to me than I can say in words and encourages me to be bold in tackling important Silicon Valley topics. Thank you Denise!

It's always great to see diversity at work in Silicon Valley. On Tuesday, January 20 VLAB will present an evening event focused on young women entrepreneurs.

[I wonder why the age limit? Ageism is another aspect of the diversity story that is very real in Silicon Valley.]  Here are the details of the Stanford VLAB event:

This year's panel, to be moderated by Fran Maier, Founder of TRUSTe, will include the following young innovators:

- Alex Meliones, Co-Founder & Chief Creative and Marketing at BitWall, a SaaS that enables digital publishers to generate revenue and engage socially with their readers. After attending many hackathons, Alex and a group of entrepreneurs hosted their own hackathon at Tim Draper's Hero City in November of 2014. They gave out nearly $20,000 in total prizes and made a donation to the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula.

- Brienne Ghafourifar, Co-Founder at Entefy, a Palo Alto tech startup in the digital communication and artificial intelligence space. Brienne is a 19-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur on a mission to radically transform the way technology helps people interact. She set a world record at age 17 by becoming the youngest college graduate to raise $1 million in venture funding; that figure has since grown to more than $5 million.

- Lisa Falzone, CEO at Revel, an iPad POS company. Lisa has led her Silicon Valley startup to profitability in just a year and transformed the "old school" POS ways.

- Nanxi Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Enplug, a Los Angeles company that builds the industry-leading software for digital displays in malls, restaurants, and retail stores. In college, Nanxi founded Nanoly Bioscience, which develops polymers that enable vaccines to survive without refrigeration. Nanxi is a current board member.

We're reaching out to you to see if you could kindly share this upcoming event with other members in your network. The event is expected to draw 400+ attendees and will be an excellent opportunity to connect with other like-minded disruptive innovators and technologists.

Please click on the following link to register for the event.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015
6:00 pm - Registration, Networking Reception & Demos
7:00 pm - Panel Discussion (Q&A)

Stanford GSB: Cemex Auditorium at the Knight Management Center
655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305-7298

VLAB 2015 Young Women Entrepreneurs Event Committee
MIT Enterprise Forum Bay Area Chapter at Stanford University

San Francisco's Victoria Theatre hosts two performances of the critically acclaimed one-woman show: Manya: The Living History of Marie Curie. 

I'll be there for the Sunday performance! There is a 20% off code for SVW readers: "polonium" http://mariecuriesf.eventbrite.com/

She is a the first person to win two Nobel prizes and a fabulous example to students of achieving the heights of the scientific profession from very humble beginnings.  

More at Younoodle.

Salon host Vanessa Camones reaches for the microphone...

Earlier this week the conversations at the SF Curators Media Salon focused on the topic of women in tech. Vanessa Camones and her team at theMIX Agency hosted the event and organized the speakers: Julie Ann Horvath of GitHub fame; Collen Taylor from Techcrunch, Leah Hunter from Fast Company, Sepideh Nasiri from Women 2.0, and Jennifer Lankford from Orchestrate.io.

SF Creators Salons are less about podiums and more about peers, so the conversation moved quickly around the room. It was great to hear women talking about these issues and to hear stories of workplace behaviors that should be cast into the history books of the twentieth century and not 2014 — well into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

I was astounded by some of the criticism male management had leveled against women: Too colorful, too passionate, too girly.

At times I felt like a fly on the wall and happy to be such a creature because I was hearing real things said openly and  passionately. It was a conversation that other men should hear because it was a real talk about workplace issues between women of many ages, there was about four decades of workplace experiences being shared. 

Foremski's Take

 I've worked in very male dominated workplaces and also in ones where it changed from very male to having more female bosses and it became a much better place, more cooperative and collegial. 

It's important to start startups off on the right track because culture is very difficult to change further along. Sometimes people are unaware that their behavior is making women co-workers uncomfortable and it's hard for new staff members to speak up, or stand up for themselves. 

I've noticed that there is a tipping point when there is a change in the group culture to a more egalitarian and gender respectful environment. It might be just 30% women or even less, but you can feel the change.

And when there are enough women around it makes it easier to stand up and not feel they are a lone female voice and self-consciously self-censoring themselves to avoid office stereotypes.

I'm confident Silicon Valley startups will have far more female co-founders and team members within the next two years simply because it makes very good business sense. Why compete with one hand tied behind your back? Companies with large gender and ethnic diversity are more successful. Original ideas come from original experiences. 

Don't lean in..stand up!

I encourage women in the workplace to stand up rather than lean-in or back. It's important to flag creepy behaviors or discriminatory practices in the workplace as soon as you see them. Tech company management isn't evil but it is autistic in character, it needs help in knowing what is acceptable social behavior and the workplace is where social behavior matters the most.

I know that many startup teams would love to have more women but they don't know that many in the first place and your network is where your team recruits. There's no conspiracy against women in tech but there is a lack of process or a collective goal in improving the gender ratio. There should be a Golden Ratio" of diversity for companies to aspire to, if someone can define such a thing.

There should certainly be a basic manifesto of work office conduct and conflict resolution that every startup could adopt from the beginning. Startup teams need off-the-shelf solutions, guidebooks for building happy and productive teams, they shouldn't have to try to figure it out themselves, hit-or-miss. 

Ladies, I encourage you to stand up! And speak up! And don't worry about being to colorful, too passionate, or too girly in the workplace — the gentlemen will respect you for it and the whole team will be the richer for it. 

- - -

Let me know if you would like to host a future SF Creators Media Salon. A big thanks to present and prior hosts theMixAgency, InPowered, Impress Labs.

- - -

James Au has posted a great account of the evening's conversations here: 

Julie Ann Horvath (a programmer with &yet but formerly with GitHub, which she left due to an atmosphere of sexism and intimidation), interviewed via live video byTechCrunch's Colleen Taylor:

 

Julie Ann Horvath on Leaving GitHub -- and What It Taught Her

 

Recapping her experience at GitHub, Julie says: "For a long time, I tried to avoid the Twitter/feminist conversation and just build things." But she quickly realized that she'd experienced sexism in tech and hadn't connected the dots -- "you get to the point where you can no longer ignore it." To the point where she couldn't even walk into the office: "I was kind of sick of the talk of hiring more women [at GitHub], yet refusing to provide the safe environments that women need."

 

Colleen notes that the conversation about the company revolved around the word "toxic", and Julie talks about that: "It's sort of Lord of the Flies... it's very high school.

Real Talk With Women in Tech - Highlights from theMIX agency's SF Creators Media Salon Panel — theMIX agency

Selena Larson at ReadWrite has an excellent report about the evening: 

At Tuesday evening’s “Real Talk With Women in Tech,” event in San Francisco, concerned women (and a handful of men) came together to discuss how both women and men can work together to empower female voices, and help balance the gender ratio in the technological workforce. 

At Last, Women In Technology Are Making Themselves Heard – ReadWrite

Here's some photos from the salon:

Above, a prior salon at Impress Labs in North Beach.

This month's salon is on the topic of women in tech and is hosted by Vanessa Camones, CEO of theMIX Agency in the Digital Garage on 717 Market Street, May 20 at 6pm.

It promises to be a feisty evening with Vanessa and her team organizing the panel. I'll be joining in from among the audience, collecting questions and comments. Here's the description:

With rising media attention focused on women in technology and gender inequalities in the workplace, it's easy to get the impression the tech community is an unwelcoming environment. We will discuss the experiences of women from all areas of the technology ecosystem. 

How has being seen as a "woman in tech" impacted their experiences in the workplace? 

Are the horror stories that make headlines causing us to overlook more subtle yet commonplace experiences of discrimination? 

And has the "Lean In" movement -- and its anti-movement "Lean Out" -- created an unnecessary divide? 

We'll have a panel discussion with women from across the tech community.

Here is the invite: SF Creators Media Salon presents: Real Talk With Women in Tech

Please let me know if your organization would like to host a future salon.

I had a fascinating conversation recently with Vivienne Ming, Chief Scientist at Gild, a San Francisco based company that scans the Internet to identify potentially great software engineers for their clients.

Finding good talent is incredibly hard especially software engineers but Gild says its algorithms can identify people with the right fit, in qualifications and also in cultural fit, sometimes in places where companies wouldn’t think of looking.

Gild weighs many factors: where a person went to school; their online contributions to Github and other online sites; where they are currently employed; and subtle factors such as the words they use to list and describe their skills.

One of the top software engineers at Gild was discovered when he was running a T-shirt business in Southern California, and teaching himself to write his own content management system on the side.

Ming has a doctorate in Psychology and Computational Neuroscience from Carnegie Mellon University. She’s convinced that given the right data it is possible find people with the right attributes to make a great employee, not just in software engineering, but also in a many other professions.

Gild has discovered some interesting factors in hiring engineers. One of the biggest is that where someone went to school matters very little after about three years after graduation. [This is something that Google recently revealed despite its long standing policy of hiring heavily from Stanford and MIT.]

Social climbing by algorithm…

Ming is super excited by something else that she has discovered, she believes the same approach can help lift people out of poverty and impact communities suffering from social and economic disadvantages. By focusing on kids early in their education, she believes her algorithms can greatly improve their chances of going to college, and landing a well paying job.

For example, she says that it’s not enough to identify bright kids. The problems with a lot of scholarships offered to economically disadvantaged kids is that they don’t take them.  

However, data shows that kids will accept scholarships if they know someone that has done the same. Thus pairing bright kids with older mentors in their communities that have successfully finished college helps to dramatically increase college attendance.

The data around kids and their education has tremendous utility, she says. It can help guide kids through their educational needs from an early age. It can also be used to help increase the number of women in software engineering and other professions, by starting early in the educational process.

While it might seem cold and cynical to trust an algorithm to judge kids so early in their lives, if the result is they productive and fulfilling lives, plus their example influences others in their communities, then that’s a very good thing.

Gild is potentially on the brink of a much more important story than helping Silicon Valley companies discover more Rails coders.

- - -

Here’s a description from an article by Katie Arnold-Ratliff on how Gild works: 

Ostensibly, the company is an HR consultancy, doing recruiting legwork for outfits in need of fresh blood. But at its core, Gild is a matchmaker, uniting programmers with the jobs that best fit their skills -- and, by extension, that best allow them to fulfill their potential. To find these people, Gild deploys sophisticated software to scour the Internet's open-source Web sites, like GitHub and SourceForge, where software engineers share computer code that's visible to anyone who cares to read it. In seconds Gild's program makes thousands of observations about that code, evaluating its idiosyncrasies to divine insights about its author. It also searches for ancillary information about each programmer -- via his LinkedIn page or Twitter account.

These data are plugged into the Gild algorithms; each tidbit, however small, is a valuable clue. If a software engineer tweets "I love celery," it's possible, if unlikely, that he's referring to the vegetable -- it's much more probable, Ming says, "that he's talking about Celery, the multiprocessing framework for Python, a popular programming language. And if he uses Celery, he almost certainly uses RabbitMQ or Lettuce, and if he uses those he's probably making Web apps using Flask or Django, and if he uses Django, he knows all about templating languages like Jinja... and that single tweet suddenly paints a rich picture of this person, in a way that listing 'Python' on a résumé would not."

One way is to increase the number of women students matched with mentors, which is the goal of a partnership between LinkedIn and MentorNet. They hope to have 40,000 students teamed with mentors over the next two years.

MentorNet has achieved a successful graduation rate of 92% of students completing STEM degrees -- double the national average. Half those students pursue jobs with their mentors’ companies, meaning that the tech industry now has a built in way to reach talented female tech grads…and start to close that gap.

More details can be found here: LinkedIn and MentorNet: A Partnership To Get More Women in STEM | Official LinkedIn Blog

On social media women are the majority:

The infographic shows that women not only use social media more often than men, but they use these sites in more ways. More women also use the top social media sites and they dominate the visual-type social websites, which are the fastest growing social networks today. No site establishes women’s dominance in social media more than Pinterest, where 33% of U.S. women online access Pinterest (for men it’s only 8%).

But more tellingly is how women lead the trend of accessing social media via mobile. Forty-six percent of women use their smartphones to check their social account versus 43% for men. Likewise, 32% of women use a tablet versus 20% of men for the same reason. Now juxtapose that to the Business Insider report saying 60% of social media time is spent on smartphones and tablets, and you’ll realize women will be setting the pace towards social mobiles.

What does this trend mean? Nothing much except for the fact that social media is now the top Internet activity, according to Business Insider. Americans spend an average of thirty-seven minutes daily on social media, and more than half of them are women.

This is well worth seeing. It's best described as a live historic TED talk from 1915 Paris. Marie Skłodowska-Curie  was the first to win two Nobel prizes. The performance by Susan Marie Frontczak is extraordinary with critics saying that she embodies the scientist in looks and in speech.

Madame Curie was the first European woman to earn a doctorate in the sciences; the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize (for the discovery of radioactivity); the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne; and the first person to receive a second Nobel Prize (a feat not to be repeated for another 50 years). Audiences witness the origins of scientific discoveries we now take for granted. They re-live the remarkable collaboration between husband and wife, Pierre and Marie, companion scientists.

This program honors the ethic of scientific altruism. Einstein said Marie Curie was "the only person to be uncorrupted by fame." In today's age of patents and litigation, the audience learns that the Curies declined to patent their methods, refused to bend their discoveries toward personal financial gain. Marie insisted that to profit from the discovery of radium would be "contrary to the scientific spirit."

This program honors the wife and mother, who felt more daunted by the chemistry of the kitchen than of the laboratory. As a single mother, Marie raised her two daughters from ages 16 months and 8 years, after the tragic death of her husband, Pierre. And it honors Manya's Polish heritage — much neglected not only now, but in her own life, to her own dismay. This program brings to light many of Marie's lesser-known contributions, both social and scientific — and the obstacles she faced along the way.

Marie Curie was, in turn, nervous and shy in public, obsessive about measurement, in denial of the dangers of working with radioactive materials, proud and possessive of her discoveries, yet generous to the extreme with the products of her work.

Marie Curie - Biographical

Earlier this year I visited the small museum dedicated to her life in Warsaw in the Old Town, close to where she grew up. 

I love this photo of the top people in science in 1927 -Institut International de Physique Solvay in Leopold Park. She's seated next to Plank, Lorenz and Einstein. Marie Curie certainly knew about the challenges of being a woman in a man's world. It's interesting to see that Silicon Valley continues to be a man's world. Scientific progress is not on the same fast track as cultural progress.

Humor Tumblr blog Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley uses Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" manifesto as an excuse to paint incredibly realistic renditions of Sand Hill Road's venture capitalist innovation warriors, and their offices. It's funny because it's true. 

He points out that VC offices are full of women:

VCs have more females per capita than any other workplace. Entering a VC firm is like being Robert Palmer in his “Simply Irresistible" music video (that sound you just heard was the collective whoosh from every YC “founder"). Within seconds you’re surrounded by women offering you water, validating your parking, getting the appropriate laptop dongle from the dongle drawer, wiping away your chorizo remains.

…none of these women are in actual meetings, of course. 

Some days its tough being a VC:

- Sit-in on (half of) a pitch meeting, adding value with every value-adding breath. Also: enjoying a chorizo omelet.
- Devour daily Flipboard to maintain finger on the Fucking Pulse.
- Publicly Tweet other Valley ‘made men.’ Tally Favorites and Retweets to determine daily self-worth.
- Lunch with some founder. Rule: if founder is rich enough to not need venture capital, do whatever you can to get in the round. “Chad Hurley’s doing online taxidermy? I’m in."
- Phone wife to say you are too busy to make it home by bedtime — gotta work a “deal" at the Rosewood — gently shutting her up by reminding her about hybrid Lexus SUV, second home in Tahoe and Carmelita the housekeeper/nanny/chef. (Note: Carmelita is also leaning in… on her fucking mop, that is, so she can keep her kids barely housed in a market that caters to the pedantic concerns of the wealthy while zoning-out every possible lower-class incursion. But they can still watch our kids and shit, you know, so long as they don’t qualify for benefits.)
- Tweet a couple of links to portfolio companies’ products that you have’t tried, but must be absolutely killing it because the number of registered users doesn’t lie.
- Read the week’s most-heavily tweeted HBR article. Continuing education is a bitch!
- Use Retina Macbook’s spacebar to Quick-Look three pitch decks.

Read more and chortle here: Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley | Ladies of Silicon Valley: Lean Back

Silicon Valley investors run as a crowd and fund the same type of companies run by the same types of people. They invest in copy-cat, me-too startups by the dozens, and they only invest in teams that are nearly identical to each other: white or Asian males with a technical Ivy league education.

Chris Yey, an angel investor and serial entrepreneur, points out on his blog "Adventures in Capitalism" that  meritocracy doesn't exist in Silicon Valley.

The astounding facts are that essentially 100% of funded founders are white or Asian, and 89% of founding teams are all-male.  In comparison, less than 1% of funded founders are black, and only 3% of founding teams are all-female.

He points to these charts from Catherine Bracy at Team Obama's technology field office:

We know that successful startups are the ones that challenge the wisdom of the crowd in various industry sectors. That's where the big money is always made.

So why do Silicon Valley's super-smart investors all follow each other and invest in the same type of teams? Surely, there's an arbitrage opportunity here? There's a huge amount of untapped resources.

Since we know that gender or "race" don't limit people's abilities or intelligence, it means Silicon Valley has a massive, nearly 100% untapped pool of resources at its disposal, waiting to be harnessed to the yoke of innovation. 

It's often said that Silicon Valley's biggest problem isn't the supply of investment capital it's the lack of capable startup teams. To say that there are no capable startup teams unless they are all-male, white, and Ivy league educated is clearly nonsense. 

Which means that there are fortunes waiting to be made by investing in female founders who aren't just techies, with broadly diverse teams.

Silicon Valley investors run as a herd, but what's needed are some lone wolves to bring in some big dollars by betting against the market. Then they'll all jump in and consign the above graphs into the dustbin of history.

So where are Silicon Valley's counter-culture investors? There's a lot of money waiting to be made.

It's taken almost a week for key supporters of Mike Arrington to publicly address allegations that he engaged in serial acts of violence against women over many years.

The  support seems to be a coordinated response because it coincides with Mr Arrington breaking his silence and stating that all allegations are untrue. The statements of support come from former employees and friends.

Mr Arrington said in a blog post that he has referred the matter to the police and will take legal action against "offending parties." That's served to silence critics such as his former business partner Jason Calacanis, and others, such as Rackspace blogger Robert Scoble, have apologized.

Jenn Allen, his accuser, answered in a Tweet: "@Arrington You know everything I said and posted is truth and true. How can you do this to women and lie to everyone. Reflect for once. #fb."

Adrian Chen, a reporter for Gawker, based in New York, compiled a long list of claims of violent behavior to women by Mr Arrington, spanning many years, in a series of articles.

Nick Denton, founder of Gawker, and a former Silicon Valley reporter for the Financial Times, said in a comment on Gawker:  

Interesting to see who has "liked" the original version of this [Jenn Allen's] post on Facebook. Caroline McCarthy, formerly of CNET. And most tellingly, power publicist Brooke Hammerling, whose clients depended on her access to Techcrunch when Michael Arrington ran the show. Don't sniff. That's what counts as bravery in the stifling tech-media complex.

The online publication Heavy.com has a good roundup of what has been said so far: 

Michael Arrington: Top 10 Facts You Need to Know | HEAVY.

Scoble: Jenn Allen Wrong, Wasn't Hacked By Michael Arrington | HEAVY

Foremski's Take: With Mr. Arrington claiming he has asked the police to investigate the allegations against him, it has put pressure on Ms. Allen, and possibly others,  to press formal criminal charges.

This is a very good thing because if the charges are true then there should be a criminal prosecution. But how do we know a police investigation has begun? What will we know of the results?

These are important points to consider if the recurring rumors of Mr. Arrington's conduct around Silicon Valley, are to be finally answered and stopped.

The charges against Mr Arrington have provided plenty of fodder for many online discussions about the problem of violence within relationships and the difficulties faced by women in prosecuting their partners. 

Here is one view from an anonymous contact:

Having been a victim of domestic violence myself, I have to say that there is no real protection for victims out there. The legal system is not set up to protect, it's there, supposedly, to punish the criminals - if you have enough evidence and are strong enough (emotionally and financially) to stand up and fight and prove the criminal act.

However, the problem with domestic violence is that it usually happens with someone that the victim (still probably) cares about... and it usually happens behind the closed door. So both the evidence and the emotional strength to standup and fight are difficult to get.

(Sol Tzvi, founder of Genieo, based in Israel.)

Silicon Valley is running hard to maintain its position as the global innovation engine, against competition with dozens of fast growing innovation centers around the world.

Which is why it's puzzling that Silicon Valley has such a large gender gap in key sectors such as angels, VCs, entrepreneurs, engineers, and in senior executive roles.

Why isn't Silicon Valley using all of its people?

Successful startups are businesses that quickly figure out how to make products and services far more productive, for far less money, they spot arbitrage opportunities in huge industries and markets, they make use of the best resources available to them -- tools, capital, business know-how, skilled staff. So why so few women?

The recent Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sex discrimination suit has focused attention on the shockingly small number of women in the VC community. That's also true for many other sectors in Silicon Valley.

Some of the larger companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Yahoo!, have had programs for many years that focus on hiring more women. And they are active supporters of organizations such as the Anita Borg Institute, named after one of the top US women computer researchers.

Ms Borg, who died in 2003, was a tireless campaigner for increasing the number of women in tech professions. In her acceptance speech at the 2002 Heinz Foundation Awards, she said:

...women are not full partners in driving the creation of the new technology that will define their lives. This is not good for women and not good for the world.

Adriana Gascoigne and her colleagues at Girls in Tech are also working hard to build up the number of women in Silicon Valley and other innovation centers.

And while the involvement of large companies in supporting the Anita Borg Institute, and other women's organizations is commendable, a long-established culture of male dominance is difficult to change within large, older organizations, even fairly recent corporate cultures such as Google's, are from another time. It's best to get it right at the start, which is why gender inequality within startups is something that deserves close monitoring and comment.

Not just unfair...

The small number of women in important roles in Silicon Valley is not just an issue of fairness and justice. It's also an issue of extremely poor management of resources.

Startups constantly say that they focus on their people first. VCs say they invest in people first, and that the makeup of the founding team is their most important consideration. So why are these teams so lopsided, so mono-gender? Mono-anything is rarely good.

If we agree that diversity in startup teams is important, because businesses need teams that have to figure out how to build and survive within a much larger culture -- a culture that's formed by hundreds of millions of people, as in the case of Internet businesses -- then the lack of women insiders, able to impart their insights, abilities, and their energies, is a serious mistake. Such mono-gender, low diversity startups, are born flawed.

Teams of innovators that show a greater mix of backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities will surely have a far better chance of success than those that don't. If I were a VC I would be paying extra attention to diversity because I want to reduce my risks, I want my investments to be successful

Yet that's not happening. Most of the startups I meet with are all founded by men, and women are rare co-founders.

This shows that Silicon Valley isn't making the best use of its resources, and it is the most valuable resource of all: people.

It's as if our startups are trying to compete with one arm tied behind their back, and their investors are actively supporting this handicap. Why this is the case I don't know and it doesn't matter. The future will be different than the present and the teams that adapt the quickest will be the winners.

The situation has to change, and it will change, simply because it makes no rational or economic sense. Once VCs realize the importance of diversity in improving the chance of startup success, things will change quickly.

Lots of capable female business leaders

I get to meet many impressive women founders, such as Heddi Cundle (below) at myTab.co, the travel services site, which I advise from time to time, but there's not enough of them.

I've met very impressive founders of startups based abroad, such as Sol Tzvi, (top of article ) founder of Genieo; and in the UK, Wendy Tan White, who's startup Moonfruit was recently acquired by Yell Group for $28 million.

Maybe other countries are jumping ahead of us. Maybe it's Silicon Valley that's living in the past instead of inventing the future.

There are scores of women that can help build successful businesses but they aren't getting the chance -- and scores of startups that are the poorer for it.

Silicon Valley should use its global leadership position to show how to build the most diverse, and the most successful entrepreneurial teams. You can be sure that the rest of the world will follow, and quickly.

Social and civil change could propagate across the globe at viral speeds. This is not rhetoric, we've seen the changes in the Middle East and how quickly they can spread, even within highly conservative, traditional cultures.

Gender inequality is something that Silicon Valley can do something about -- and make money, because its startups will become more successful.

If Silicon Valley won't do it, then the rest of the world will move on -- and do it first. First mover is a powerful position to be in.

- - -

The Search For Silicon Valley's Women... - SVW

The annual event is organized by the Anita Borg Institute, one of Silicon Valley's oldest professional organizations. [Please see my interview with director Telle Whitney.]

The recipients of the 2012 awards are:

Jennifer Chayes, Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England 

Chayes is well known for her work on phase transitions, which is now giving rise to some of the fastest known algorithms for fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization. She is also one of the world's experts in the modeling and analysis of random, dynamically growing graphs -- which are used to model the Internet, the World Wide Web and a host of other technological and social networks.

Among Chayes' contributions to Microsoft technologies are the development of methods to analyze the structure and behavior of various networks, the design of auction algorithms, and the design and analysis of various business models for the online world.

 

Sarah Revi Sterling, Director, ICTD Graduate Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sterling is recognized for conceiving, implementing and leading programs that have had a direct, positive and lasting impact on the lives of women. She pioneered the development of a new participatory community radio technology that enables women to create content for broadcasting from remote locations. She also created and deployed appropriate and sustainable education, health and livelihood programs based upon a variety of innovative networking technologies.

 

Sarita V. Adve, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Adve has made significant contributions in parallel computing, hardware resiliency, and power management, often by synergistically bringing together hardware- and software-level solutions. She is widely known for her work on hardware and software memory models. These models define the behavior of shared data in parallel hardware and software, and form the foundation for reasoning about parallel programs and optimizing them for performance.

- - -

Please see: Anita Borg on why there should be more women technologists - SVW

By Intel Free Press

Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif. is the epicenter of Silicon Valley's venture capital scene, but it's 15 minutes up the road at a diner nestled in the woods where many startup funding deals get hashed out over plates of pancakes and eggs.

Buck's Diner in Woodside is where startup veteran Marylene Delbourg-Delphis took time recently to reflect on her legacy as one of the first European women to start a tech company in Silicon Valley.

Decades before organizations such as Women 2.0 and One Million by One Million helped women start their own businesses, Delbourg-Delphis dove in headfirst, developing her own business philosophy defined by friendships and intuition but rooted in a bootstrapping approach aimed at generating revenue before reaching for venture funding.

"Lots of VCs come to Buck's. I really like the energy I find here," Delbourg-Delphis said with a smile.

Legend has it that Hotmail and Tesla were founded at Buck's. Netscape had early stage meetings at the roadside diner and it's where PayPal secured initial funding.

Over a bowl of mixed fruit and a mug of Buck's house coffee, the self-professed serial entrepreneur talked about her early morning meeting at TalentCircles, a job-recruitment company where she is CEO. It's the most recent of more than 30 companies she has worked on over the years, including Brixlogic, Exemplary and Objective Marketer, all of which were eventually acquired.

"Startups have been my passion, my exclusive passion for the past 25 years," she said.

First Startup

In the mid-1980s, Delbourg-Delphis was studying at l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris when she first used an Apple III.

"I was working on the history of fragrance, and I needed a database to manage my research," she said. "I looked at dBASE and thought it was so anachronistic. There was really nothing simple, visual and easy to use."

Her need turned into an idea that became a business in France. She named the database 4th Dimension, and claims it was the first relational graphical database.

"I was not approaching this from a point of view of a computer scientist, but from a point of view that this is what I really need," she said, underscoring that this simple, humanistic approach is the essence of most successful startups today.

The French-based database business became profitable after 2 years, according to Delbourg-Delphis. During an Apple Expo in France in 1985, she met Apple software evangelist Alain Rossmann, who strongly encouraged her to visit leaders at Apple headquarters in California -- she arranged to arrive in Cupertino post-haste.

When she first set foot in Silicon Valley in 1985, she was fascinated by the sheer concentration of companies all in one place.

"I looked at this as a renaissance world," she said. "I thought of places like Florence, Rome or Paris, where all of the great minds got together to create things, making these places like the center of the Universe. There is a map of Silicon Valley with names of all of the companies in the area, and I remember looking at this map and saying, this is Florence, only several centuries later."

"This is when I figured that the market was here," she said, and quickly decided to start a US subsidiary of her growing French company, and she named it ACIUS 4th Dimension.

"Being one of the very first European women to start a high-tech company in Silicon Valley, it was out of the question that any VC would fund me," said Delbourg-Delphis. "When I did my startup, VCs would not relate to somebody like me. I had a heavy-duty background in philosophy, was a woman and I was French."

"I believe VCs were willing to fund women entrepreneurs in the early days, but we just did not have many approach us for capital," said DuBose Montgomery, who co-founded Menlo Ventures in 1976. He remembers Sandra Kurtzig as being one of the first women entrepreneurs to convince VCs to back her technology startup ASK Computers, which later became a very successful manufacturing software company acquired by Computer Associates in 1994.

This environment didn't dissuade Delbourg-Delphis. She focused on product development and networking with developers and potential customers, which she says led her privately held startup to generate more than $45 million in revenue in 6 years.

Getting Guy Kawasaki

If there is a line between business and real life, it is blurry if not invisible to Delbourg-Delphis. She believes that the best business relationships develop into true friendships like the one she has with Guy Kawasaki, who today is a top-selling author and successful Internet entrepreneur.

She first met Kawasaki during her early visits to Apple headquarters in 1985. Kawasaki was the company's chief software evangelist, and Delbourg-Delphis described him as someone who always had his hands on products, and the 4th Dimension database was one product he knew well. That same year, Delbourg-Delphis asked Kawasaki if he would join her startup as CEO.

"What's the likelihood of a man coming to work for a woman in the 1980s?" asked Delbourg-Delphis. "But he did. I think he liked how I asked him directly without dramatizing my invitation."

"Guy helped me understand American idioms," she added. "I could speak Shakespeare, but I couldn't read the Mercury News."

Kawasaki left ACIUS in 1987 to become an author and speaker, leaving the CEO role to Delbourg-Delphis. Rossmann, who had become a board member at ACIUS, acknowledged that Delbourg-Delphis had built "one of the leading PC databases software companies in the world," capturing a major share of the Apple market.

Delbourg-Delphis left ACIUS in early 1997 at the request of her then 9-year-old daughter Sophie, who wanted to stop traveling back and forth to France and live exclusively in America. After moving permanently to Silicon Valley, she set up Cilantro Productions, her consulting firm where she uses her knowledge and business process management skills to help entrepreneurs.

Democratizing Magic, Intuition over Experience

Silicon Valley has remained a hotbed of innovation for decades because it is continually "democratizing magic," Delbourg-Delphis wrote in a recent article for the French publication Atlantico.

She has never followed a career roadmap, structuring her life instead around interaction with people and her intuition. "I have had a lot of experience, but in a way, I always see experience as something that you must forget," she said. "Experience only helps for routine tasks. I don't use experience as a filter to evaluate new opportunities. I plan when I see and I don't plan to see."

Delbourg-Delphis paused to look around Buck's, turning an ear to nearby chatter about Google, Facebook, Apple, social networking apps and possibly even a deal or two, before offering a parting comment.

"Silicon Valley is a place where you can just do anything, but geography matters less," she said. "With the addition of all sorts of nationalities, far more than anything we saw here 30 years ago, it's a true melting pot for geographies and times. You have people coming from very different backgrounds with completely different histories. It's truly phenomenal. Here people have been used to inventing and innovation for two generations."

"According to our research, women MBA graduates earn, on average, $4,600 less than men MBA graduates in their first job out of school. We also found that mentoring benefits men the most: men with mentors received $9,260 more in their first post-MBA jobs than women with mentors."

Catalyst President and CEO, Ilene Lang, has a few words of wisdom for the class of 2011 on her blog Catalyzing:

Attention Class of 2011: Women start behind, and stay behind, equally skilled men after graduating from prestigious MBA programs.

In today's Take 5--a new Catalyzing feature highlighting five important Catalyst findings--we look at our research into our best and brightest: MBA grads from top business schools across the globe. A level playing field does not exist even for these high-potential women. Here's why:

1) Women MBA grads earn, on average, $4,600 less than men in their first job out of school. This is after taking into account number of years prior experience, job level, global region, industry, and parenthood.

2) Mentoring benefits men most: Men with mentors received $9,260 more in their first post-MBA jobs than women with mentors.

3) Men got more promotions than did women, even after taking into account prior work experience, time in role, starting level, industry, and region.

4) Men's salary growth outpaced that of women, perpetuating the gender gap established in the first job.

5) Each promotion in 2008 amounted to an extra 21% in compensation for men, while each promotion for women amounted to an extra 2%.

And FYI: Pay inequity is a reality--MBA or not. The typical woman loses $431,000 in pay over a 40-year career.

What would you do with that cash?

Here are this year's winners:

Chieko Asakawa, IBM Fellow and Chief Technology Officer of Accessibility Research and Technology, IBM Research

Chieko Asakawa is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. She is recognized for her work as a leader in the field of accessibility. Her work at IBM has led to breakthrough technologies including Japan's first computer network based Braille library system and Home Page Reader which has enabled the visually impaired to easily surf websites. Another innovation, aDesigner, is used by Web designers today across the globe to help them build pages that are accessible to those with poor sight.

Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi

Mary Lou Jepsen is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Innovation category. She is honored for her technical successes in innovative design of computer displays over several iterations including most recently as CEO of Pixel Qi, her leadership of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project to accomplish its ambitious goals, and in the impact of OLPC's work on accessibility of digital technology to enable children in all nations to use the digital tools of the modern world, and use them collaboratively.

Karen Panetta, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Simulation Research Laboratory at Tufts University

Karen Panetta is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category. She is recognized not only for her contributions in both academia and industry but also as one of the United States leading experts in innovating successful low-cost methods for disseminating engineering and science to youth, parents, educators and the general public to help recruit young women to the STEM disciplines. Her Nerd Girls international program has inspired young women by teaching them that engineers and scientists create innovations for the benefit of humanity.

The keynote will be delivered by Anousheh Ansari - the first female private space explorer and first space ambassador.

Call her a mother of two, but don't call her "Mother of the Internet." Engineer, author, inventor and, since March, Intel's director of Network and Security Technology, Radia Perlman never cottoned to the label despite its use nearly every time she speaks at a technical conference or is written about in a story (including this one, her first interview since leaving Sun Microsystems).

"'Mother of the Internet.' I did not come up with that," Perlman said. "I was interviewed for some thingy or other, and the writer came up with that. I didn't see the article in advance, and it kinda stuck. One reason they thought they could get away with it is because several people claim being the 'Father of the Internet,' and 'Mother of the Internet' wasn't already staked out."

The reason Perlman winces at the label is "it's a title that one has no clear way of getting, unlike, for example, a Ph.D.," said Perlman, who earned hers in computer science from MIT in 1988.

"It's overreaching because I don't think any single individual deserves credit for inventing the Internet. Many people had large roles, including, actually, Al Gore, and in a sense it was something that was inevitable. Also, being called 'Mother of the Internet' is a little strange in that it emphasizes gender. I mostly don't even think about gender."

Coined by a publication whose name she forgets -- hence, "thingy" -- the cringe-worthy nickname is probably something she's stuck with. Not helping her cause is a Wikipedia entry that references the maternal moniker in the opening sentence.

But also noted are her myriad accomplishments and honors:

- SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award and similar honor from the advanced computing systems association USENIX.

- Lauded as one of the 20 most influential people in the tech industry by Data Communications magazine.

- Named Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year by an intellectual property law association.

- An honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology of Sweden.

- One of three recipients of the inaugural Women of Vision Award from the Anita Borg Institute.

That's only the short list for the daughter of engineering-grounded parents.

Creator of the spanning tree algorithm (and poem)

The achievement that has made Perlman a household name in certain cerebral circles is the spanning tree algorithm, which she invented in 1985 while working for the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation.

Her protocol transformed Ethernet from a technology that could only work with a few nodes over a limited distance, into something that could create fairly large networks.

"The protocol is really very simple," Perlman said. "I can summarize it in a poem!" Poem? Yep, the woman who has made large contributions to many areas of network design and standardization is also a poet.

Her ode to the spanning tree algorithm, titled "Algorhyme," is a geek favorite and has even been set to music, thanks to her son, Ray. Perlman's daughter, Dawn, an amateur opera singer, even performed it at a recital. The proud mom accompanied on piano.

The poem, Perlman's first, could serve as a "Spanning Tree for Dummies," and was the abstract of the paper in which Perlman published the spanning tree algorithm:

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never seea graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial propertyis loop-free connectivity.
A tree that must be sure to spanso packets can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least-cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
then bridges find a spanning tree.

Perlman said she is a bit surprised that the spanning tree is what she's most known for given that, "I always thought it was a bad idea to forward Ethernet packets" and that it took her less than a week to invent the algorithm, write the specification and, of course, pen the poem.

Other networking contributions include inventing concepts that made a particular type of routing protocol, called "link state routing," stable, scalable and easy to manage. The protocol she designed for DECnet got adopted by the International Organization for Standardization and renamed IS-IS, and is the routing protocol of choice in most ISPs today.

Recently she's been working on standardizing TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links), which allows forwarding Ethernet packets using IS-IS instead of spanning tree. ("My apology to the world for introducing spanning tree," she mused.)

Perlman also has done important work in security, including the ability to make data expire and become unreachable, even though backups of the data still exist.

The funny side of protocols...

When Perlman isn't inventing or dabbling in poetry, she's writing books. While their titles suggest dry reading that only a computer scientist would relish -- "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols" and "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World" - Perlman said one mustn't judge her books by their covers.

"They're not just technical books," she said. "They're actually very funny."

When talking about the lighter side of Radia Perlman, one must include her stab at stand-up comedy. Yes, stand-up comedy.

While on a cruise to Novosibirsk, Russia to see a solar eclipse in full glory, Perlman signed up to perform in a passenger talent show. "To play piano," she recalled.

"On the day of the show, Charlie [Perlman's significant other] and I walked around the ship and it dawned on us that we hadn't seen a piano. When we were told there wasn't one, I decided to try stand-up comedy. It's something I always wanted to do."

"That night at the talent show, the audience was pretty drunk and I couldn't possibly have been as funny as they were acting like I was. They were rolling! The next day we kept hearing other passengers talking about my performance and retelling some of the stories."

Happiest as an Intel Fellow

Creative writing skills and a penchant for comedy are desirable attributes, but not why Intel hired Perlman, who turns 60 in December.

Based out of Redmond, Wash., she joined the company in early March as an Intel Fellow, one of the highest levels of technical achievement within the company.

Now after a couple of months on the job, Perlman, who was at Sun for 13 years, and also previously worked for Novell and Digital, finds herself at a company that was never on her radar as a place of employment.

"I never thought about working at Intel," Perlman said.

"I always figured they did all these mysterious chip things. I am in awe of it, but never thought about working here because I have no expertise in things like doubling the number of transistors every 2 years just because Moore's Law says you can, or how to make a room really, really, really clean. I never thought there would be anything interesting for me to do and they wouldn't be interested in me."

Jesse Walker, a principal engineer at Intel Labs, recommended Perlman to Intel Labs Vice President Wen-Hann Wang.

"I've always been pretty happy where I've worked, but so far I'm the happiest here," she said.

"People tend to be intellectually curious and invite participation and advice from those who have fresh eyes and fresh expertise. They have passionate discussions as nerds do, but people do listen to each other."

This is my idea of living: exploring, learning, teaching others, sharing thoughts and ideas, braking rules and lines I locked myself in years ago without even noticing, growing day by day and becoming the person I am today, re-inventing myself to with every new dawn - every day I am the person I am that day.

Our definition of ourselves as people is based on our past: past behavior, past experiences, past achievements. And yet, is observing a prior behavior really the best approach to understand who we really are? Well, to some extent - yes. But then this could lead us to live in a false impression and view of ourselves. After all, we humans are only trying to simplify complex questions, such as who we are.

Can we really do it?

Ordinarily, we'll try to answer these questions with reference to our past achievements in life as oppose to our qualities, capabilities and skills. We've all heard stories of people who suddenly found a new hobby at which they really excel. One starts painting at the age of 60, another starts playing the guitar at the age of 50.

Talent is most of all about faith, will power, practice and a hard work. So yes, one can live up to his dreams by having strong faith, powerful will and diligence. Easy to say - after all, I must admit myself to accommodating a lazy demon inside of me as well as anyone. I do like to do the things I love, and the things I love come fairly easy to me most of the time - easier than other things anyway.

Yes, I could fool myself and fall into this magic circle of doing only the easy things, but instead I chose to break this circle, free my mind and dare to dream.

I keep reminding myself that every light, bright or faint, begins with a spark of the freedom of dreaming, and the courage to believe. That is the difference between the creator and his opposite, the eliminator.

The creator and the eliminator

I think about every great idea I ever had along the years, and of the obstacles which stood in my way to realize them. I could start a company 10 or 15 years ago. So what was it that was so different two and a half years ago, at the moment when Genieo was only an idea in my mind, not even a dream?

Insight and instincts - your guides on the journey

Whenever I felt I had a good idea, I used to go to people I admire and consult them upon it, in hope to get some kind of approval to my insane concepts. 100% of the time, the feedback I got was that it's impossible to technically do, impossible to monetize, impossible to raise the money for it... All those clever peers of mine, those great company employees simply told me to forget about it, and that it won't work.

It took me nearly 10 years to see that those ideas of mine were actually possible; unfortunately however, it happened only by way of it coming to my attention when someone else had realized them. Some of those ideas proved to be rather good ones and made their developers very successful.

So what was it that made my friends tell me my ideas were impossible? Was it me? Maybe I failed to communicate my thoughts properly? Or was it a matter of bad timing?

In fact, throughout the years I began to realize that many of my ideas involved instincts that I had in me, instincts that kicked so strong and became in away part of reality - a reality I saw but they did not.

There were things that were so clear to me and I didn't even bother to explain, because they were so obvious in my vision. Well, it appears that sometimes there's a big difference between consulting with any of your peers and consulting with someone who's actually realized his dreams already.

Your peers can never be a good starting point. They are working for all those great corporations, and are imprisoned within this false transparent wall which prevents their minds from roaming free. Your peers can become innovators, they can be creative, they can posses a great variety of skills, and they can be very willing - But they too often will lack faith.

But don't get me wrong, I do think that one should seek other people's opinion, learn from it, embrace good advice as one lives through this journey. However, one should never lose his faith and should always listen to his inner voice and let himself be guided by it.

If you are a problem solver, you will find your way. You do not need to figure out and have all the details lined up ahead from the start. Even if you could do it, I would advise against it, as things have a way of changing around us, and we must keep our eyes wide open and move very consciously step by step, from one point to the next; most of the time, the idea we've started with will become something else along this journey; a product may turn out to be quite different from the one we've thought of at the beginning; we may come across a different methodology of solving the problems we set out to solve.

Many a time, success will present itself actually when what you've created will seem to have nothing to do with the plans you made for it at the beginning your journey. Sometimes, you may even find that your consumers will redefine your product for you by the way they chose to use it.

So let the world surprise you, let people around you become creative and innovative, let them grow and spread with the seeds you plant. It will make the things you yourself do even better.

(Part 2 is here.)

Here are some details:

Keynote Speakers

· Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels & Marketing, IBM

· Bernadette Nixon, SVP Global Field Marketing, CA

· Nilofer Merchant, Entrepreneur, CEO & Chief Strategist, Rubicon Consulting

· Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer, EMC

The 15th Annual WITI Hall of Fame Awards

· Honoring key women innovators from science and technology on Monday, September 13^th. This year’s honorees are: Sandy Carter of IBM, Dr. Ruth David of Analytic Services, Inc., Dr. Adele Goldberg, Dr. Susie Wee of Hewlett Packard and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Katie Boehret, Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, will serve as Master of Ceremonies.

o WITI NextGen

· At this Young Women’s micro conference on September 13, 2010, leading women from technology will teach, mentor and share with 20 middle school and high school girls to encourage the pursuit of careers in technology. The day will feature career, leadership and mentoring panels and workshops, as well as the opportunity to share and have lunch with distinguished WITI Hall of Fame Honorees.

o The WITI Foundation Executive Auction and VIP Reception

· Provides an opportunity to network and bid on one-to-one meetings with the top executives of companies such as GEICO, Symantec, eBay, Genentech, McKesson and Charles Schwab. Auction items include packages such as an executive lunch or dinner meeting with Mr. Randy Spratt of McKesson at a Bay Area restaurant of the winner’s choice; plus an iPod Nano, American Express gift card and tickets to the September 16 San Francisco Giants vs. Los Angeles Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The Executive Auction is the WITI Foundation’s annual fundraiser and closes the Annual WITI Summit on the evening of September 14, 2010.

More info: WITI Announces Event Schedule for Annual Women and Technology Summit September 12-14, 2010 at the Doubletree, San Jose, CA

"There is not of enough wisdom around, your job as a leader is to do things differently." She said that the financial crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf, and other events should have been better handled yet few saw the possibility of those events happening.

She said women leaders are good at imagining what could go wrong and to make sure protective measures are taken.

About 700 people gathered at the Santa Clara Convention Center Wednesday evening to celebrate the Anita Borg Institutes' Women of Vision awards. The Anita Borg Institute works to promote the careers of women professionals within the tech industry. It builds on the work of Grace Hopper, a pioneer computer scientist and US naval officer.

The three winners were:

Innovation Award:
Kathleen R. McKeown, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Social Impact Award:
Lila Ibrahim, General Manager, Emerging Markets Platform Group, Intel Corporation

Leadership Award:
Kristina M. Johnson, Ph.D., Under Secretary for Energy at the Department of Energy

Ms. Huffington spoke for a long time, dispensing lots of advice. She spoke about her latest book: On Becoming Fearless.... in Love, Work, and Life. She said she wrote it for her two daughters to encourage them to take risks and not be fearful of failure.

Here is some more advice from Ms. Huffington:

- I always tell my children about my failures rather than my successes.

- Be bold, chutzpah is rewarded.

- Avoid guilt and feelings of inadequacy, deal with naysayers.

- Multitasking is not productive.

- Get plenty of sleep, 4 hours a day is not enough, we live in a sleep deprived culture and that affects our decisions.

- She quoted Michel de Montaigne:"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."

- Turn off your gadgets, your Blackberries, spend some time away from them and never place them close to where you sleep.

I spoke with Ms Huffington earlier in the evening and asked her how she feels about being a role model. She said that she doesn't think of herself as a role model but she can't control how others see her.

She said that the number of women executives and entrepreneurs appeared to be increasing and that the movement was in the right direction.

I also spoke with one of the award winners, Lila Ibrahim from Intel. She runs the 'one laptop per child' program that has already placed more than 2 million Classmate laptops around the world.

Ms. Ibrahim has a team of 130 people at Intel. The group is a for profit social enterprise. (More to come in a future post.)

Justin Rattner, CTO at Intel and on the board of the Anita Borg Institute, said that there were now three women Intel Technology Fellows from none three years ago.

Jerri Barrett, VP of Marketing at the Anita Borg Institute said that the organization had managed to survive the financial crisis. There was concern that companies would hold back funds but the Institute had managed to grow over the past two years.

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More info on the Anita Borg Institute:

Reading our blog
Reading Telle Whitney's blog
Read our Fast Company blog
Following us on Twitter
Listening to our podcasts
Subscribing to our news feed
Subscribing to our e-newsletter
Watching our YouTube videos

Past Women of Vision Winners
2009
2008
2007

Here is a Pearltree about the event and also about women in tech:

Keynote will be given by Arianna Huffington, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Award winners:

Innovation Award:
Kathleen R. McKeown, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Social Impact Award:
Lila Ibrahim, General Manager, Emerging Markets Platform Group, Intel Corporation

Leadership Award:
Kristina M. Johnson, Ph.D., Under Secretary for Energy at the Department of Energy

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Please see: The Search For Silicon Valley's Women...

Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs.

That disparity reaches beyond entrepreneurs. Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, and 22 percent of the software engineers at tech companies over all, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And among venture capitalists, the population of financiers who control the purse strings for a majority of tech start-ups, just 14 percent are women, the National Venture Capital Association says.

It's an old story and the article doesn't come up with anything new.

Not too long ago I asked Judy Estrin, one of our top serial entrepreneurs why there was a gender gap here:

Kay Koplovitz, the former head of USANetworks, has headed many successful companies. She called for more women entrepreneurs last year when she received an SDForum Visionary Award:

Adriana Gascoigne founded Girls in Tech to try and address the issue: Here is my interview with her:

"When women get together we can connect on a deeper level than if men are around," says Ms Gascoigne. "It helps to build confidence and it helps to create stronger relationships."

Men are allowed to some events such as dinners but they have to be a guest of a member.

A lot of women in tech tend to try to blend in, they dress in a similar manner to the men, and they behave in a similar way but this is a mistake she says.
"It is important to embrace feminity, to embrace girliness," says Ms Gascoigne. "Too many women think they need to be more like men to succeed. You don't."

Here is my interview with Telle Whitney, the head of the Anita Borg Institute, which is very focused on increasing the number of women in tech.

Thoughtleaders: Where are the women in technology? Anita Borg Institute aims to shake things up

Ms Whitney said that when she worked in tech research she sometimes felt isolated as a woman. And that isolation sometimes leads to women leaving their company, or their profession, to go and do other things. The Anita Borg Institute wants to reverse that trend and raise the numbers of women in tech research.

Here is the Anita Borg Institute's: The 6 Attributes Of High Ranking Women In Tech

And: Anita Borg Institute - Women Of Vision Winners Announced

Here is Google's Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

And here is an excerpt from a story by Sand Hill Slave about life in the Silicon Valley VC gulag:

Ladies (and Gentlemen) Executive Assistants,

Do you have a boss that is a complete ass hat? Is he the type of guy you look at and say,"forget closing deals..this fool can't even close a door..."

I had one of those bosses. And with alarming frequency, he would go over his idiot minutes allotment for the week within the first 48 hours. My personal "Bend it for Beckham" fantasy was more likely to come true than this moron ever achieving "rollover" idiot minutes.

What was my damage with this guy?? He was constantly opening up attachments that CLEARLY had a virus and then would give me his laptop to deal with. He'd get the warning about it being a .vbs file but since he was "multitasking " on the phone and didn't pay attention to his screen, he'd go and click on the attachment. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Course of action: I stayed up late a few times over a period of 2 weeks until about 2am, went to work (yes, you read that correctly) and I subscribed his work email address to multiple hardcore gay porn sites for the "free pix of the day".

Read the rest of "Hardcore Pranks"

And here is my PearlTree that collects web sites about women in tech:

ptInitTree('pt-pearl-1_803149-56',1,9745,1,803149,1);

Here are some extracts from the report that highlights the six attributes held by senior ranking women:

- Analytical: The majority of senior technical women perceive themselves as analytical. Indeed, all technical employees tend to see themselves as high on this attribute, as technical careers tend to first and foremost look for analytical and problem-solving skills.

- Unafraid to Question/Desire to Learn: A majority consider themselves as questioning - having the ability to ask the right questions, which is critical to problem-solving.

- Risk-Takers: A majority of senior technical women view themselves as risk-takers, which was identified by technical employees as one of the top four attributes of success. Moderate amounts of risk-taking are an important part of leadership, and senior women and men are equally as likely to perceive themselves as risk takers. This research shatters the stereotype that men are more likely to be risk takers than women are.

- Collaborative: Senior technical women are collaborators. A collaborative work style is perceived as a critical success factor in high-technology by both technical men and women, and is consistent with a culture that values innovation, which cannot be achieved without extensive collaboration. Collaboration is both a critical source of success but also a great source of career satisfaction.

- Hard-working/Long Hours: Advancement for senior women comes with long working hours. This finding is consistent with the culture of technology where advancement is tied to increased responsibility and significant availability. This can be a barrier for women who seek advancement while juggling family responsibilities in dual-career couples. 72 percent of the senior technical women surveyed reported cutting back on sleep to advance their careers and nearly a third have delayed having children.

- Assertive: A majority of senior technical women describe themselves as assertive - significantly more so than women at the entry and mid levels. In a professional culture that rewards speaking up, self-promotion, and ambition, senior women interviewed uniformly said they had to learn to be assertive and promote themselves in order to advance. However, research also shows that women have less freedom than men in assertive behavior. Because women's assertiveness defy long-standing gender stereotypes, women often experience a "likeability penalty" when they are assertive.

Kristina M. Johnson Under Secretary for Energy, Department of Energy

Kristina M. Johnson is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. Kristina Johnson is recognized for her work as both Under Secretary of Energy and as an academic. As Under Secretary of Energy, she is working on the plan to achieve an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050.

Kathleen R. McKeown, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Kathleen R. McKeown is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Innovation category. McKeown has made seminal contributions to the natural language processing (NLP) area, also called Computational Linguistics (CL), within the general areas of artificial intelligence, information extraction, and human machine interaction. More specifically, McKeown has made pioneering contributions to natural language generation; this field of research focuses on enabling computers to effectively utilize natural language.

Lila Ibrahim, General Manager, Emerging Markets Platform Group, Intel Corporation

Lila Ibrahim is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category. Ibrahim is responsible for leading the research, definition, development, and marketing of technologies that are specifically designed for education worldwide. Previously, she served as Chief of Staff to Intel Chairman Craig Barrett where she led the Digital Village Initiative to deliver technology projects which advanced Education, Health, and e-Governance from the Amazon to Africa. Ibrahim also established two computer facilities at the Druze Orphanage in Abey, Lebanon.

There will be an awards banquet on May 12 with a keynote by Arrianna Huffington, co-founder the Huffington Post.

The Anita Borg Institute focuses on women who can be role models for other women. Connecting Women and Technology » Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

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Please see:

Thoughtleaders: Where are the women in technology? Anita Borg Institute aims to shake things up

Anita Borg on why there should be more women technologists

She said that women haven't had the access to capital and she urged Silicon Valley to "open your hearts" to more women entrepreneurs.

Her Bio:

Kay Koplovitz is currently a principal of Koplovitz & Co. LLC., a media investment firm and is the founder of USA Network, the first basic cable network delivered via satellite nationwide. Koplovitz was the first woman to head a television network when she founded USANetworks under the banner of Madison Square Garden Sports in 1977. Ms. Koplovitz co-created Springboard Enterprises, a national organization that fosters venture capital investments in women-led high growth companies. Since its inception, Springboard has presented over 380 companies that have raised $4.4 billion in new capital. She also co-founded Boldcap Ventures, a venture capital fund backed exclusively by leading women executives. Ms. Koplovitz is Chairman of the Board of Liz Claiborne, Inc. and a board member of CA.

Please see:

Judy Estrin on the Gender Gap in Silicon Valley