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A Twitter colleague sent me a link to an article in the Harvard Business Review “Women and the Vision Thing”.
According to the researchers, women score higher than men in all leadership areas except for one, a quality they call “vision”: “the ability to see opportunities, craft strategy based on a broad view of the business, and inspire others.”
The authors conclude from this that gender bias is, thus, not responsible for limiting women’s leadership opportunities, but rather that it’s a matter of style: successful women don’t fit the “mental model” of a visionary.

Continue reading If Barack Had Been Barbara

I worked most of the weekend, so spent some time over the past two days running errands, keeping appointments and putting aside items for recycling, donation or a future yard sale.
Last night was our User Group January meeting, and it included a visit from one of our New England Developer Evangelists, which is kind of a big deal.
Fortunately, we had a good turnout, good enough that our DE’s guest, another speaker, volunteered to come back to do a presentation in April.
Best of all, at least from my perspective as the person who picked the date and the place, the weather held for us, making it an easy back and forth commute for everyone.
I’d been nervous because there were predictions for snow showers last evening and clear skies today.
As it turned out, though, even though it’s a bright, sunny morning, it’s colder than a well-digger’s rear, and temps are expected to be in the single digits tonight. I suspect that would have demotivated all but the hardiest and it would have been unpleasant in any event, so the meeting date turned out to be okay after all.
The bad news is that I really want to do a transfer station run today, the last stage of my clean-up efforts, and the prospect isn’t doing much for me.
Onward, ever onward.

A recent Pew Research survey showed that Americans rank women higher than men in 5 out of 8 leadership qualities and equal to men in 2 of the remaining 3. The only quality in which men outscored women is “decisiveness”.
Yet women lag behind in being elected or appointed to leadership positions in government and business.
How did the survey participants resolve this apparent paradox?
Well, much to my relief, the old saws about women being unable to balance work and family responsibilities or not having enough experience didn’t make it among the top explanations.
Rather, the public cited “gender discrimination, resistance to change, and a self-serving “old boys club” as reasons for the relative scarcity of women at the top.”
Amen, amen and amen again.

I am a slacker.
I just discovered that one of the people in my high school graduating class, Bob Shillman, is the founder and CEO of Cognex.
Bob is a success from a technical, business and humanitarian standpoint: in 1990, he was voted Inc. Magazine’s High-Tech Entrepreneur of the Year and in 1999, he made a substantial gift to his alma mater, Northeastern University.
Good for him.

Ada Lovelace is considered by many to be the world’s first programmer. The programming language ADA is named after her.
Today, March 24th, has been designated in her honor as a way to recognize women who have made a contribution to technology and thus, are potential role models for those who wish to enter tech-related professions. Ada Lovelace Day is the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson, a British social software consultant and writer.

Per Carl Wieman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist* at the University of British Columbia, the human brain

Switcher’s Lament

First Holder. Then Richardson. Now Panetta.
Seems like the gloves are coming off already, two weeks away from the coronation, er, inauguration.

Since posting the link to Computerworld’s article on why women drop out of IT, I’ve read most of the 300+ comments that accompany the article.
Besides commenting on the article itself, the common theme seems to be that IT is a lousy profession, and those who escape it are lucky.
Well, well, well and well.
I’ve read a lot of nonsense through the years about why more women don’t enter the field, and agree with the person who said that this article comes closest to an explanation that makes sense to me.
What the article doesn’t do is propose a solution that makes sense.
The tired suggestion of mentoring, which relegates “older” developers to a ridiculous in loco parentis role is appropriately denegrated in the comments section.
Some one states the obvious, that when you get critical mass, the problems will go away on their own.
Based on my experience, you need a very strong, savvy COO type who has been empowered to crack some senior management heads.
In other words, someone who will take a swing at their peers. Because that’s where the problem is.
Of course, I – and everyone else who has ever worked in an American office – have yet to meet such a person.

Certain people in my life have claimed for years that the issues I’ve had with development departments are somehow or other my fault.
Thus, it is with tremendous relief – as well as sadness – that I discovered I am not alone. In fact, I’m very much in the majority:
Last year, Harvard Business Review published a research study which found that 52% of highly qualified women in tech drop out because of the corrosive attitudes of their male colleagues.
India was found to be slightly better than the US, which does not surprise me: recently, the youngest person ever to obtain their Microsoft certification was (you guessed it) a 9 year old Indian girl.
I relate to the following especially: “A women fails and is never seen again. A woman cannot survive a failure. So they become risk-averse in a culture where risk is rewarded.”
“It’s almost like a time warp” observed one of the researchers. “Engineering and tech cultures are worse than scientific, but across the board there