Women don’t ask…or maybe we do….

There is always discussion online and offline about the lack of equality of women’s and men’s pay in the IT industry. Women often get paid significantly less (a quick google search will point you to endless articles on the topic) and many say that this is because women are poor negotiators in this space, or we under emphasize our skills and worth while men tend to over emphasize them. This is a stereotype that is now common, one that this brilliant critique of the book women don’t ask examines in detail.

I’ve never read the book but I have heard of it and been recommended to read it. I’m inclined to agree with the critique on a lot of levels. Firstly the research basis is somewhat flawed, especially when discussing the possible multiple interpretations of the word “negotiate”. I also think the premise is a little disturbing: by strongly arguing for the stereotype with little empirical evidence to base it on I think the authors are doing a disservice to women by suggesting a “character flaw” that possibly does not exist. I’m a believer that if you tell someone something enough times, they will believe it. We are told we (women) cannot negotiate so tell us enough times and we will never be able to improve on this (if it is actually a deficiency at all).

I agree with the comments on the article that we should spin this to be more positive, to empower women to ask for what they think they deserve, rather than enforcing even more negative stereotypes. Ask away!

From me to you, happy Friday…

I woke to this beautiful sweet rose on my bedside this morning, so fresh from the garden it still had raindrops on it. I appreciate the wonderful things in my life every single day, I hope you do too x

Will you or won’t you Spotify?

I heard Spotify was on its way to Australia. It launched in NZ days ago and it was reported as being well received. So I was surprised to see the headline accompanying its launch here as “artist anger as spotify launches in Australia” link. It seems the lesser known artists/musicians feel that the service doesn’t help them as much as it does the more mainstream well known artists and one complaint is that the tech gurus who created the service (one of who was the original creator of Napster, the first widely available file sharing service) are taking away money that is deservedly the theirs (musicians).

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Spotify makes money primarily from advertisements much like google. So every time a song is played via the service, Spotify makes money from advertisers. I don’t know if or how much money goes to the record labels at this point. Once users get sick of hearing ads during the songs they are playing, they can subscribe to a premium service minus the ads. I’m sure at this point the record labels get a cut, as do Spotify. How much of that money actually makes its way back to the artists through the record label food chain is one reasons musicians are not happy.

What I have to wonder though, is how similar this business model is to the pirate bay (which has been strangely inaccessible in oz in the past few days) and online communities sharing unauthorized music. People are still listening to music for free via Spotify as they would with TPB (I’m not sure how many will pay for a premo service), the act of listening to music for free is just now considered legit because a corporation (tech company, not music company) is taking money from advertisers and legitimizing the access to this music. The pirate bay does something similar, takes money from advertisers and provides music to users (albeit in a much less user friendly playable format).

The main difference is, how much goes to record labels? The comments from musicians in this article suggest very little is going there. I need to investigate to find out more. But food for thought!

Are you a man or a man-shaped animal?

I started my Monday morning reading this post via the systers mailing list about a recent Dell conference in Copenhagen. In the long time past I would have been appalled, but now I’m just embarrassed for the company, the women who work there under this kind of controversy, and the men who work there who really are MEN.

I picked up the title of the post from the article and I like it. As some commenters on the blog pointed out, reasonable men would not behave in this pack mentality reinforcing us and them. Many of the men I work with in the tech industry are very supportive of women and they understand the importance of having diversity in all aspects of technology development (this view is not just about having more women in tech, but increasing representation of other minorities and important groups often overlooked also (indigenous, elderly etc)). In my opinion, the “men” who agree with the comments made by the speaker have a twisted view of reality and are not men at all, but men-shaped animals (with very little resemblance to being useful members of the technology industry and society in general). Do not be confused, this behaviour led by a worldwide leading technology company is APPALLING! Dell should be ashamed and they deserve the backlash they get from this.

We have seen similar scenarios from yahoo and a host of other big tech companies, when will it stop? I certainly don’t enjoy “man bashing” (or man shaped animal bashing to keep consistent) but people and companies like this deserve to be exposed for their archaic, out of touch and discriminatory views. It is difficult enough being in a minority in your workplace and industry as a woman, without these further ridiculous views. I’m do not consider myself a feminist, but I do believe in equality for men and women, and I’m just glad I wasn’t one of the few women in the room when this took place.

Oh well, another reason for me not to buy a Dell in future

Link source

UPDATE: I’ve been pulled up on my comment that I’m not a feminist, because according to the definition, I am (someone who believes in equal rights for men and women). But I’ve disliked the word since a male colleague called me “a feminist” many years ago, and he said it to me with a kind of distaste in his mouth, suggesting a negative perception of my values because he saw my views as being anti-male and pro female superiority. I’m definitely not either of those things. I hate meaningless labels that then get morphed by particular interests in society (piracy is another example of this). My other problem with the term is, doesn’t everyone (or almost in western societies) agree in equality for men and women? Maybe this is shortsighted and naive of me to think this, but this view reflects the majority of behaviour that I see even as one of the few women working in the IT industry. I realise there is a need for “feminism” because we haven’t always been so fortunate (women) and of course we still have a long way to go in terms of equal pay etc. but how about we just be positive and passionate members of society and be the best people we can be. If part of that means mentoring and empowering others (particularly women) then I’m all for that as part of my everyday.

Oh and there has been an “apology”from Dell. Falls short of anything useful to counteract the damage they have done though.

Mac attack!

Are you a PC or a Mac?

I’m a long time proud Mac! So I thought the new skin for my blog is appropriate for this post. It looks like the first Mac I used back in high school. Good memories!

Link source

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now, and I hope my advice reaches you in time!

Link source

It’s a falsely held belief that Macs don’t get viruses. Until now this was somewhat true but not because of any technical superiority of the Mac. It was just not worth it for virus writer to target the small number of Mac users for a very long time (there is an interesting discussion here). This has now changed with the growing popularity of Macs.

So….my Mac started behaving badly recently, excel wouldn’t open, the word ribbon would not appear, I had printing problems and I was getting regularly bumped off my home network. Frustrating! It took me a bit to consider a virus as the problem so I started googling and I found and downloaded the free sophos anti virus for Macs.

Link to Sophos

I was somewhat surprised it found 22 viruses! At least I had an answer for why my Mac was misbehaving, but after quarantining and deleting the infected files, I had to work out how to repair the damage the virus caused. I reinstalled office and I still had the same problems. So I deleted every single inkling of office (I found a great blog post with instructions on deleting preference files etc.) and reinstalled it, which fixed my office errors to my excitement!

I’m less happy to report that my network problems persist, I need to manually reconnect regularly during the day. So the problem I now face is do I reformat my Mac, or buy a new one? Of course I have a backup (if you don’t, do it NOW!) but I’m wondering if my backup also has a virus? I hope not! I better scan it.

My Mac is 6 years old so maybe it’s time for an upgrade. I am well and truly out of hard drivespace. My Mac actually died six months ago, six months out of warranty, and Apple kindly replaced the logic board ($1200 value!) because I hadn’t claimed on my warranty and I bought the apple protection plan. I was impressed with that! While I decide, I’ll keep an eye on macrumours to see what the new soon to be released macbookpro model looks like…

Is this the answer to increasing women in computing?

I hope I have your interest from the title of the post!

I like travelling for work, it breaks up the week and I like the change. It also gives me time out to think and plan for the coming weeks (for my job, every week is different). I find it gives me another perspective on what’s happening in my life at the moment and it’s incredibly refreshing. Particularly when I get to stay in such lovely locations…

So my trip away last week got me thinking about the upcoming Go Girl Go For IT event to be held in Melbourne in June. I always love attending this event and I have been invited back to present to the 1000+ girls again this year. Don’t you just love their fabulous logo of the girls head? Funky

Exciting too because all high school girls attending get a copy of my pink book! So what topic will I present on this year? I will let you know when I know but I will be travelling to Go Girl on the way back from Barcelona so I’m sure I will have plenty of stories to tell!

So back to the title of the post. Attending these events always gets me thinking about how we can inspire more females to consider a career in computing. And we need to do this now as much as we ever did; the numbers of females studying technology are at an all time low. In the first year undergrad class that I teach, I only have one female out of 23 and this disappoints me, mostly because I don’t like being the only girl in the room! I’m sure you can relate. But seriously, this is a problem that many of us have been trying to solve for more than a decade. We have tried lots of different strategies and interventions including events like Go Girl and Technology Takes You Anywhere (the Qld equivalent) and the pink book, however. The numbers of females in computing have not yet increased significantly.

So why do we keep spending much of our spare time in organising and implementing these interventions? Well we figure that we might not have any girls in computing otherwise! I’m being serious! We keep doing what we do …but maybe we need to take some advice from Maria Klawe’s inspiring lecture. (pity I couldn’t get it to run on my iPad )

I have heard of Maria who is a well known computer scientist and advocate of women in computing, and read some of her academic papers and I think she gives all of us who work so hard at inspiring young females fresh hope. She suggests some new strategies (which I’m sure we are already doing on some level within our universities), and gives evidence of how they have worked in her university. At Harvey Mudd college, they have increased the number of female computer science majors from 10% to 42% in 5 years!

Even if we can learn one new thing from Maria, it all helps…

Microsoft IT-Girls 2012 Monday 2nd April

Microsoft ran a great IT girls day this week in Sydney and all attendees received a copy of the pink book. Lauren, our awesome role model in the pink book went along to inspire the girls (and did a fantastic job!)

Microsoft hosted over 150 attendees from 16 schools in a full day of workshops and panels so students could learn more about opportunities for women in the ICT industry, and get inspired to follow their career dreams!

The workshops included “The Future of Innovation”, “The Future of Entertainment” and “Experience Windows 8”. The organiser, Katrina Wong, commented on how it was amazing to hear the laughter and oohs and aahs during the workshops, and how very encouraging it was to see a group of girls ambush their Windows 8 workshop presenter after the workshops to see more about this new operating system! The girls asked lots of questions during the careers panels and it was great to be able to showcase that there a multiple study paths that lead to a career in technology.

The schools who attended…
Liverpool Girls High School, Asquith Girls High School, St George Girls High School, Brigidine College, Santa Sabina College, Our Lady of Mercy College, Miller Technology High School, Moorebank High School, Wiley Park High School, Ambarvale High School, St Ives High School, Bass High School, East Hills Girls Technology High School, Willoughby Girls High School, Gymea Technology High School, and Stella Maris.

We also had guests from…
Macquarie Group Limited, the NSW Department of Education and Training, Ausgrid, and Hornsby Girls High School.

Here are some gems Microsoft would love to share from their evaluation forms…
(these are quotations taken verbatim; any grammatical errors are left intact):

· I really enjoyed this experience and has made me want to work in IT even more
· I really enjoyed the career panel (interns) because it really gave an insight into what it is like to complete university and getting an internship here
· This has been an enjoyable and incredible experience. The three guys who ran the workshops were very entertaining and taught me many things about technology and the nature of other people and the needs of people that technology reaches
· It was a fantastic day. Now maybe I even want to work for Microsoft
· Every time I left one event I learnt something new
· The part in which interns and management talked about their own experiences provided valuable information regarding careers in IT
· I really enjoyed the interactive presentations as they were very engaging. The talks where there videos about futuristic technology and technology that have been very recently established were very enlightening. Food was great also!
· Thank you for inviting us today! All presentations were very informative and motivating for my future career. I look forward in the future to work for Microsoft as an accountant in the industry. Thank you
· Today was a great day and I was influenced by all the people and learnt a lot about different jobs in IT. It was also fun to use the different technologies and be able to experience different technologies. I think this was well done and the presentations were also well done and engaging
· Today was an extremely informative and enjoyable experience where I got to learn more about the future opportunities in Microsoft and ICT. This experience enabled me to think about my future and what I should do and thanks to today, I narrowed down my future choices
· Today was a very enjoyable day. I learnt a lot about the technology we have today and the upcoming technology that Microsoft is aiming to make public. The experience has shown me that I can have a career in technology and be successful at it.
· I loved how you introduced us to so many technology. It actually made me realize how behind I am with just a smart phone
· I like the fact that we get to listen to interns/careers panels. Everyone that spoke to us told us something very inspirational. Thank you so much and I hope to work with your company in the future!

Happy Friday from me and my furry friends

It’s no secret that I’m an angry birds fan, it’s a wonderfully simple (and highly addictive!) Scandinavian game. So I was pleasantly surprised when hubby went to the local shops to get milk this morning, and tried out the skill tester game and came back this cute present…

Almost as cute as my kitty sitting in all of the greeting cards I’m trying to sell. Have you seen the $1 card sale at madlyCreative, this is my business

happy fabulous Friday to you! x

Rockin’ IT gal shaves for a cure

Had to share this fabulous pic of my colleague Maria who yesterday shaved for a cure! Maria is a maths/computer science whiz, and she teaches first year undergraduates at university. We have worked alongside each other for many years. I also think Maria is very brave for doing this!

Maria is also a fab zumba instructor, they are a fun way to spark us up in our lunchtime break!
Go Maria, you’re an inspiration

My fab friend Bron (who I also work with) did an awesome job of Maria’s do!

Barcelona, here I come!

I’m so excited, I’m going to Barcelona, Spain! Even better, it’s for work!

Part of what I do in my job as an academic researcher is that I write research papers reporting on the results of my research. These are usually 5000 words long. I find it really hard to write a good research paper! But I keep practicing….

Well the practicing paid off! My paper was accepted to the international conference on information systems (ecis) which will be held in Barcelona in June this year! I really can’t believe it! I expected to get the paper rejected as often happens, but this time I was pleasantly surprised! The conference only accepted ~220 papers out of about 800, not great odds. but this time I beat them! So I get to go to Spain and present details on my research. The paper is about what motivates file sharers to share music in online communities.

Best of all, Barcelona is one of my absolute favorite cities in the world. I get to see Gaudi’s mosaics again, and be inspired. After my last trip there in 2004, hubby & I created our own piece of Gaudi in our living room. I am reminded of the beautiful place every single day

So right now, I feel like I can do anything! Maybe it’s time to work on a new mosaic masterpiece…