Let's hope she has a plan to learn new skills!
One of the challenges for technical women (as well as men) is keeping up with the pace of technology. Keeping technical skills current and relevant is key to retaining and advancing women in the field. In the United States, organizations often view the task of skill development as belonging to the employee on their own time. Often times, learning a new skill is something an organization does not require at that moment, from that particular employee, so the employer balks at providing the resources to update an employee's skills as an unnecessary expense. This is where the challenge exists for technical women in particular. Classes can often be expensive and take you away from the office and many women don’t ask or fail to convince their employer to support learning new skills. Courses offered at night or on the weekends are often not possible for women with competing commitments. Keeping your skills current is crucial to your future in technology. During the last few years, specifically during this economic crisis, many women have chosen roles with legacy and proprietary tool sets within organizations originally thinking their role in the organization will be more stable and less risky. These women find themselves out of work when organizations re-tool, downsize or outsource. There is a pattern of letting legacy tool employees go (not attempting to retrain existing workers who are often women) while hiring new recruits with the new skills required to propel an organization forward. The person with the legacy skills is no longer relevant to other organizations and has been pushed out of the market. This post is a request to start a dialog – what do you do to assess your skills development and how do you learn those skills? I have noticed this topic has been missing from conversations in the community. Is it possible for us to develop a process by which a technical woman can assess where she currently sits from a skill level standpoint and create an action plan to ensure she stays relevant in the marketplace? Our next blog post will summarize our findings as we talk with many of you. Looking forward to this conversation. - Deanna (deanna@globaltechwomen.com) Please share your ideas using the comment section below or email me directly.
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UN Women has declared October 11th 2012 to be the International Day of the Girl. It is wonderful to read the blogs and opinions with a wide range of issues girls face around the world. Issues regarding health, child marriage, education, poverty and my favorite topic, girls in STEM. It makes me happy to see so much focus on the girl child who is often overlooked and undervalued. I wanted to write something personal on this day. Something that has had a deep impact on my work. Here is my story. By guest blogger: Lisa Kaczmarczyk It has been 7 weeks and still no one from the trenches has said anything in response to the news flurry about women executives and their fashion choices. If we want to keep women in computer science and we think clothing plays a part, we need to hear from less powerful women. Although some might scoff, my experience in high-tech says there might well be an important issue here. Dressing with a feminine fashion sense has often been dangerous for high-tech women struggling to be taken seriously. In case you missed the conversation, it started with articles in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. The stories claimed times are changing and Silicon Valley women can now wear traditionally feminine clothing. That may be true for successful women with significant control over their lives, but women just starting out are still limited by male-dictated dress codes. In my previous blog, I laid out the problem of employability in India for technical students and why this problem is far more prevalent for young women. Between 60-80% of technical graduates are considered "not employable" because they lack the "soft skills", the gap between the knowledge-based skills and the skills that would make them successful in industry. Each year, hundreds of thousands of students defined as "not employable" are unable to find careers in technology upon graduation. Government, most academic institutions and industry see this as a "fact of life" and have done little, if anything, to address this waste of talent and the impact it has on the individual, their families, community and society. In this blog, I will address: what do we mean by "soft skills"? Why are these skills important qualities for a "fresher" (new recruit)? Finally, what can be done to resolve the employability problem both short and long term? People who are not familiar with the job market in India are often unaware of the "employability issue" specifically in the IT industry. Working with technical women in India since 2008, I am often asked to help female students find employment when they graduate. This is not surprising, as I have helped many young women in the United States find their first employer. What surprises me more is the response I often received from my hiring contacts in India: "I am sorry, but she doesn't meet the criteria" or "We can't help her. She doesn't meet the basic standards we require." How could this be? These women have bachelor’s degrees in computer science. Read on... During this election season here in the United States little attention was paid to the announcement from the White House last week about the 18 new White House Tech Innovation Fellows. These 18 people will leave their jobs in Industry and Academia to relocate to Washington DC for 6 months to help solve 5 technological challenges in government. Looking through the list of names I noticed only 2 of the 18 fellows are women (zero were African American). Given Obama's commitment to girls in STEM, how did this happen? Jennifer Martinez The media made no mention of this discrepancy, after all, this is typical. 22% of computer science graduates are women, but the resulting fellow tally here is far worse at 11%, (half of the number). If the media noticed, they didn't say anything. It wasn't until Jennifer Martinez blogged on The Hill "Where are the Women"? quoting Micah Sifrey, co-founder of the Person. “A distinguished group, but only 2 of 18 are women?”
With Shabana Azmi
As promised in my previous post, here is my list of Women Heroes in Tech in India. I spend 3-4 months a year working in India since 2008. During this time I have been inspired by a group of very young, wicked-smart and fiercely-driven technical women across India. What you don't find very often are very senior women (i.e. people my age)... women who have been in the field 20+ years. I have been fortunate to meet a handful of them during my travels and listen to their stories of what it was like in the early days of India's climb to technical prominence and their challenges over the last two decades is truly amazing. These women have forged a space in which the next generation of technical women are thriving. The challenges for technical women in India are far from over in fact I believe they are just beginning (that is another blog), but without these trail blazers, we would not see the brilliance and the accomplishments technical women in India are achieving today. As before, I am limiting my list although this is double with 6 (Sudha Murty is the only one on this list I have not met but was advised I need to include her- thanks Pramita :-)): Marilyn Nagle, the CEO of Watermark recently wrote a blog in the Huffington Post concerned names like Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Meyer and Susan Wojciki are the only names appearing in a Google search "women in tech" (interesting they all worked/work at Google). Nagle then lists her "women in tech" in Silicon Valley you have never heard of. I was excited, waiting to see her list...but wait a minute...2 of her 3 examples although very accomplished and I am sure spectacular executives, are not technical...where are the technical women? In keeping with the number 3, here are my picks of 3 "women in tech" the mainstream probably hasn't heard of. A CNBC article published in Entrepreneur Magazine July 17th 2012, just days before her move to Yahoo!, detailed how Marissa Mayer prevents burn-out working 130 hours a week often sleeping on her desk. "You can't have everything you want," Mayer cautions. "But you can have the things that really matter to you. That empowers you to work really hard for a long period of time on something that you're passionate about." She tells readers to watch out for resentment, find your rhythm and choose what is not negotiable and keep your commitment. Is the Tuesday dinner or daughters game the place you need to be present? Then never compromise on this, it will allow you to work harder and longer. 18 days earlier, I read an article by Tim Kreider called The "Busy" Trap. He observed a growing trend in his inner circle not just being "busy", but "CRAZY BUSY". This busy proclamation Kreider theorizes fills in a gap in peoples roles at work were most of us no longer make or build anything tangible. It creates a buffer between meaning, gaps of emptiness and ourselves. This busy syndrome is not only self-inflicted, but we foist it upon those around us, after all, if all of our friends and colleagues are too busy to see a movie, get that email written or turn in the budget on time, then we too must get crazy busy to appear we are just as important as the person we are trying to impress. He provides an example of a woman in New York who was "too busy to date" and moved to the south of France and is now hanging out with friends every night and has a boyfriend. Uh, ok. I am not sure what this means...should we all move to France? Perhaps we can explore what works here. "Can women have it all?" Every time I hear this question I think back to my childhood in the 1970's watching the Enjoli commercial, my first look at the career woman, frying the bacon, in the business suit and the evening gown - how can her hair be that perfect? 18 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In the technology vertical there are 3 - lower than almost all other verticals. A common theme for successful female technical executives: they are not married nor have children while their successful male counterparts have both. In the 1990's as a woman in technology, we came to the conclusion that women who really wanted the corner office had to make a "choice". Finding a female technical executive who has "made it" with a successful career, child and husband was as rare and hard to spot as Bigfoot at Starbucks. |
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