[PLUG-TALK] Women computer groups in portland

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Apr 5 20:03:29 UTC 2011


On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 10:30:52AM -0700, Daniel Herrington wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm trying to increase my company's pool of women candidates for job 
> positions. One of the strategies I'm attempting is to reach out to women 
> computer groups in the local area. I did some googling for PSU, women, 
> and computers but didn't come up with much.
> 
> I'm hoping someone on the list may be able to point me in the direction 
> of some organizations I can talk to.

I'm not sure where I read it, but about a week ago I read an
abstract of a paper about why women leave technical jobs and
leave the workplace.  The usual assumption is that they are
drawn towards family and home, but according to the study 
about half of them were not "pulled away", but "pushed out"
by a hostile workplace.  

It is laudable to reach out, but it might be worthwhile to 
locate some of those "pushed out" and have them help you
redesign your workplace and company values to make it
more compatable with your goals of hiring valuable women. 
Technical problem-solving women might be especially helpful
as consultants for this redesign - unlike those who look
at problems through a political/ideological lens, the
technical types might come up with ideas for a welcoming
workplace that are clever, practical, and geek-friendly.  

Please don't focus narrowly on CS majors when looking for
programmers.  Allison Randall, chief architect of Parrot
and president-emeritus of the Perl Foundation, trained in
linguistics.  It is better to hire competent, motivated
problem solvers from other domains than focus on
soon-to-be-obsolete-language-of-the-week jockeys.

Learn about Edwin Land.  When he founded Polaroid in 1937,
he needed chemists.  He hired women with PhDs in English
from Brown and Radcliffe and other top-rank women's colleges. 
Why?  Because it was easier to teach chemistry to first class
researchers (who happened to be women) than to teach diligence
to second class chemists.  The women were available, and
grateful for the jobs, and proved to be competent and loyal.
The women became first rate chemists, and helped lead a great
company, decades before women's liberation became popular.

Computer book publisher Tim O'Reilly learned the same thing 50
years later.  Though his endeavors are more "Englishy", it is
still easier to teach a first-rate English major to create great
computer books, than to teach a computer programmer to write
readable English.  While most English majors (or biology, or
music, or art majors) will never make good programmers, there are
still far more first rate ones than your company will ever need.

You might contact O'Reilly Books and suggest they produce a book
on "Women Friendly Technical Workplaces".  While the suggestion
won't immediately give you the book you want, it will lead to an
interesting conversation that will point you towards candidates.

And of course, your company should help sponsor Open Source
Bridge in June, and set up a recruiting table there.  OS Bridge
is considered by many to be the most woman-friendly technical
conference.  I hope you find some non-testosterone-poisoned
guidance for that.

Good luck!  We geeks are a long way from inclusive, but with
efforts like yours, even we can eventually learn to be civilized.

Keith
-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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