[PLUG-TALK] Women computer groups in portland

Daniel Herrington dherrington at robertmarktech.com
Wed Apr 6 01:41:23 UTC 2011


Keith Lofstrom wrote, On 04/05/2011 01:03 PM:
> 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.
While that might be helpful in a typical workplace, I'm with a 
specialized services company.  The team is distributed throughout the US 
with little contact other than email. I'd love for input about any bias 
inherent in the setup, but our main source of contact is mostly the 
internal mailing list. There is some phone contact, but in the end, 
there isn't much as far as culture and values to evaluate. We aren't a 
body shop, so staffing is pretty static except in instances we we grow.
>
>
> 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.
I'm a geologist by training, and I feel strongly that technical skills 
are easily trainable skills. They just require work and persistence. 
Initiative, interpersonal communication, persistence, and confidence are 
skills I've found I just can't train people on. Anyone who has spent 
some time hiring quickly comes to the conclusion that "soft skills" not 
listed in job descriptions tend to be the most important to success.
> 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.
I would love to be more involved in something F/OSS, but we aren't a 
software developer. We specialize in a narrow set of software, 
enterprise job scheduling (AutoSys) and I'm spinning up a Data Center 
Automation practice. We work with a single software vendor. From a 
business perspective I can't convince the owner to put money in to 
something that doesn't benefit what our company is focused on.

Also, in my googling today, I came across The Grace Hopper Women In 
Computing Conference (http://gracehopper.org/2011/). It will be held in 
Portland from November 9-12. I wouldn't presume to reach out on behalf 
of PLUG, but I'd be happy to help someone if we wanted to get some women 
of PLUG representation there.
> Good luck!  We geeks are a long way from inclusive, but with
> efforts like yours, even we can eventually learn to be civilized.
Thanks. I'm hoping to build more of a geek/hacker culture into the 
company as we grow, but as I mentioned we're a very distributed, small 
firm with only minimal capabilities to build any culture.
> Keith

-- 
Daniel Herrington
Director of Field Services
Robert Mark Technologies
o: 651-769-2574
m: 503-358-8575




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