One of the technology industry’s most serious shortcomings is that it leaves out women and some minorities. I have written a lot about the dearth of women and why this is an important issue. I am also crowdcreating a book, Innovating Women, on how to fix this imbalance. In a nutshell, we need to do this for the economy and to boost innovation.
Culture, values, and ethics flow from the top to the bottom in companies—from the board down to the executive team, to management, and ultimately to the rank and file. When boards don’t place a value on diversity, you can’t expect employees to. The gender imbalance that is created hurts companies at all levels.
I and many others have highlighted the problem with company boards, and I said some strong words about a company that is in the limelight because of its IPO: Twitter. Its CEO, Dick Costolo, was not happy about this because he and many other executives would rather pretend that there is no problem. But as a result of the media firestorm that resulted from Costolo’s inappropriate comments, we are making progress on this front. Now that Twitter has been called out on its board imbalance, I have no doubt that, by early next year, it will announce that it has at least one woman board member—possibly two. With a bit of luck, these will be African American, Latino, or Asian women.
Other companies too are looking at themselves. We can measure the gender composition of boards and executive teams, because these are published on company websites. What isn’t published—and is hard to determine—is a breakdown of the engineering staff. The best way of fixing any problem is to start by admitting it exits, measuring it, and then taking positive actions. So these are important data.
One woman engineer is working on making this happen. Tracy Chou, who works at Pinterest, is collecting data on gender in engineering. I encourage you to help her. Please provide her with information about the composition of your engineering team and of any others that you know about. This information is not confidential information and is not a trade secret. It will help the cause.
We are pleased to announce that The Center for Gender Education was established in Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics.
The center is to upgrade the University activity in the system of Higher Education, to create a comfortable gender learning climate attracting more university entrants, to expand international ties, to share experiences and internships on gender problems, become a focal point for the correct implementation of gender policies in the educational process.
The objectives of the Center activities are:
- to provide guidance, scientific and practical assistance to teachers and students how to implement the idea of gender equality into the educational process;
- to assist in organization of seminars, exhibitions, presentations and debates;
- to do scientific and research work on gender problems; to promote gender issues in students and postgraduates’ scientific work, i.e. scientific projects, articles and reports;
- to assist in psychological and training work;
- to provide information, reference and education service ensuring equal rights and opportunities of women and men in education.
and http://nure.ua/en/university/structure/departments/kiu/philosophy/gender/
