Success, money and disrupting an industry just doesn’t cut it anymore.
“Optimizing” is the male version of the same techniques women have been forced to use for decades to avoid being labeled old, AKA, unhireable.
Of course, old is relative.
The stretch number used to be 30 for women and no top for men.
While aging out for women hasn’t changed much, men’s has dropped like a stone, especially in the rarified atmosphere of Silicon Valley and other tech environs.
So what’s a guy to do?
The same thing women have been doing for decades.
These men are turning to procedures like Botox, fillers, laser treatments, and radio frequency microneedling, a technique that stimulates collagen and rejuvenates the skin. In some cases, they’re going under the knife for eye and neck lifts, according to the Post.
Who would have thought that any form of gender parity in tech would be driven by rampant ageism?
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Our population is aging, so more and more products are being developed for that market. The problem is that they are being developed by 20 and 30-somethings based on their idea of what’s needed — but in most cases they don’t have a clue.
The company recently hired Barbara Beskind and both she and IDEO consider her 90 years a major advantage.
She applied after seeing an interview with IDEO founder David Kelley, who talked about the importance of a truly diverse design team and hires accordingly.
The aging Boomer market has companies salivating and hundreds are developing products for them.
The problem, of course, is that younger designers have no idea what difficulties older people face; not the obvious ones, but those that are more subtle.
Beskind does.
For example, IDEO is working with a Japanese company on glasses to replace bifocals. With a simple hand gesture, the glasses will turn from the farsighted prescription to the nearsighted one. Initially, the designers wanted to put small changeable batteries in the new glasses. Beskind pointed out to them that old fingers are not that nimble.
“It really caused the design team to reflect.” They realized they could design the glasses in a way that avoided the battery problem.
It’s the little things that make or break products and the knowledge of the little things comes mostly from having been there/done that.
That became clear in a recent study by Martin Abel, an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College, that was published in the Institute of Labor Economics.
All managers need to be able to give tough feedback at times. But Abel’s research finds that both men and women discriminate against female bosses who dish out criticism, even when the feedback is worded identically to the feedback given by male managers.
Women are supposed to be nice, complimentary and supportive (especially to men). Those who are assertive and speak up, instead of melting into the background and shutting up are considered bitches.
As are women who do what bosses are supposed to do, i.e., provide feedback, both good and not, that helps their people grow and develop their capabilities to the fullest.
…workers surveyed were “about three times more likely to associate giving praise and appropriate use of tone with female managers. By contrast, they are about twice more likely to associate giving criticism and strict expectations with male managers.”
The attitudes aren’t new. The same type of studies (presenting the same whatever, but using male and female names) have documented the same reactions in college professors, managers and workers.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
There’s not a lot on TV that I like, but I used to really enjoy Shark Tank. Past tense; haven’t watched in several years. Why? Two words: lifestyle products. With very few exceptions that’s what was being presented, whether an app, a product or a service. I understand that entrepreneurs create stuff that will get funded, and while I’m not saying they are bad investments or that the entrepreneurs don’t mean well, I am saying that I don’t care about them. They won’t change the world or even improve it. Uber and Lyft are good examples; they haven’t decreased traffic, as they claimed they would, in fact, they’ve increased it. Most in the “life style” category are focused on “personal care.” (Have you noticed that sometime in the recent past “personal growth” morphed into “personal care”?) More packaging in the landfills, more time on the screen, more focus on self — so not my mindset.
Innovation isn’t nearly as mind-boggling today when compared to what startups were doing in the late Seventies/early Eighties when I started working with them.
A recent Reuters report found that the majority of Silicon Valley startup founders that receive Series A funding come from the same pedigreed cohort: either they previously worked at a large, well-known tech firm, a well-connected smaller tech company, they previously created a successful startup, or they come from one of three universities—Stanford, Harvard, or MIT.
It’s been 15 years since I first wrote about the proclivity of managers to hire people like themselves and more over the years showing it leads to homophily and the negative impact that has on a company.
It seems it’s no different for investors.
They are funding people like themselves who were raised, educated and worked along paths similar to their own who they either know or are introduced to them by a friend.
“Like a lot of the investments [Instacart] that have come our way, a friend of a friend talked to us about it, and told us about it, and encouraged the founder and the CEO to come and chat with us. One thing led to another.” –Sequoia partner Mike Moritz
When you fund from a homogenous group, no matter where they are, creativity and innovation are watered down, because those groups tend to be insular and badly interbred talking mostly to each other.
If you’re fishing from a pond of rich white guys, you’re mostly going to get ideas that address the needs of rich white guys.
I had something else planned for today, but two things, took precedence.
First, I had coffee with some guys and they started in about how overblown the whole “he touched me” thing had gotten. There were five of them, two said it had been blown up by the media, two thought the women had a point and the fifth said it was all feminist crap from a bunch of man-haters.
I accidentally spilled my coffee on him (it really was an accident; I choked on the sip I was taking when he said that and spilled it), which broke up the party.
So I came home, looked at some news articles and found one that was so relevant I had to share it with you.
For the project, titled “The Dress for Respect,” researchers built a dress embedded with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure. The information was then relayed to a visual system so that researchers could essentially track harassment in real time. (…) In just under four hours, the women are touched a combined 157 times.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Being a woman in tech can be a serious drawback in 2015; far more so than in the 1980s and 90s — Tinder even dumped a woman founder on the basis that the company wouldn’t be taken seriously by investors. Sadly, they may have been right.
Leave it to Slack, valued at $2.8 billion, to do things differently.
According to its diversity report released on Wednesday, 45% of all Slack managers are female, with 41% of the entire workforce having a woman as their manager. “This means that 41% of our people report to a woman who helps set their priorities, measure their performance, mentor them in their work, and who make recommendations that will impact their compensation and career growth.” In non-engineering positions, 51% of the workforce turned out to be female. Out of the roughly 250 employees worldwide, 39% are reported to be female.
Slack is considered the fastest growing software company in history and they certainly lead the tech pack In gender diversity.
And while their racial diversity stats are as dismal as the rest of tech they are far more actively working on changing that, too.
Here are the company’s four hiring guidelines,
Examining all decisions regarding hiring/recruiting, promotion, compensation, employee recognition and management structure to ensure that we are not inadvertently advantaging one group over another.
Working with expert advisors and employees to build fair and inclusive processes for employee retention, such as effective management education, company-wide unconscious bias training, ally skills coaching, and compensation review.
Helping to address the pipeline issue with financial contributions to organizations whose mission is to educate and equip underrepresented groups with relevant technical skills (like Hack the Hood and Grace Hopper), as well as supporting a variety of internship programs to broaden access to opportunity (like CODE2040).
Attempting to be conscious and deliberate in our decision-making and the principles and values by which we operate. Changing our industry starts by building a workplace that is welcoming to all so that a generation of role models, examples and mentors is created.
Slack is practicing what recent studies have proven; hiring women pays.
Give that some thought the next time your unconscious bias kicks in leading you to reject a candidate because she is a she.
Last year I had an argument over lunch with a woman friend who insisted that women in tech, especially in Silicon Valley, don’t face the same kind of difficulties career-wise that other women do.
She based her argument on the successful technical careers of a number of women friends and she became increasingly an4gry when I kept disagreeing with her.
I didn’t realize until several days later that we were both right.
Her friends did indeed build successful tech careers during the 1970s and 80s — predating the dot com era.
I, however, was focused on post dot com attitudes in the wake of the rise of bro culture.
Anyone around tech these days either recognizes the bias against women or lives in deep denial.
The latter apparently includes the editors in charge of Wikipedia, who didn’t think much of Donna Strickland’s work.
Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Strickland’s only previous mention on Wikipedia was in an article about Gérard Mourou, her male co-inventor. On May 23, a Wikipedia editor rejected a draft of an article about Strickland, claiming that it failed to “show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject.” The rejected draft noted that she was at that time the associate chair of the physics department at Waterloo, and a past president of the Optical Society.
This post isn’t about WeWork, but about two things that struck me.
First, the pure adoration shown to Adam Neumann and the absolute blind following of all he preaches reeks of Jim Jones only with a far larger world vision.
The second were the words uttered by Neumann’s wife Rebekah at the recent Tunbridge Wells Summer Camp.
“A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.”
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I wrote this back in 2014. Obviously, I didn’t mention harassment because the post focused on what was in the news, and it wasn’t talked about all that openly, unlike now.
Sadly, nothing has changed. It’s still news and people are surprised.
I get it. I get what’s going on in terms of women in the workplace is news.
I get it that it is important to remind people that for all the progress that’s been made some things haven’t changed.
It’s still assumed that it’s OK to ask professional women, such as lawyers and marketing execs, to do stuff that would never be asked of the men in the organization.
“…plan parties, order food, take notes in meetings and join thankless committees…bring cupcakes for a colleague’s birthday, order sandwiches for office lunches and answer phones”
By the same token, it’s news that board diversity is moving at glacial speed, primarily because boards only want people with experience and to have experience they need to serve on a board.
“Recruiting women and minorities to boards is being slowed because of boards’ unwillingness to look at candidates who have not yet served on boards,” said Ron Lumbra, co-leader of the CEO and board services practice for Russell Reynolds. “There’s a premium on experience.’’
So while I have no problem with these subjects being presented over and over in the news, there is one thing I don’t understand.
Why are so many people surprised by the information?
Is the general population so naïve that they actually believe women are no longer asked to do tasks that are closer to house work than business work?
Do they really believe that the lack of board diversity is a function of the lack of experience as opposed a desire to spend time with people like themselves who are well within their comfort zones?
The sad part is that while it’s still news, it’s certainly not a surprise.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
