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Category Archives: Women in technology

On the degrading comments made by an engineering society leader

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by EngineerChic in Diversity, South Africa, Unconscious bias, women in engineering, Women in technology

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discrimination, gender, Unconscious bias, women, women in engineering

More girls are starting to choose careers in STEM, and early wins have been made in getting more women into leadership positions, having a hugely positive effect on the situation for other women in their organizations. Despite this, the fabric that these incredible leaders have woven is still thin, and influencers can still negatively impact the struggle against overt discrimination, unconscious bias, and the endless micro-aggressions from family, friends and co-workers that women in STEM face.

My personal experience speaks volumes to that struggle, and the many comments on this blog over the years tell me that I have not been alone in this.

  • In high-school, I had to lie to my parents and apply to mechanical engineering in secret, to avoid them forcing me to do something medical.
  • Instead of congratulating me for getting a scholarship interview at a mining company, a teacher decided to expound on how difficult the working environment would be, and wouldn’t I rather do something like medicine or teaching?
  • Upon learning I had received a full scholarship to study mechanical engineering, a friend’s parent remarked, “But why? That’s so…manly!”

If I wasn’t hell-bent on becoming an engineer, and if my circumstances had not been so fortunate, the ‘social and proximal factors’ around me would have forced me into a career outside STEM, and I would never have known the joy of doing what I absolutely loved, what I was born to do!

It thus sickens me to read that the CEO of a South African civil engineering society SAICE, Manglin Pillay will not be asked to step down from his position, after commenting in a SAICE magazine column (also posted on his LinkedIn profile) that South Africa should stop investing in women engineers.

In the column, Pillay quoted from a study by Leeds Beckett’s School of Social Sciences and the University of Missouri that women in gender-equal societies choose care or people-orientated careers while men tend to choose careers that orient them to things and mechanics.

Pillay’s conclusion was that women prefer not to occupy high-profile executive posts because they would rather have “the flexibility to dedicate themselves to more important enterprises like family and raising children than to be at the beck and call of shareholders”.

Pillay goes on to explain that the sole reason for women leaving the field is to raise children (and not the overwhelming gender discrimination they face every day), and that the gender pay gap does not exist, and if it does, its only because women are so congenial in negotiating salaries – a trait that comes from the “maternal instinct”.

Gosh, I am baffled at the level of ignorance in these statements. Where to even begin?In my years as a volunteer at ASME – the leading global society of mechanical engineers – I could have never imagined any of its leaders making remarks such as this – not least of all because many of them were women themselves, which set an excellent example for the industry.

Pillay’s comments are outstandingly irresponsible for a thought-leader in his position, with the influence he has over the industry, and are a terrible reflection on the organization of SAICE. His comments directly work against progressive organizations like WomEng and SWE, who work to balance the negative influence that society holds for girls pursuing STEM careers.

Worse still, his statements normalize and justify similar beliefs held by men (and women) on the role of women in the workplace, perpetuating harmful societal beliefs at a time when women have barely begun to experience the smallest of wins in closing the gender pay gap and in starting conversations about unconscious bias. One example of unconscious bias: a man leaves to tend to a sick child, he’s applauded as a hero. A woman does the same and she’s sloppy.

In addition to being wildly inappropriate, his conclusions are also horrifically false, and telling of a deep-set belief that women don’t belong in senior leadership roles. 

As highlighted in Professor Alison Lewis (Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at my Alma Mater – the University of Cape Town) in her open letter to SAICE, the research Pillay quoted, “does not, in my view, lead to the conclusion that there should be less investment in attracting women into STEM careers.”

The research clearly states, “that the career and education choices made by girls are a function of both social as well as proximal factors”.

Reading the examples I gave above, it doesn’t take much to understand what “social and proximal factors” influence a girl’s decision not to take science as a subject, despite them excelling at it.

“On the contrary”, Lewis goes on to say, “the only way to fight for gender equality is by inspiring girls about STEM careers, promoting access to STEM disciplines and changing work environments to actively support women’s contributions. The development of women role models in the engineering professions is another vital aspect. This is the only way we will be able to change the real choices that are available to girls. Even “gender neutral societies” are still very far from gender neutral!”

And that pretty much sums it up for me. SAICE – with their all-male leadership team of Presidents and Vice-Presidents – should look long and hard at who they are, because what I’ve learned in my years of serving the C-Suite, is that the attitudes of the CEO are pervasive throughout the organization, and directly influence its culture. In SAICE’s case, the effects of an article such as this could poison an industry.

For some research-backed literature on some structural issues women face in the workplace, check these posts out:

What is unconscious bias?

Mentorship and sponsorship for career adancement

UPDATE:

The SAICE has since decided to sack Manglin Pillay, after calls from the engineering community and its members forced them to do the right thing.  A win for gender equality, although I still believe that having at least one woman on the SAICE Board would have had a major effect on its initial decision to keep Pillay in the position, thus avoiding the embarrassment and member outrage caused.  This is a fair lesson for the Boards of private and social sector companies and non-profits.


DISCLAIMER: I am in no way a spokesperson for ASME or for any other organization. All comments and views are strictly my own and do not reflect that of any organization I may be affiliated with.

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Women in technology – what is unconscious bias and why is it important?

30 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by EngineerChic in Diversity, Unconscious bias, Women in technology

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Diversity, Unconscious bias, Women in technology

I started my career as a mechanical engineer and through an unexpected turn of events, landed up in cybersecurity.  Although this may sound impressive to some, and definitely makes for an interesting story, these two careers are very similar in a pretty uncomfortable way.  I may just be a sucker for punishment, but I essentially left one highly gender-exclusive field for another.

According to SWE, just 7% of mechanical engineers are women (compared with 14% in chemical engineering) and although a whopping 36% of computer systems analysts are women, just 11% of information security professionals are women. Out of all the technical fields I could have chosen, I chose these two zingers!

So why is this necessarily a bad thing?

This weekend, I had the honor of hosting a panel of amazing leaders in the information security field at the AusCERT conferences in Gold Coast, Australia. The topic was “Diversity and Women in Cybersecurity” – embracing diversity to close the growing skills gap facing the industry.

AusCERT 2017.jpg

Globally, women make up just 11% of the information security workforce and this percentage has not changed since 2011.  The stagnation of women’s participation in the workforce is particularly troubling as the gap between available and unfilled positions in cybersecurity is estimated to grow to 1.8 million by 2022. Attracting and retaining more women has the potential to shrink this, but only if they can be hired, trained and retained in sufficient numbers. Not only is diversity key in addressing the skills gap, but in a security landscape where attackers continue to outpace defenders, enriching problem-solving with a diversity of perspectives, could be pivotal in keeping up.

Women are starting ahead but quickly falling behind

The Global Information Security Workforce Study is conducted every 2 years by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education. The latest study conducted in September 2016 surveyed just under 20,000 male and female information security professionals from 170 countries worldwide.

The study found that women are entering the field with higher education levels than men. 51% of women vs. 45% of men enter with a master’s degree. Secondly, there is one women for every 6 men in non-managerial roles, but this drops to 1 in ten at the manager level. So women are coming to the field more educated, but quickly falling behind their male counterparts.

What is unconscious bias and why does it matter?

The study asked men and women about diversity and inclusion. 51% of women say they have experienced discrimination in the workplace, whilst only 15% of men reported experiencing discrimination. Of those women who said they had experienced this, here are the stats:

  • 87% experienced unconscious bias
  • 53% experienced unexplained denial/delay in career advancement
  • 29% said they’d had exaggerated highlighting of mistakes, errors or occurrences
  • 22% tokenism
  • 19% were victims of overt discrimination

Unconscious bias refers to a bias that we are unaware of, and which happens outside of our control. It is a bias that happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgments and assessments of people and situations, influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.

Unconscious biases are a major contributing factor in women not being hired for jobs that are traditionally held by men, such as “manager”, for not being paid as much for doing the same work, for not being handed challenging assignments and for not achieving leadership roles at the same rates as men do.

A Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research found that managers are significantly more likely to critique female employees for coming on too strong, and their accomplishments are more likely than men’s to be seen as the result of team, rather than individual efforts. This is irrespective on whether the manager assessing the candidate is male or female.

  • Women received 2.5 times the amount of feedback men did about aggressive communication styles, with phrases such as “your speaking style is off-putting,”
  • Women had more than twice the references to team accomplishments, rather than individual achievements
  • Men also received three times as much feedback linked to a specific business outcome, and twice the number of references to their technical expertise.
  • Men’s reviews contained twice as many words related to assertiveness, independence and self-confidence—words like “drive,” “transform,” “innovate” and “tackle.”

Sheryl Sandburg said in Lean In, ““Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.”

Ok, so that is one study. Is that enough to prove that unconscious bias exists?

A Yale study called “Constructed Criteria – Redefining Merit to Justify Discrimination” asked participants to evaluate male and female candidates for the traditionally male job of police chief. Candidates were rated based on 2 factors: education and streetwise characteristics. Although evaluators gave the candidates fair scores for how educated or how streetwise they were, when it came to selecting the candidate for the job, evaluators started doing a very strange thing. They assigned more weight to the characteristic that that male candidate had performed well on.

If the candidate was well-educated and media-savvy, the evaluator saw this as a critical quality for success in the role. But when the candidate was lacking in these qualities, these were suddenly not very important to the role. Evaluators were shaping the criteria to fit the candidate. Unfortunately, the female candidate was not show this favoritism. Male evaluators were shown to be more biased than female evaluators (although both were pretty biased).

What is even more interesting is that evaluators were then asked to rate themselves on how biased or objective they thought they were. The results are even more shocking.

Female evaluators who considered themselves more objective were, in fact, more objective. But male evaluators who considered themselves the most objective were actually the most biased! Among men, there was a clear inverse relationship between shaping evaluation criteria to fit an applicant, and how objective the evaluator though he was.

 

Wow, this is really an issue. What can organizations do about unconscious bias?

Its clear that unconscious biases are holding women and other minorities back from entering the employment market as a whole, and advancing in their careers. This effect is only amplified in high gender-exclusive technical fields where the echo-chamber is particularly strong.  As these fields are still dominated by a narrow demographic, it is far less likely for individuals and groups to be aware of their biases.

Some organizations however, are awakening to this and starting to not only realize the untapped potential in a diverse workforce, but are actively working to change their culture to embrace diversity far more purposefully than ever before.

My next blog will talk about some of the things organizations are doing to facilitate these programs and what individuals can do to become more aware of their own unconscious biases.

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