Birds of a Feather: Women in Advanced Computing

Last night I went to the Advanced Women in Computing birds-of-a-feather session (Guys welcome). Carolyn Rowland (the LISA conference chair this year) and Nicole Forsgren Velasquez lead the discussion. They saw this as an extension of the discussion started at the Women in Advanced Computing federated conference earlier this year, and put the "guys welcome!" on the BoF announcement because they wanted to expand the audience.

The room was about half men, which is a marked difference from last year's Advancing Women in Computing panel which had maybe seven men in the audience. They need allies, and that's what Nichole and Carolyn were here to help create. The focus of this discussion was to better equip everyone, not just women, in ways to put downward pressure on misogyny in the workplace. It was a pretty free flowing discussion and did threaten to veer into argument territory a time or two but the facilitators managed to steer things back on course. Rather than provide a transcript of what was discussed, I'll be including some interesting observations I recorded.

One of the most important things an ally can do is to speak up in meetings when people belittle, diminish, or skip over women when they offer an opinion. It brings people up short and does start whittling away and the bias that the women's technical skills are somehow less than the men at the table.

I've seen this exact thing first hand, and the belittling can happen from anyone. I was in a meeting with our sysadmin team and our manager, a woman of some 20+ years experience being and managing sysadmins. At the time me and another woman were splitting the sysadmin duties for our area, and this woman was also a 20+ year veteran. My coworker had complained, often, that any idea she brought up was immediately dismissed and it took months to convince our manager that whatever it was had merit.

My own experience was quite different. Any ideas I brought up were quite definitely evaluated favorably. A plan was hatched.

I remember the meeting well. My coworker brought up an improvement to how we were handling user-group management and sure enough our manager dismissed it. It being a good idea I spoke up, "You know, she has a good point. That really will help things out."

She looked at my coworker, back to me, and agreed that it was a good idea.  Wash, rinse, repeat at several weeks of meetings, and finally, she was taking my coworker's ideas at first presentation without me having to endorse them.

It works.

One of the things talked about at the WiAC conference earlier this year is a study put out by Harvey Mudd about women participation in the Computer Science program. They found that their first year students were pretty well represented, but by the second year a lot of the women had dropped out. The reason? They didn't see people like themselves in their peers or faculty.

One thing that really helps is having a female faculty member in the CompSci program. Two audience members went to a college that had one, and the effect was marked. Another audience member was at a University looking to start a Systems Administration program and was actively looking for people, but had just lost to retirement the only woman on their CompSci faculty. It's a problem, but does show a way forward.

The Los Alamos high-performance-computing lab is apparently a quarter women. The audience member who worked there had some theories about this, mainly centering around the community being fairly remote and Los Alamos is the major employer. This contrasts with my own annecdotal experience that HPC-space tends to be dominated even more by men that the more generic computing space.

When hosting a conference, or a vendor party at a conference, there are a couple things you can do to make things better for everyone.

1. If you're offering t-shirts offer t-shirts in women's cut. It only costs a bit extra, and it'll make the women feel more included. They all have too many too-big shirts, getting them shirts that actually fit is an easy win.
2. If you're having an off-site party, be it an official conference function or a vendor party, please ensure there is a safe method of transportation between the conference site and the off-site location. Especially if there is alcohol involved. The prospect of walking half a mile in the dark, in a strange city, is enough to make them not attend at all.

Sexual harassment charges are very serious, and women don't file them unless they're willing to accept major consequences. Consequences like "I'll never be able to work in this industry again" kind of severe. This means they're putting up with a lot more crap than they're letting on, and crap that astonishes men that they're not reporting it.

This is an oldy but ones that bears repeating: if you're looking to hire more women, remove the names from resumes. Multiple studies have shown that this increases the selection of women, even if the people in the study know that bias exists.

Thursday at 2pm is the actual panel discussion for Advancing Women in Computing.