Hey Silicon Valley--I Have a Gender Equality Solution for Ya!

There has been a lot of talk for years about women in STEM, from trying to get girls to fall in love with science and technology, to getting women to stay in the workforce once they’re trained, a lot of time and effort has gone into studying this problem. Decades of research, funding and programs later and we still have an issue, almost 40% of women leave the field, yet we’re still not entirely sure why.

I applaud programs that seek to encourage females to enter STEM careers and stick with it. I myself have been lucky enough to have been a part of many. But there is one age group that no one is paying attention to: women in their middle age who majored in engineering, but took time off to raise children, that are now empty-nesters.

I know, I know. Why would anyone bother with a 45 y.o. woman, but hear me out. We spend money on programs to train young girls in the sciences, we spend money on programs to get young women to major in engineering. We spend tons of money trying to figure out how to keep them and support them as they raise their children. Yet that’s where it ends. If you chose to leave to raise your kids, you’re gone, forgotten, and let go. But many of those women are done raising kids, and only in their forties. Why not spend some money re-training them and getting them back into the lab?

According to PewResearch in 2014, 29% of women were stay-at-home-mothers. It’s hard to find the data to see how many of them were STEM majors, but of the 40% of women who leave STEM careers, about a quarter of them do so to raise families. This means they didn’t leave because they no longer love engineering, they just chose to take time to raise their kids.

Many of these women are now in their mid-forties and their kids are on the way to college, which leads me to wonder, just how expensive would it be to train these women to become coders and technology workers today? With all the coding bootcamps out there, as well as other retraining programs, why not recruit from this group of women to fill not only your technology needs, but also to balance gender in the workplace?

A few years back, Apple and other big-name companies began offering female employees money to freeze their eggs, with the idea that they can invest in their careers until their late thirties/early forties, and then begin their families. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of “Sequencing," made popular by the book by Arleen Rosso Cardozo in the early nineties. The idea being that women can have it all, just maybe not all at once. This works for certain types of women, particularly those who enjoy diving deeply into their careers and find the work/family balance to be too difficult.

We all agree that a woman can begin her family at age forty, and that in some ways, she may make an even better parent than she would have when younger, given her life-experience. Then why not say the same about a woman in her forties and her career? If we’re physically and intellectually capable of handling an infant at forty, we’re certainly physically and intellectually capable of coding in our forties. Having done both, trust me, the infant is way more difficult.

So why not include Gen X female engineers who are done raising their families and ready to return to work in your recruitment plans? Why not spend some money retraining them, and growing your female base from this older stage of life, rather than only investing in young girls and college aged women?

To help get the conversation started, here are five reasons to consider recruiting Gen X engineers who are done raising their kids:

1.       They’re already in love with engineering! You don’t have to convince them math is beautiful, or that software rules the world, they already know this. As young girls they were interested in STEM fields and pursued them in college. They naturally have the mindset of an engineer, raising children doesn’t change that. And many of them have just spent twenty years or so raising their own engineers and science loving offspring, like Kim Moldofsky, The Maker Mom, and many of her website’s followers.

2.       They already have engineering degrees. True, the technology has changed, but most have a foundation in engineering, math or computer science. You might be coding in Javascript and Ruby, but C++ is still the sixth most popular language in GitHub, and most of these women have ten+ years using that language before they took time to raise their families. With this foundation, they can easily be trained how to write code using today’s tools and development environments.

3.       They know how to adult. I hate to say it, but it’s true. Women in their forties got their shit together, and they can manage a performance review just fine. In addition, they don’t suffer the same social media/Tinder/out of control rents/roommate issues that younger employees who are just launching from home are dealing with. A woman who has raised children to adulthood is the ultimate adult herself.

4.       They’re done raising kids. This is a big one, and both men and women wonder how to balance work and family. While we still need to continue the important work of bringing that balance to the workplace, many women in their forties are done with this part of their lives and find themselves empty nesters with lots of time to invest in their careers.

5.       They’re excellent program managers. Many educated SAHMs are deeply involved in their communities and often serve in executive roles on school boards, church leadership committees, and other clubs that their kids are involved in. Many also have blogs, write books, and share their love of technology on social media. They haven’t been lounging around eating bonbons the past twenty years, rather they’ve been putting their managerial and intellectual talents towards the next generation. This means that even though they might not have run an international software release in a while, they have for example, overseen the development of a new building for their kid’s school, or launched a new coding club for their kids, or even founded a soccer or gymnastics team. They drew upon their natural leadership skills to do this work, often for free, as a service to their children and the community at large. This capacity is a part of who they are, and all of those skills transfer to the latest apps being developed in the valley.

So there you have it Silicon Valley. Everyone knows you have a gender issue, and I applaud all of the nationwide programs that serve our girls and young women in this way. All I’m suggesting is taking a look at the 25% of Gen X engineers who left to raise their kids, and encouraging them to come back and be a part of the future of your business. What do you have to lose?

Come On Girls, Code With Me!

“Computing has seeped into every corner of the economy. It is the new literacy. A basic understanding of how computers work and what they can do is becoming increasingly important in landing a 21st century job.”

 

“The dearth of women in computing has the potential to slow the U.S. economy, which needs more students in the pipeline to feed its need for more programmers.”

~ Mike Cassidy, Mercury News Columnist

It’s been in the news a lot lately. Women make up 50% of the users of technology, but hold only 17.6% of Computer Science degrees. Why is there such an imbalance? I’ve been reading about it and find myself stumped…it doesn’t make any sense.

As a woman who pursued Computer Science in the early 90’s, I’m often asked what it’s like to be the only female in the room. I’ve heard that many women experience sexism at the workplace and feel left out in the career. But I did not experience that. Yes, I was often one of the only women in the room, and I noticed it, but never one did I think I shouldn’t be there, or that my ideas wouldn’t be heard. Never once did any man in the room tell me that I didn’t belong.

Never once did I look at a professor and think, “He isn’t like me, I’m not sure I belong here.” Instead I thought, “I’m here to learn what he knows, and use it to make a living.”

As I’ve moved from programming to writing, I find myself again in the male dominated worlds of film and science fiction. And again I’m asked, “What’s it like to be a woman in a field full of men?”

I’m going to be honest in this blog—for me, it isn’t strange at all to be a woman working with men. Men are human, just like me, and many of them happen to like the same things I do. Often people try to blame the lack of women in STEM on the fact that it’s a men’s club, and perhaps that’s true, but no one has ever pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Lady, you don’t belong here.” Instead I found myself writing code, debugging, system testing, drinking beer and playing softball with my colleagues, who happened to be mostly men, and I enjoyed all of it.

Here in Silicon Valley, the tech firms are trying to figure out how to create a sense of workplace parity. They often point to the lack of women to hire. Truth is, the pipeline is pretty empty in general at this moment.  As Mike Cassidy states in his article for the Mercury News,

“The damage starts with a problem that is already being confronted by the tech industry and other companies that rely on computing talent (which means practically all of them): The economy is creating far more computing jobs than U.S. schools are creating computer science graduates.”

We will experience a slowdown in our economy if we can’t fill these jobs, which means the current generation of kids needs to be encouraged to at least look at careers in computing. And this, of course, should include women. Why not? Girls are just as capable as boys in this realm. And these are high-paying jobs—all of our children ignore them to their peril.

Jocelyn Goldfein, sees this as a historic moment in history, where women could flock to careers in computer science like women flocked to the factories in WWII. “I really think this is kind of a Rosie the Riveter moment," says Goldfein, a director of engineering at Facebook.

Which is why so many organizations and colleges are trying to get more women into their ranks. Yet so many of the solutions being tossed around weren’t necessary for someone like me, a sorority girl, to jump into programming. However, there are some things I experienced that might help recruit more girls into this career, and it's all about education.

First of all, I began coding at age 12. I think this is important for all children. In my case, my first computer science teacher was female, hired to teach those of us identified as “excellent” in math twice a week. In addition, my math teacher at the time, who was also my Mathcounts coach, was female. According to research, because I saw myself in these women, it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to think I could be good at these subjects.

So perhaps one solution is to have more women teach math and computer science to middle schoolers. I can’t say for sure that worked for me, but it was my experience. Yet my work with strong women didn’t stop there. I went on to attend an ALL GIRLS high school, and I firmly believe that this is what makes me able to be in a room of mostly men and work alongside them, without feeling different.

My teachers at my ALL GIRLS high school were women. My Trigonometry and Pre-Calculus teachers, my Biology and Chemistry teachers and, best of all, my Computer Science teacher. There were only eight of us who took her class, but Sr. Newhart (yes, she was Bob Newhart’s sister) was a great instructor and under her tutelage I learned Pascal and Fortran. What a woman!

Truth be told, I love computers and I love men. I love working with both and have always found the experience enjoyable. Perhaps then, the issue isn’t that men don’t want women working with them, but rather for some reason women somehow think they can’t. Perhaps having females teach me math and computer science from age 12 – 18 shaped my confidence.Do most boys see men in those roles and follow them in the same way? If this is true, then would replacing women with men as teachers to this age group make men less interested in math and science? What good would that do?

Maybe separating the sexes during puberty is powerful for both of men and women? Perhaps letting us learn from our elders, without the need to be attractive to the opposite sex, frees our intellect in a way that builds confidence that can never be taken from us? That once we’ve mastered our minds, we can integrate in college and the workplace in less stereotypical ways? If so, this might just be the case for single-sex education, which is something I NEVER see in the list of ways to get women interested in technology.

But it might just be the answer.

***In the meantime, I've begun speaking to middle and high schoolers about the creative career of coding. If you're looking for someone to share her experiences in this field, and how this has helped me launch a career in science fiction, contact Brighter Brains. I'd love to share my professional journey with your kids, boys and GIRLS!