The Future of Tech Is Female
The Future of Tech Is Female

Author: Douglas M. Branson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1479806048

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An accessible and timely guide to increasing female presence and leadership in tech companies Tech giants like Apple and Google are among the fastest growing companies in the world, leading innovations in design and development. The industry continues to see rapid growth, employing millions of people: in the US it is at the epicenter of the American economy. So why is it that only 5% of senior executives in the tech industry are female? Underrepresentation of women on boards of directors, in the C-suite, and as senior managers remains pervasive in this industry. As tech companies are plagued with high-profile claims of harassment and discrimination, and salary discrepancies for comparable work, one asks what prevents women from reaching management roles, and, more importantly, what can be done to fix it? The Future of Tech is Female considers the paradoxes involved in women’s ascent to leadership roles, suggesting industry-wide solutions to combat gender inequality. Drawing upon 15 years of experience in the field, Douglas M. Branson traces the history of women in the information technology industry in order to identify solutions for the issues facing women today. Branson explores a variety of solutions such as mandatory quota laws for female employment, pledge programs, and limitations on the H1-B VISA program, and grapples with the challenges facing women in IT from a range of perspectives. Branson unpacks the plethora of reasons women should hold leadership roles, both in and out of this industry, concluding with a call to reform attitudes toward women in one particular IT branch, the video and computer gaming field, a gateway to many STEM futures. An invaluable resource for anyone invested in gender equality in corporate governance, The Future of Tech is Female lays out the first steps toward a more diverse future for women in tech leadership

Innovating Women
Innovating Women

Author: Vivek Wadhwa

Publisher: Diversion Books

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1626813833

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From one of Time Magazine's 40 Most Influential Minds in Technology: women across the globe share stories of closing the tech industry’s gender gap. Women in technology are on the rise in both power and numbers, but we need to accelerate that momentum if we want to "lean in" and close the gender gap. The future of technology depends on women and men working together at their full potential. For that to happen, it is vital that women feel welcomed, rewarded, and respected in tech sectors. Hailed by Foreign Policy Magazine as a “Top 100 Global Thinker,” professor, researcher, and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, alongside award-winning journalist Farai Chideya, collect anecdotes and essays from female tech leaders around the world, sharing how their experiences in innovative industries frame the future of entrepreneurship. With interviews and essays from hundreds of women in STEM fields, including Anousheh Ansari, the first female private sector space explorer; former Google[X] VP and current CTO of the USA, Megan Smith; Ory Okolloh of the Omidyar Network; CEO of Nanobiosym Dr. Anita Goel, MD, PhD,; and venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, Innovating Women offers perspectives on the challenges that women face, the strategies that they employ in the workplace, and how organizations can support the career advancement of women.

Lean Out
Lean Out

Author: Elissa Shevinksy

Publisher: OR Books

Published: 2015-09-03

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1939293871

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“Disconcertingly thought-provoking.” —TechCrunch "Nineteen disruptive, disturbing and divergent voices ... an honest portrait of a network of gender-oppressed people leaning every which way." —Feministing "Everyone who hires or manages anyone in tech ought to read the remarkable book Lean Out. If tech companies are unwelcoming places, to hell with them. Start your own company and run it better." —The Los Angeles Times Why aren’t the great, qualified women already in tech being hired or promoted? Should people who don’t fit in seek to join an institution that is actively hostile to them? Does the tech industry deserve women leaders? The split between the stated ideals of the corporate elite and the reality of working life for women in the tech industry—whether in large public tech companies or VC-backed start-ups, in anonymous gaming forums, or in Silicon Valley or Alley—seems designed to crush women’s spirits. Corporate manifestos by women who already fit in (or who are able to convincingly fake it) aren’t helping. There is a high cost for the generation of young women and transgender people currently navigating the harsh realities of the tech industry, who gave themselves to their careers only to be ignored, harassed and disrespected. Not everyone can be a CEO; not everyone is able to embrace a workplace culture that diminishes the contributions of women and ignores real complaints. The very culture of high tech, where foosball tables and endless supplies of beer are de facto perks, but maternity leave and breast-feeding stations are controversial, is designed to appeal to young men. Lean Out collects 25 stories from the modern tech industry, from people who fought GamerGate and from women and transgender artists who have made their own games, from women who have started their own companies and who have worked for some of the most successful corporations in America, from LGBTQ women, from women of color, from transgender people and people who do not ascribe to a gender. All are fed up with the glacial pace of cultural change in America’s tech industry. Included are essays by anna anthropy, Leigh Alexander, Sunny Allen, Lauren Bacon, Katherine Cross, Dom DeGuzman, FAKEGRIMLOCK, Krys Freeman, Gesche Haas, Ash Huang, Erica Joy, Jenni Lee, Katy Levinson, Melanie Moore, Leanne Pittsford, Brook Shelley, Elissa Shevinsky, Erica Swallow, and Squinky. Edited and selected by entrepreneur and tech veteran Elissa Shevinsky, Lean Out sees a possible way forward that uses tech and creative disengagement to jettison 20th century corporate culture: “I’ve figured out a way to create safe space for myself in tech,” writes Shevinsky. “I’ve left Silicon Valley, and now work remotely from home. I adore everyone on my team, because I hired them myself.”

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pio neers to Ursula K. Le Guin
The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pio neers to Ursula K. Le Guin

Author: Lisa Yaszek

Publisher: Library of America

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1598535854

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Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery. CONTENTS Introduction by LISA YASZEK CLARE WINGER HARRIS The Miracle of the Lily (1928) LESLIE F. STONE The Conquest of Gola (1931) C. L. MOORE The Black God’s Kiss (1934) LESLIE PERRI Space Episode (1941) JUDITH MERRIL That Only a Mother (1948) WILMAR H. SHIRAS In Hiding (1948) KATHERINE MACLEAN Contagion (1950) MARGARET ST. CLAIR The Inhabited Men (1951) ZENNA HENDERSON Ararat (1952) ANDREW NORTH All Cats Are Gray (1953) ALICE ELEANOR JONES Created He Them (1955) MILDRED CLINGERMAN Mr. Sakrison’s Halt (1956) LEIGH BRACKETT All the Colors of the Rainbow (1957) CAROL EMSHWILLER Pelt (1958) ROSEL GEORGE BROWN Car Pool (1959) ELISABETH MANN BORGESE For Sale, Reasonable (1959) DORIS PITKIN BUCK Birth of a Gardner (1961) ALICE GLASER The Tunnel Ahead (1961) KIT REED The New You (1962) JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY Another Rib (1963) SONYA DORMAN When I Was Miss Dow (1966) KATE WILHELM Baby, You Were Great (1967) JOANNA RUSS The Barbarian (1968) JAMES TIPTREE JR. The Last Flight of Dr. Ain (1969) URSULA K. LE GUIN Nine Lives (1969)

Gender, Technology, and the Future of Work
Gender, Technology, and the Future of Work

Author: Mariya Brussevich

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2018-10-08

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 1484379764

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New technologies?digitalization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning?are changing the way work gets done at an unprecedented rate. Helping people adapt to a fast-changing world of work and ameliorating its deleterious impacts will be the defining challenge of our time. What are the gender implications of this changing nature of work? How vulnerable are women’s jobs to risk of displacement by technology? What policies are needed to ensure that technological change supports a closing, and not a widening, of gender gaps? This SDN finds that women, on average, perform more routine tasks than men across all sectors and occupations?tasks that are most prone to automation. Given the current state of technology, we estimate that 26 million female jobs in 30 countries (28 OECD member countries, Cyprus, and Singapore) are at a high risk of being displaced by technology (i.e., facing higher than 70 percent likelihood of being automated) within the next two decades. Female workers face a higher risk of automation compared to male workers (11 percent of the female workforce, relative to 9 percent of the male workforce), albeit with significant heterogeneity across sectors and countries. Less well-educated and older female workers (aged 40 and above), as well as those in low-skill clerical, service, and sales positions are disproportionately exposed to automation. Extrapolating our results, we find that around 180 million female jobs are at high risk of being displaced globally. Policies are needed to endow women with required skills; close gender gaps in leadership positions; bridge digital gender divide (as ongoing digital transformation could confer greater flexibility in work, benefiting women); ease transitions for older and low-skilled female workers.

The Only Woman in the Room
The Only Woman in the Room

Author: Eileen Pollack

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0807083445

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ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in STEM fields—“beautifully written and full of important insights” (Washington Post). In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer’s institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.

Programmed Inequality
Programmed Inequality

Author: Mar Hicks

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-02-23

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0262535181

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This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

Women in Tech
Women in Tech

Author: Tarah Wheeler

Publisher: Sasquatch Books

Published: 2016-03-29

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1632170671

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“Jam packed with insights from women in the field,” this is an invaluable career guide for the aspiring or experienced female tech professional (Forbes). As the CEO of a startup, Tarah Wheeler is all too familiar with the challenges female tech professionals face on a daily basis. That’s why she’s teamed up with other high-achieving women within the field—from entrepreneurs and analysts to elite hackers and gamers—to provide a roadmap for women looking to jump-start, or further develop, their tech career. In an effort to dismantle the unconscious social bias against women in the industry, Wheeler interviews professionals like Brianna Wu (founder, Giant Spacekat), Angie Chang (founder, Women 2.0), Keren Elazari (TED speaker and cybersecurity expert), Katie Cunningham (Python educator and developer), and Miah Johnson (senior systems administrator) about the obstacles they have overcome to do what they love. Their inspiring personal stories are interspersed with tech-focused career advice. Readers will learn: • the secrets of salary negotiation • the best format for tech resumes • how to ace a tech interview • the perks of both contracting (W-9) and salaried full-time work • the secrets of mentorship • how to start your own company • and much more! BONUS CONTENT: Perfect for its audience of hackers and coders, Women in Tech also contains puzzles and codes throughout—created by Mike Selinker (Lone Shark Games), Gabby Weidling (Lone Shark Games), and cryptographer Ryan “LostboY” Clarke—that are love letters to women in the industry. A distinguished anonymous contributor created the Python code for the cover of the book, which references the mother of computer science, Ada Lovelace. Run the code to see what it does!

Technologies of the Gendered Body
Technologies of the Gendered Body

Author: Anne Marie Balsamo

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780822316985

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This book looks at the representation of the body in culture from a feminist perspective. Subjects covered include bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery, and cyberculture.

Is Technology Widening the Gender Gap? Automation and the Future of Female Employment
Is Technology Widening the Gender Gap? Automation and the Future of Female Employment

Author: Mariya Brussevich

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2019-05-06

Total Pages: 37

ISBN-13: 1498303749

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Using individual level data on task composition at work for 30 advanced and emerging economies, we find that women, on average, perform more routine tasks than men?tasks that are more prone to automation. To quantify the impact on jobs, we relate data on task composition at work to occupation level estimates of probability of automation, controlling for a rich set of individual characteristics (e.g., education, age, literacy and numeracy skills). Our results indicate that female workers are at a significantly higher risk for displacement by automation than male workers, with 11 percent of the female workforce at high risk of being automated given the current state of technology, albeit with significant cross-country heterogeneity. The probability of automation is lower for younger cohorts of women, and for those in managerial positions.