For the allocation of work in the technology and innovation industries to change, so must the workplaces. Despite the challenges facing women in technology, the gender wage gap is still smaller in STEM fields (14 percent) than other fields (21 percent).[1] Yet equality can be a very vague concept until the rubber meets the road of reality.
Are technology and innovation industries changing the culture of workplaces? And if so, how? We spoke with Megan Smith, an effusive speaker who had moderated an event highlighting Google’s women technologists. She described her parents and her schooling as helping open her to choices to move into entrepreneurship and mechanical engineering, particularly around energy. But green energy research funding dried up, and she ended up doing her graduate work with tech/design pioneer Woodie Flowers at the MIT Media Lab. After that, she went to Apple in Tokyo and then came to Silicon Valley as an early team member at the pioneering, but ultimately too early and financially unsuccessful, company General Magic. The company has been nicknamed “the Fairchild of Mobile” because much of the top talent who created today’s largest smartphone platforms were on that early team.
She then became the CEO of PlanetOut, a gay and lesbian online content and community company funded by AOL and others. She went from doing more technical work to more business development, saying, “I think mechanical engineering, and engineering in general, is great background for any work. Once I went to Google, I actually moved away from direct technology work into tech partnerships. I really am an entrepreneur type, so I move more into collaboration for innovation.” Her work during her tenure included running Google’s New Business Development team for eight years, where her team helped engineers and product managers across the company globally get new products launched, like Gmail, Book Search, Android, Chrome, and Google Translate. She also led the acquisition of companies, talent, and technologies for several products, including Google Earth and Google Maps. Recently joining the Google[x] team, she also created “Solve for X” with Astro Teller, a platform that brings together top tech talent to help accelerate “moonshot pioneers”—people with big ideas and nascent projects for solving huge problems in the world with technology innovations.
As a company, Google offers employees the chance to participate in affinity groups called ERGs, or Employee Research Groups. She is the executive liaison to Gayglers [LGBT], VetNet [Veterans], GAIN [Google American Indian Network], and a co-executive representative for the Women@Google. The upside for Google supporting these self-organized interest groups is that as the company expands, it seeks more talented employees via the group networks and works to help these employees thrive; it also seeks new markets and suppliers. The company has an internal research team called “PI Labs”—People Innovation Labs—whose broad range of work includes learning about how bias manifests in the workplace and the pipeline and creating company-wide trainings to share those learnings. For example, one study on employment finds that if a job description has ten criteria, men will apply, on average, when they have three of the job criteria; women will apply when they meet seven. That means that there might be people who are more qualified for the job and not raising their hand. Google, according to Smith, has also researched how to deal with a self-nomination process within the company. Men are more likely to self-nominate for promotions than women. Google held seminars for senior women urging and training them to self-nominate more and is looking into these processes overall.
Additionally, Google studied algorithms to assess where they were losing potential female employees. For example, they found women only interviewed by men were less likely to accept an offer. In an effort to retain employees, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and from partial to full pay after discovering that attrition rates for postpartum women was twice that of other employees, and they also expanded paternity leave. To attract women and parents, the company also offers subsidized childcare, a $500 stipend for takeout meals after a baby is born, seven weeks of paid leave for new fathers, and dry cleaners onsite.[2]
Understanding the data behind how a workplace operates is, then, only the first part of the solution. Megan Smith strongly believes that the visibility of technical women, including historical context, could help today’s entrepreneurs and innovators. “I think technical women are largely invisible both historically and currently. You [at Innovating Women] get to figure out how to get the lost history stories told and make the current women who are doing awesome work more visible.”
Of course, there is an array of efforts to surface the history of female innovators, past and present. For example, in 2012, the Royal Society and Wikimedia UK teamed up to add Wikipedia entries on pioneering female scientists who hadn’t been documented on that platform. Those added to the online platform included cognitive neuroscience professor Eleanor Maguire, who charted changes in brain structure as trainee London taxi drivers studied for three to four years to master a tremendously difficult exam about London roads known as “the knowledge.”[3] The Google Doodle team finally moved birthday doodles to half men and half women, after discovering that their unconscious bias, coupled with biases in historical reporting, had caused them to celebrate almost no women’s birthdays in doodles in the first seven years of the program.
“You’re starting to see changes across the organizations,” said Smith. “Because of unconscious bias training and company-wide goal-setting to improve in these areas, many Googlers have become much more aware of the problems and deep challenges as well as the actual value and importance of diversity, and they are taking action, asking for more research, and getting creative around solution pilots and programs.”
Innovation is gaining momentum. Smith’s colleague, Mary Grove, is the director of global entrepreneurship outreach at Google. Grove launched the company’s Google for Entrepreneurs program, which has a strong international outreach to female entrepreneurs.
“In our three years since launch, we’ve worked with more than seventy partners with a mission of fostering entrepreneurship in local communities around the world (in more than one hundred countries) and pulling together technology and tools to equip entrepreneurs to be successful,” she said. “Take, for example, our Online Learning Center, which provides free and open access to quality educational content. Another example of this is the recent Campus for Moms program, run out of our Campus Tel Aviv and Campus London spaces—they run a nine-week program for new moms and women on maternity leave, equipping them to launch startups.” Google also works with organizations including Women 2.0 and Black Girls Code.
Within our discussion boards, the strongest call to action to create change was increased networking opportunities. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) is one of the largest organizations, with members of more than 450 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and nonprofits focused on increasing women’s participation in technology and computing across the pipeline with programs from elementary school through workforce participation.[4] Many companies have already started to embrace the need for women’s networks. Catherine Rose, senior product manager at Philips, said companies should “set up and support women’s leadership networks to help foster connectedness. My loyalty to my current company is supported by the women’s network in place. It has allowed me many connections that my day job wouldn’t have offered.”
[1] David Beede, Tiffany Julian, David Langdon, George McKittrick, Beethika Khan, and Mark Doms. “Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation.” U.S. Department of Commerce. August 2011.
[2] Claire Cain Miller, “In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women,” The New York Times, August 22, 2012.
[3] Maev Kennedy, “Forgotten Women of Science Win Recognition Online,” The Guardian, October 19, 2012.
[4] “NCWIT Fact Sheet,” National Center for Women & Information Technology.