Business Blog Archive
Posted October 25, 2009 at 3:36 PM in Business, Career, Women!, Work | Comments (1)
From the New York Times, The Mismeasure of Woman:
“For the first time, women make up half the work force. The Shriver Report, out just last week, found that mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. We have a female speaker of the House and a female secretary of state. Thirty-two women have served as governors. Thirty-eight have served as senators. Four out of eight Ivy League presidents are women. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, it couldn’t be more spectacularly misleading.”
Sadly, it’s true: making up half of the workforce has not brought women equality in the workplace. American work places are still largely ill-suited for us and our employers do not fully recognize or taking advantage of our talents. What’s more, we’re still far too often demeaned, belittled, and treated as sex objects — usually behind closed doors, but sometimes publicly, too. What must women continue to do to gain equal footing?
In Ten Things Companies — and Women — Can Do To Get Ahead, employers are reminded that a lack of gender diversity in executive and board positions hurts both the company, as well as professional women, and provides some great tips for companies seeking to increase female presence. While all of the tips were good, those which I’d personally recommend, from personal experience, include: (emphasis mine)
- Make Mentoring a Priority: Research shows that mentoring programs can be powerful tools for advancing the careers of professional women. Every young professional can benefit from having a mentor. But for women in male-dominated corporate environments, the need is even greater. Women with mentors, research finds, are more likely to apply for promotions.
- Retain Your Best Women: What does it take to keep talented women in your organization? Asking them directly is a good place to start in getting an answer. However, research finds that flexible work hours, generous maternity leave benefits and coaching for women returning to the workforce can make a difference.
- Measure Your Results: When companies put goals in writing and track their results, things gets done. Companies need to know where they stand and make managers accountable for the level of gender diversity in their organizations.
- Move Beyond Tokenism: According to McKinsey, companies with three or more women in senior management scored higher on measures of organizational excellence than companies with no women at the top. It is not enough to add a woman here or there. The best performers build a critical mass that gives women the power to have their views heard.
The article also provides some suggestions for women — again, all good tips. Here are the ones I’m always telling other women:
- Dare to Apply: McKinsey, citing internal research from HP, found that “women apply for open jobs only if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria listed, whereas men respond to the posting if they feel they meet 60 percent of the requirements.” That by itself, if it holds true across the corporate world, could be holding back a lot of talented women.
- Know What You are Good At: Instead of just focusing on what you are lacking, take time to inventory what you have to offer. Evaluate your potential based on your skills and competencies, not merely the jobs you have held in the past. Many of your skills could be applicable in jobs — or in fields — you have not considered.
- Know What Success Means to You and Move Toward It: If you want to get somewhere, it helps to know where you are going. In the book “Stepping Out of Line: Lessons for Women Who Want It Their Way…In Life, In Love, and At Work,” author Nell Merlino says: “You have to see it before you can devise a plan to get there.”
Some of the best advice I’ve read lately comes from an unlikely source — Forbes. (They’ve published a number of sexist pieces in the past year or two.) The article states what many people won’t acknowledge, telling women: “Sexism, whatever you call it, hasn’t disappeared. But it’s better to know exactly what you’re up against.”
Amongst their list of unwritten rules: (emphasis mine)
- Men get the benefit of the doubt. Men generally get hired on their promise and women on their demonstrated experience. Men are usually taken at their word, while women get challenged more, required to deliver data and substantiation for their views.
- You won’t get sufficient feedback. Professional development depends upon rigorous, comprehensive, ongoing feedback. Your (male) boss may not feel comfortable delivering that information to you. You need to be direct in asking for it from him and from other colleagues and team members.
- Women are rendered invisible until they demonstrate otherwise. If you want to be noticed, you’ve got to offer your ideas, approach a mentor, ask for the assignments, build a network, convey your aspirations and communicate your achievements.
I feel very lucky to have worked with some great women and men in the course of my career who — regardless of whether or not they acknowledged that sexism still exists — proactively mentored me, instructed me, and helped me overcome any roadblocks which could have set me back. Still, I see too many environments in which sexism, however subtle, is part of the status quo and managers and leaders are unprepared (and, sadly, sometimes unwilling) to change their own behaviors, as well as those of their teams. I realize that I make people uncomfortable in raising these issues and pushing to address them. But what others must realize is that I live according to a rule my mother taught me long ago, which is reiterated in the Forbes article by Ann Daly, and which I can’t say often enough to other women: “Don’t let them sabotage your ambitions”
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Posted February 17, 2009 at 10:16 AM in Activism, Business, Web Standards | Comments (1)
I’ve spent most of my career working at large Web-focused companies which typically have multiple Web development teams to handle their sites. While the Web may be the vehicle that makes their business viable, most of the business people in these companies are ignorant oblivious too busy to follow the developments of the browser market space.
These companies, while all different, handled the release of new browsers using the same wait-and-see approach: wait until the browser comes out, see how much of the site’s traffic moves to that browser, then invest on bug-fixing only if n% of users are on that browser. Most, if not all, of the alpha/beta/RC testing was done by developers who were interested enough to test and possibly bug fix (assuming the issues weren’t major shared template problems). And they were probably doing this on their own time, because the business wasn’t going to stop business-supporting, revenue-generating development work in order to support a new browser!
I often owned the browser support matrix at the companies I worked for, but just because I owned it didn’t mean I could change it whenever I wanted. I had to convince the business teams that preparing for a new browser was worth our time and money. If I didn’t walk into meetings with current and historical browser usage statistics and demonstrations of bugs in the new browser, I would have been laughed out of the room. Simply stating that “a new browser is coming and we’d better be ready” just wasn’t, and isn’t, enough.
Other than a handful of companies, businesses aren’t in the browser business, or even in the browser support business (even though we developers may feel differently). Microsoft is right to not expect all businesses and Web sites to jump just because they have a new browser coming out, and I think that IE8’s Compatibility Mode provides a decent solution to bridging the gap for users between the old, crappily coded sites and the nice, new(er), standards-compliant sites.
I’m not jumping for joy over it, of course, because it signals that we standardistas haven’t succeeded in our education mission. There still aren’t enough designers and developers out there building standards-compliant Web sites, with or without business support, to withstand an event such as this. There certainly aren’t enough business people who understand the Web well enough to simplify the business case for standards-based development. Community and education tie into this as well.
Those who think that IE8 is going to be a wake-up call to businesses dependent on the Web are wrong — it won’t be. But it should be one to all of those designers and developers and business people who do understand the benefits of sticking with the standards: we still need to get out there and talk to our colleagues and community about standards, and help move the Web forward!
Posted August 10, 2007 at 7:46 AM in Business, Career, Web Standards, Work | Comments (4)
Karl Dubost’s recent post on the craft of HTML coincided with the launch of the first round of Web coding standards at work. Why did we need coding standards? Karl answers that for me in his first paragraph:
HTML is a practical art. In a professional context, it requires precise and extensive skills. As with many popular crafts, the vast majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living. The quality of products varies a lot.
When you have a team of developers working on a product, you need to set quality requirements… but to meet those requirements you also need to set the expectation that the developers will work in a consistent manner. Sometimes this can be achieved by having the team lead set the direction for the code by crafting templates and doing code reviews. But what happens as team members rotate on and off the project — how do you retain the knowledge about the coding direction without taking time to bring each person up to speed? What happens as your development team grows to 10, 40, 100 people? This stuff doesn’t scale without spelling out the rules and setting expectations… thus the need for coding standards.
But standards alone won’t create consistency, of course. When Karl says that “HTML is a craft”, he implies that there are techniques that one can only learn through study and practice. When practicing a craft, there are skill levels that reach into the realms of mastery that only few will ever meet. Out of that team of 10, 40, or 100 developers, how many will truly become those masters?
My experience over the past 8 years of working in industry has led me to find that only a few will ever commit themselves to the craft of Web development, and that worries me as a developer and as a manager. We all want job security, and dedicating oneself to excellence in a field implies we’re in that field for the long haul. But what career path can a Web developer expect to have today? What opportunities will be available 5 years from know? There are many unknowns and I think that this may be one big reason I don’t see more talented developers taking the plunge and committing themselves more fully to Web development as a craft and career.
Karl points to another problem: the “majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living”, which to me implies that most people think anyone can be a Web developer (how many times have you heard someone state that their kid could build a better site?) and therefore they don’t take the craft of Web development seriously. I’ve found that most Web developers who didn’t emerge from computer programming backgrounds have serious complexes over whether or not they’re “real” developers… and a lot of this is due to snarky computer programmers who put Web developers down because they make the same, stupid assumption that “anyone can do Web development”. How is that encouraging to anyone looking at committing themselves to this work as their career? (Nevermind how irrational it is for a computer programmer to dismiss part of their larger discipline.) How is that encouraging to anyone who has hopes of using Web development as a basis for a career that could include programming in other languages?
So what’s a developer to do? And what’s a manager to do? I’ll post my ideas at another time… right now, tell me yours.
Posted August 7, 2007 at 3:16 AM in Business, Meeeeeeee, Women!, Work | Comments (1)
In this recent study, a Yale post-doc has found that a woman who shows anger in the workplace is likely to be seen as incompetent and out of control. In order to achieve status at work, women may have to behave calmly in order to be seen as rational. In fact, an “angry” woman is also likely to make less money than an “unemotional” woman, though in either case is still likely to make less than a man.
No wonder why so many women end up adopting a “nice girl” approach in business. But you know what? That doesn’t work either — at least not for the woman trying to always be so nice. That’s why I’m glad to see that Erica wrote up her 5 steps to stop being too nice. I was also pleasantly surprised by the book Ambitchous by Debra Condren, which promotes embracing ambition as a virtue, standing up for one’s self, and being authentic in order to be achieve success on one’s own terms and to be happy with one’s life.
I could go on at length about the “nice girl/angry woman” paradox, but I won’t because I resolved this internal conflict a long time ago. Ultimately I only care about being authentic, because when I’m not true to myself, everything else in my life goes to hell.
Sure, I try to be nice, and yes, I get angry. I don’t let people step all over me, but I also don’t run around yelling and screaming (much — hey, I’m Italian!). Some people will think of me as the crazy lady but really don’t care. I simply hope that others will remember that I behave the way I do because I care about myself, my work, my people, or whatever the issue is at hand. It’s in expressing some emotion that I am (and I think most women are) most comfortable demonstrating my commitment to my work, by showing how much I care about what I do. An unemotional response might help a man better understand my point, but wouldn’t be an authentic expression of myself.
To those that know me and work with me, I hope the above is either already apparent to you or is now clear. To everyone, here’s what I ask of you: The next time you encounter a “nice girl”, ask her if she’s being true to herself by always being so nice. And when you butt heads with an “angry woman”, acknowledge her commitment to the work and doing what is right. Encourage people be themselves, to be authentic. I bet that you’ll find that you can then do the same, and everyone will be all the happier for it.
Posted May 23, 2007 at 10:30 AM in Business, Just Sayin, Work | Comments (1)
Robert Scoble alerted readers to Jeff Barr’s post about Google recruiting. I had to laugh out loud here, because I’ve also been subject to some strange Google recruiting crap myself.
Most recently, I got an e-mail from a Google recruiter (who clearly did look at my Web site, because she commented on the pink-ness of my blog) with regards to a technical solutions engineer position. The first thing that struck me as odd is that, if you actually read my resume, you’ll learn that I’ve been in management positions for a while… so why would I be interested in an engineering position? The next oddity was the requirement that I complete a self-evaluation before discussions could proceed. Uh-huh. No thanks.
Of course, when I got that e-mail I was laughing pretty hard, because in the many years I’ve attended the Grace Hopper Celebration I’ve talked to Google folks many times about job opportunities there — and was basically told again and again that “Google doesn’t recruit Web developers because that’s not important to [their] business”. Whatever.
I have some friends that have gone to Google, but honestly, the more I learn about them, the more suspicious I am of them. I feel like they’re one giant social engineering experiment, and we’re all their guinea pigs.
Hi, my name is Kimberly Blessing. I'm a computer scientist, Web developer, standards evangelist, feminist, and geek. This is where I write about life, the Web, technology, women's issues, and whatever else comes to mind.
