Accidentally in Code

Tag: perception

  • On Being “Strategic”

    On Being “Strategic”

    Ages ago, a work colleague / friend offered me the following piece of advice: “We need to make sure you’re seen as strategic”.

    I’ve thought about it a lot ever since. It was the first time I realised I was on the edge of (perhaps in?) the trap of “she’s just not that strategic”.

    Because, y’know, you can deliver huge projects, scale teams/processes/etc, fix systematic issues and still… just be “so great at execution” 🙄

    This is not new – there’s an article in HBR from 2009.

    “When we asked how they would interpret our data, we heard three explanations. First, several women noted that they tended to set strategy via processes that differed from those used by their male counterparts. This suggests that what may in fact be visionary leadership is not perceived that way because it takes a different path. Second, we heard that women often find it risky to stray away from concrete facts, analyses, and details. And third, many women betrayed negative attitudes toward visionary leadership. Because they thought of themselves as grounded, concrete, and no-nonsense, and had seen many so-called visionary ideas founder in execution, they tended to eye envisioning behaviors with some suspicion”

    The article resonates with me. Particularly the distrust of “strategic leadership”. I have definitely seen examples of “strategic leaders” who failed to deliver, often putting the blame on team or circumstances, like the strategy was perfect, the failure was “just” in execution. This is part of why the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy resonated so much – the concept of the proximate objective, the value of strategy as something that actually effects change.

    There’s an interesting post on strategy here, and I can’t claim to mastery in all these things, but some things I keep in mind to try to manage perception of how “strategic” I am:

    • When possible, expose the underlying strategy. E.g. when someone is focused on an individual piece, step back and explain how it fits into the bigger picture.
    • Ask good questions. Use what you learn to reframe discussions to get to a better outcome, more quickly.
    • Document document document. Something I love about distributed work is that it relies more heavily on written communication – so I always have my recipts. In particular, any regular reporting should empasize progress against overall strategy.
    • Be willing to play a long game. It’s easier to sell people on progress than an idea. Make sure to build a narrative as the pieces build on each other.
    • Make time to think (and write).
  • Why Are We Still Geeks – Panel at GHC

    Why Are We Still Geeks – Panel at GHC

    Fortune Most Powerful Women Dinner With Marissa Mayer
    Credit: Flickr / Fortune Live Media

    Marie Klawe

    Been worried about image in the media for 20 years. Been working on it, but no progress. But “if you don’t even try, you definitely won’t succeed”. Had many failures, but getting closer to success.

    There used to be very few female lawyers and doctors, now it’s 50%. Still not reaching power – see the low number of female deans of med schools. In the 1970s, there were TV shows with male and female factors, and male and female lawyers – e.g. LA Law. They were portrayed as people making a difference, with interesting jobs and personal lives. They were attractive, and empathetic. Women flooded into these professions, and girls doing well thought about law and medicine as their careers.

    Now it’s forensic shows.

    Being a doctors or a lawyers isn’t really as interesting, not as interesting as CS. High levels of debt, long time to qualify, and lousy pay. There are more opportunities in CS than forensics.

    Media portrayal dramatically affects high school students. It really matters. Even if you really like CS, other people have the image that it is boring and uncreative – that matters.

    This underrepresentation is not just technical women, but women in general. The Gina Davis studies found that men are the main characters, and women are dressed sexily. Also technical men – see NCIS are portrayed as having no social like. They are OK-looking, but dress nerdy. Big Bang Theory – love the show, but it’s doing a terrible disservice to science and engineering. In Friends, Chandler had a job so boring that none could remember what it was. It was “data processor”, essentially CS. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is great with computers, but also really weird.

    Mid-1990s, met a NBC exec for saturday night movie series. Told him that they needed movies and series showing women as engineering, empathetic and doing interesting things with their lives.

    Raised money for a pilot, wrote it, working with a CS person turned screenwriter. They were jumping out of helicopters, no connection. Saw it wasn’t going anywhere.

    Mentions a TV series showing computer scientists doing interesting fun things. Email from Bob Quin – Rush. Startup in Sillicon Valley. Loved it, sent it to 20 people. Brad Weshler Co-CEO of IMAX, passed it on again – loved it. Went nowhere, have to get a channel to pick it up.

    It will eventually happen. People now realise that tech is changing the world.

    Megan Smith and people at Google are doing things, but personally out of ideas.

    Tried hard! Emailed with James Cameron. But getting nowhere.

    Brenda Laural

    Founder of  Purple Moon – amazing woman, my favourite panelist this year.

    The Star Trek reboot. Hated turning women from competent into a “wimpy slut”.

    Start at home, looking at the GHC 2012 image – there are power and racial issues there. Changes it up to put the Black woman in the centre, speaking, and gives the Asian woman Glass so “she has something to look at” (original shows her staring into space).

    We are responsible for our own representation – likes the way we look.

    Put out and hold up our self-representation. Deny power to the spectacle (how we look, speaks).

    There’s an inverse relationship between family income and desire for a Louis Vuitton bag amongst high school girls.

    Do great work and get noticed for it. Self promotion is good.

    Taking action – Wikipedia Storming (FemTechNet).

    Kim Surkan

    Hard not to feel disempowered when talking about women in the media. Unclothed. Objectified.

    Feminist Media Studies is growing. Media consumption is growing. Average is now >7 hours a day (much of it while multitasking).

    Stereotypes affect perceptions and performance. Self-fulfilling prophecies.

    Easier to protest a bad image, than an image that isn’t there.

    So much time on the TV/internet, that the space between lived reality and media is blurred. Result is decreased self-esteem.

    “Stepping out into your world, found your world is troubled” – on women in CS. BS levels in CS are declining.

    Women in the 1940s were part of the war effort, lots of women working at Bletchley Park.

    There is and extreme culture of sexism and anti-Feminism in CS, especially in gaming. The shift from geek to bro, supposed to appeal to younger men, it seems sexier. Women are 5% of people starting tech companies, the rise of frat culture in Silicon Valley. Recruitment materials alienate women, and hackathons, like TC disrupt.

    When women complain, they become the targets of hate speech. E.g. Anita Sarkesian, and Adria Richards.

    Women are reluctant role models, like Marissa Mayer.

    The backlash effect is harnessed to benefit, but why do women need to turn to kickstarted to start their companies?

  • Of Snap Judgments and Sexism

    Fascinating post today in CopyBlogger – Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. It’s a female writer outing herself; she’s been writing under a male pseudonym for the last three years. She’d tried under her real name, but started working under a second name because she didn’t want her own name to be associated with a failing business. Inadvertently, she started an experiment, because the name she’s picked was a man’s name. Finally she started having more success, which she attributes to people thinking she was a man. That’s such a brief overview, and I recommend you read the whole article, because it’s good.

    Anyway, I tweeted this with the comment “It’s not always overt, but sexism is still alive and well :'(“. And I continued to think about it.

    Her situation – working as a freelancer, often for one off, seems like it would be one of many quick decisions about whether or not to hire her. Perhaps even, snap judgments? Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Amazon), in car dealerships. In an experiment, car dealers were found to offer women (and black people) higher prices than they offered white men.

    Credit: Flikr / myoldpostcards
    Credit: Flikr / myoldpostcards

    As I write this, the article has been tweeted 1866 times and has 463 comments. And I think it’s a good thing, because it’s good that we’re having this conversation. How long ago would this kind of discrimination, overtly done, not generated any comment? Not that long. And this isn’t, I don’t think, overt. It’s about snap judgments. We’ve been proven to be discriminatory in our snap judgments, against women and against black people (more thoroughly discussed in Blink). But – we’re not as discriminatory in our long term relationships anymore. The response to the article shows how far we’ve come.

    As a women in tech, I’ve seen this. The look on someone’s face when you walk into a room of men I think it says, “is she lost?”. A guy I know (and like!) on meeting me started telling me the difference between a computer scientist and a software engineer quite recently. But – I also see that it’s a quick perception, and for most people it’s immediately changed by saying, or showing that no, you’re not lost. By speaking fluent geek, or making or doing stuff that demonstrates you know what you’re about.

    I think there are two lessons we can take from this. In our treatment of other people, we can learn to be aware of our snap judgments and consider our biases before we act on them. (Note, the only thing they found effective to reduce bias was reading or watching positive things about the group that you’re biased against – so instead of complaining about sexism we should put out and promote great stories of women doing awesome things).

    Lesson two – for ourselves – if we take from this that all things being equal, a man will beat out a women in perception… let’s strive to make things unequal instead. This doesn’t mean complaining, it means demonstrating our value better, educating ourselves so we perform better, and beating out on our capabilities, instead.