At last check Bill and Melinda Gates’ net worth was around $97 billion dollars (USD). While the number is astounding on its own, bear in mind that this power couple has made over $50 billion in contributions to noteworthy charitable causes and foundations. They give much of their money away. What do Bill and Melinda support? Disaster relief, human development, medical research, etc. We can now add “Women in Technology” to an already notable list.
During a recent interview on NBC, Melinda Gates noted, “Women are so underrepresented in the technology sector in the United States, and yet tech is pervasive.” To bolster the profiles of women engaged in Tech, Gates launched a technology incubator in September with the goal of “getting women into tech and helping them stay there.” For Gates, herself a onetime programmer on the Microsoft team, the quest to equip young women to succeed in technology is deeply personal. When Gates went to work for Microsoft in 1983, more than 35% of computer science degrees awarded in the United States were awarded to women. Today, the number is less than 20%.
The Conversations
As Melinda Gates builds her office and team, she converses with Silicon Valley leaders about the most troubling issue in the Valley: Where are the women? Consider this: In current US and Canadian contexts, nearly 50% of all law and medical degrees are awarded to women. This represents a “doubling” of representation since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, as the need for technologists grows exponentially, fewer and fewer women are staking their flag in the technology sector. “Every company needs technology,” laments Gates, “and yet we’re graduating fewer women technologists.” “That is not good for society,” she adds, “We have to change it.” What is Melinda Gates learning from her conversations? The gendering of gaming probably led to a decline of women engaged in tech. She makes some good points. The games of the early 80s – Pong, Packman, Asteroids – were generally gender-neutral. As gamification intensified, the rise of titles focused on genres like war, football, and racing connected with an increasingly male audience. Gates calls this the “leaky pipe,” a leak that created an upstream siphoning of young women from computer science degrees and leadership in technology sectors. Compounding the trend, colleges and universities built computer science curricula around a narrow, testosterone-fueled target audience. Gates recognizes that is paradigm must shift. “If it’s completely geared towards an 18-year-old white male and they are not thinking about role models for women or problem sets they get for women, how do we keep [women] in the course?” Further, as I noted in a previous article, many of the women who make their way to Silicon Valley are often treated like third-class citizens or worse by their male counterparts.
We need to buck this trend too.
Towards Solutions
Gates believes that bolstering the participation of women in technology begins with highlighting the contributions of women who are already making significant contributions to the field. Makes sense, doesn’t it? When young women see stars like Sheryl Sandberg, Ginni Rometty, and Meg Whitman leading significant tech companies, young women are more likely to say, “That could be me twenty years from now.” Beyond the aspirational role modeling, Gates also contends that young women should be given real-time STEM opportunities that are led and sustained by women in the industry. Coding camps, enrichment classes, and technology competitions that connect women in technology with young women interested in learning more, builds skills, self-esteem, and primes the pump for further innovation. In higher education settings, leading institutions like Stanford and Harvard continue to tweak their technology offerings to move away from the gender-exclusive models that filled syllabi on the tech side of the academy for decades.
Some tech companies are already refitting their operations to attract and support talented women in technology. “Now tech companies are finally saying they care a lot about having females in the workplace,” says Gates, who sees the proof in some of the big brands from the Valley. Big outfits like Google, for example, offer generous family leave benefits that recognize that the bright MIT grad who’s developing the next big Android app may also be very excited about starting a family with her partner. Policies that police inappropriate behavior – like sexual harassment – also help technology firms create healthier environments for female workers.
Entrepreneurial Incubation
Perhaps Melinda Gates’ boldest initiative is in the realm of incubation. Her new incubation model will provide tech-savvy women with the equipment, financial support, and the mentoring they need to bring great ideas from the conceptual space to implementation. Picking on Apple (no surprise from a Gates), Melinda wonders why a watch that can monitor vital statistics doesn’t have an app that tracks menstruation. She’s right of course.
Hopefully the emerging decade will overcome the gendered trends of the current one. A rise in the roles of women in computer science degrees and growth in the number of patents attributed to women, will demonstrate that we’re making progress. I’ll do my part, what about you?
