My favorite workshop was Industry's Role in Promoting Gender Equity in Academia. Panelists were:
Novell COO Burnside is pictured below left, and entrepreneur Rice-Oliver below right with two workshop attendees.
Humphreys got the discussion rolling by stating "Women in academia need help, not just money." She urged women in postions of leadership in high technology industry to exert some policy leverage on universities hosting programs funded by their companies. She also recommended that they mentor students and make themselves visible in the academic world in the capacity of speakers or visiting professors.
Ortiz noted that she didn't feel gender discrimination in her field until she left sexually conservative Spain, where 40% of physicists are women, for the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, where she remembers being "shocked" by the lack of women in her field there. The conservatism of Spanish culture and the normally late marriage age of Spanish women were factors that she believed helped to shield younger women from the type of harassment and social expectations that can alienate women from male-dominated fields.
Novell COO Burnside said that she has meetings with faculty heading programs funded by her company, she tells them that one of their jobs is "delivering a diverse workforce" and if they fail to do so, it will be held as their failure to deliver on conditions for funding. She urged women in industry to lose their complacency, and be aggressive and active in the educational environment. Three out of nine Vice Presidents and 20% of the management at Novell are women.
Successful entrepreneur Rice-Oliver, who is also president of the board of Girls, Incorprated, agreed that industry seems much more validating for women than the academic environment. She recommended that women science and engineering students take time off for internships or summer jobs in industry, where managers are far better trained and more ready to reward talent in women than are most tenured male science and engineering professors.
Several women in the audience spoke passionately about their bad experiences with graduate advisors and graduate school in general. From remarks on all sides, a general picture emerged: university professors have tenure, and so are the least influenced by market forces and also least affected by consequences of their actions on the marketability of their services. Graduate advising at many schools is haphazard, without quality assurance for the students, and professors are often able to raionalize their own poor management performance by saying a student "simply wasn't cut out for the field". Note however that this conference is scheduled during finals week for many universities, making it hard for women professors to attend and benefit from support at the conference.
Developer Katie Scheding of UCLA's multimedia program was part of the workshop Emerging Technologies on the Internet. She told us about Shockwave, which is a way to use animations created in Macromedia Director on the World Wide Web.
We also heard from Soraya Bittencourt, Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Bittencourt fought sexism in her native Brazil, launched two satellites before she came to America, and plays saxaphone in a blues band. She gave us an expert tour through the amazing features on her company's new Internet Explorer 3, including those unfortunately Microsoft-OS-dependent floating borderless frames. Oh my! Don't we have enough compatibility questions already with ordinary Netscape frames? Hmmm...
Amy Pearl, Manager of Java Engineering at Sun, waxed philosophically for us at the import of her product for blurring the boundary between client and server, something she said would happen more in the future as people gravitate towards "enterprise computing", and the definition of "enterprise" becomes more virtual and less localized in space. Pearl told us that she didn't foresee a profitable market in Java applets, they will always exist at the level of shareware, and said that Java will find it's major market in building full applications.
If you want to hear about the other workshops I went to -- sorry! My arm is aching enough already and I've got to get back to my physics! But I heartily recommend that women out there attend next year's Channels for Change.