One Of You [ Reshma Saujani for New York City Public Advocate ] Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting Maler - News. My first job in journalism was at a local newspaper staffed mostly by men. When many of them left for gigs elsewhere, I was told that hiring decisions would be based on finding the "best person for the job. " In a matter of months, we had staffed all of our management positions with three white men named Mike.
So I tipped the gender balance even further—I quit. This week, the Women's Media Center released its annual report on the state of women in the nation's newsrooms, radio stations, and film sets. Last year, women made up only 22 percent of the local radio workforce, compared to 29.2 percent in 2010. This story is not new. It's easy to hide behind that old journalistic convention of objectivity, but when your "unbiased" hiring strategy results in the systematic underrepresentation of women, something very biased is going on. Photo via (cc) Flickr user visual.dichotomy. Women And Collective Intelligence Will Solve Our Planetary Crises. Sustainability is a so-called wicked problem. It is complex, difficult to define, impossible to solve in a linear fashion and the aspects of the problem are so interrelated that it is impossible to consider (and therefore impossible to model) all of the unintended consequences that might accompany any single “solution.”
This complexity makes us anxious. The common approach in the past has been to reduce the problem to smaller parts, solve for “x,” and hope that these disparate solutions aggregate positively. The nature of wicked problems is that they yield to the truth of systems--the consequences of one action are difficult to completely predict because of the many moving parts and interacting factors. The consequences are further disguised because of the time delay in large systems. For instance, the carbon in the atmosphere that is just now reaching a significant tipping point has been accumulating for a century. Most recently, MIT professors Thomas Malone and Patrick J. Why Your Next Board Member Should Be A Woman. Editor’s note: Aileen Lee is a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she focuses on investing in consumer internet ventures.
You can read more about Lee at KPCB.com and follow her on Twitter at @aileenlee. Good questions have been asked lately of tech companies without gender diversity on their boards of directors. While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards. Why should we care? For one, women are the power users of many products and it’s just smart business to have an understanding of key customers around the table. Could you imagine a game company without any gamers on the leadership team or board?
If you’re not aware, studies also show companies with gender diversity at the top drive better financial performance on multiple measures – for example, 36% better stock price growth and 46% better return on equity. The Face of Success, Part 2: Where Are All the Female Tech Geniuses? I used to think Silicon Valley was a model meritocracy. From 1995 to 2005, 52 percent of the Valley’s startups were founded by people born abroad. Immigrants from India had become the dominant company-founding immigrant group. They had achieved this by mastering the Valley’s rules of engagement and building their own mentoring networks. Then I moved to Berkeley, Calif., and started frequenting networking events in Silicon Valley. It soon became blatantly obvious that the immigrant data didn’t tell the full story. For me, the most eye-opening event was a tech awards event hosted by the blog TechCrunch in January 2010.
I decided to make this my next research project. I found that the problem is deeper than merely who gets to go on stage at a TechCrunch event. Many people in the Valley suggested that the backgrounds and motivation of high-potential women inhibit them from becoming entrepreneurs. So then: Are women less competent as entrepreneurs than men?
No. Sheryl Sandberg: the first lady of Facebook takes the world stage | From the Guardian. Sheryl Sandberg was once in a meeting in New York, pitching a deal, when she needed a bathroom break. Embarrassed, the man to whom she was pitching had to admit he had no idea where the women's bathroom was. Sandberg wondered whether they had just moved in to the office. No, came the reply, they had been there for a year. "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office for a year? " Sandberg later recalled. "And he looked at me and said, 'Yeah, or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom.'" Facebook's chief operating officer (COO) is used to being the only woman in the boardroom – but she doesn't like it.
If Sandberg has anything to do with it, that is going to change. Sandberg told her bathroom story in a speech at TED, the tech world's version of Davos. The same could not be said of Sandberg. Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Social Network himself, poached Sandberg in 2008. "She's the grownup in the room," says Hamadeh. "I said, 'You're right.'