What is the balance of genders in your department?
LBRE - 3/18 women:men
GSB research group mostly women, IT group ½ women with a lot of women in leadership positions
CRC - all men.. 10% women in CRC (out of 50 people) - does desktop support
UC Berkeley - a lot of staff are Berkeley alums, should we recruit undergrads, think about disciplines that lead to IT jobs and encouraging women to consider jobs in IT. 70:30 ratio
School of Med - help desk and field support at best 10% women
Administrative Systems - 5/16 are men! manage SERA system (research administration system) -- newer team created recently
At Stanford, most IT groups are really tiny, like Earth Sciences has four people
Reaching out to kids
Programs to do outreach to bring in Bay Area high school students, elementary school students to bring girls into IT at Stanford, meet women leaders in IT.
Girls who code Club on campus - could we partner with them and offer field trips for them to come to campus
When you talk to your kids about what you do, what is their reception of you talking about IT?
They form perceptions of what girls do vs. boys do
Hard to understand what IT means and is… “internet” is videos, youtube, etc.
Hard to define what IT is to kids…
Why might there be a gender difference?
There is a big difference from a generational perspective. 30 years ago there really weren’t any women in IT.
Issues around recruitment, hiring, and interviewing
Getting people in the pipeline is happening, and we need to keep getting it to happen.
One recent hiring had only men as finalized candidates… why?
Intimidating to be the woman interviewing on a team of all men
What are some ideas for the interviewing and onboarding process to help women see that it’s a friendly place to work
Bring in a woman from another group to participate in the interview process
What can we do in the recruitment process to get more women to apply?
Clayman Institute for Gender has tactical things for hiring - http://gender.stanford.edu/
Video resources
Be clear about the criteria you are hiring for before getting people, to get a more diverse resume pool
Be more flexible with your job description, particularly with time flexibility 60% time
Job descriptions have an enormous amount to do with gender balance
Women will look at a possible job and won’t apply if they don’t think they can already do the job. Vs. a man who will assume he can learn that when he gets there.
Describe your ideal candidate and what they bring to the table, enabling both men and women to envision themselves in that role.
Key duties, some bullets, preferred skills.. more broad
Job descriptions can be more of a narrative
Why are we writing job descriptions in silos, vs. getting input from others?
IT job descriptions be circulated more widely for input on how they are written?
Could HR step in and connect up different groups
Panel could go work with HR to put something together to help them attract better candidates
How do we write job descriptions that are more gender neutral?
HR at Berkeley provides targeting goals for that position and offers suggestions of where to advertise
Can we have a more fair hiring process by hiding names/genders?
Can hiring process hide the name until later on in the interviewing process?
Can we be more public and honest about the ratio, and the trend of growth in the ratio
Could Stanford publicly state that they want to hire more women in IT?
Research says women are more interested in jobs that are more integrated with other things, vs. things like infrastructure, servers, etc…. is there a perception of certain fields that is wrong? Would women be interested in jobs in help desk and field level support?
Tailor job descriptions and recreate the jobs to be more balanced, more integrated, un-silo the jobs..?
A balanced team (or not so balanced team)
Adding even one woman can balance a team and make a big difference
Gender in management
There are a lot of female web developers, but not a lot in senior management roles
Problem keeping women and helping them progress in their careers
pressures about having families, pursuing education…
It’s tough.
Need to acknowledge that having children is part of life, it’s inevitable. We need to be more flexible with what you need to be in a job.
Right now, flexibility is dependent on small teams and mangers being open to this. There isn’t a university-level policy or guideline or attitude about this. Prevents some women from becoming full-time staff.
Benefits and family
Benefits structure funnels us into a traditional mode of women taking time off.
More equal parenting benefits.
Flexibility has to come from top down. Leadership needs to set this expectation.
Managers with children are more understanding. This is important.
Sometimes managers without children who have higher expectations are not as forgiving.
Perception of gender bias vs. reality
Perception of this is very interesting
The perceived ratio is very different than the real ratio
IT is a broad field. What are the more specific problem areas?
Strengths of different genders
Men tend to be more narrowly focused, but as a result get intense things done
Women more broad, able to integrate things better, able to get people to work better together
Having a mix really is helpful for team dynamic
Women in IT need to be able to speak both languages between mostly male teams and female teams
Harder tech skills seem to be more dominated by men… softer skills more by women
Next steps
Consider a women-only session to get feedback
Survey to IT staff to gather data
Present findings to leadership and the IT community
Connect with the STLP 2015 Gender and IT affinity group (email iposton@stanford.edu)
