SFWoW

San Francisco Women on the Web: serve, educate, empower

A former colleague at IBM sent me this article today about the first woman to win the Turing Award. Frances Allen pioneered compiler optimization at IBM, and has, over the years, been recognized as an IBM Fellow and inducted to the WITI Hall of Fame.

Reading this article made me think back to my experiences at IBM and the female role models I had there. In my very first job out of college, the first five managers in the chain of command, all the way to the vice president level, were women. Over my five years at IBM, I worked with some amazing female engineers. Like Frances Allen, many of them joined IBM back before there were computer science departments at universities. But IBM sought them out and trained because they were looking for smart and talented people where-ever they might be.

Today, IBM and most other companies have changed how they recruit. They generally don’t offer intensive computer programming training courses, and instead look for people already with the skills they need to dive into the work. As recently as 15 years ago, IBM was still sending new employees off to three-month training courses before they started work. Now, employees get a day of orientation.

Companies are employing who the universities are graduating out of their computer science and related departments. IBM doesn’t have to be as creative as they were when Frances was graduating from school, when the distributed pamphlets called “My Fair Ladies.” There are always CS grads pouring out of school.

But the grads coming out of those schools are generally boys, and I can see how companies like IBM have changed their strategies. They used to say, “Let’s go find smart women and educate them to be programmers.” Now they say, “Let try to convince girls that they want to be CS majors in college so we can hire them as programmers when they graduate.”

I was 3 years old when my mom tried to dress me in a little pink outfit. I said very adamantly, “Mommy… Pink is only for little girls.” And I didn’t wear pink again. Because, darnit, I was a big girl.

Fast forward 30-odd years to just last month, when I was interviewed by Bay Area Business Women for an article about women in technology. Article titled “The Five Percent Enigma.” My employer, Marker Seven (blue-themed, mind you), has plenty of women programmers, and I’m very proud of our team. But the reporter asked me, just in general, if there are enough women working in tech, and I said no, not at all. In fact, I said that a lot of women work in the web industry, especially in marketing and web content. But there is a dearth of women in web development, as in the actual programming part of the process. When asked why, my answer was that programming is seen as a scientific skill in which women generally are not encouraged to pursue interest.

And then I was quoted in an article in a big pink web template. Here it is, on Page 2.

Oh well; it’s all good press for SF WoW! This doesn’t mean I’ll be appearing in a pink dress at CANWOW, though, so don’t hold your breath, or call my mom.

Thanks to Sarah for getting me the interview and to Kimba for asking me to blog about it!

Thanks to the WoWsers who came out in the rain last night for the Resume Roundtable at the Orbit Room!! We had a solid bunch of old-school WoWsers and some list newbies, with a good mix of those established in tech sector/online jobs, and others looking to return to the field.

Susan Stearman, former SF WoW Director and marketing guru, gave a talk on resume hints, do’s and don’ts. Probably one of the best reminders she gave was that the purpose of the resume was to get the interview, not tell a life story! She also stressed that the resume is to be about you- don’t waste space talking about what a company you worked for does- talk about what you did for that company.

Other key points:
* Use accomplishment statements
* Put relevant experiences towards the top of the resume
* Use a proper balance between black and white space on the paper
* Don’t obsess about your wording- focus on talking about achievements
* Cover the last 8-10 years of work experience
* Do not print date of B.A. (or don’t give the employer an opp to discriminate based on age)

Those were just a few of Susan’s helpful tips. Thanks, Susan!

We then moved to the resume trade portion of the evening, where WoWsers traded resumes to critique, red pens and all! This phase generated a lot of great feedback- for active job seekers and for those of us who just want to stay current.

Many thanks to the following WoWsers- notably Susan Stearman for, well, steering us in the right direction! And kudos to Rebecca for launching the whole event, as a lead up to SF WoW’s CANWOW recruitment event (free with rsvp). Watch the SFWoW site for event details and ticket info for the Interview Tips panel, scheduled for 2/28 (buy tickets here).

To close it out, I received valuable feedback from the event- both from employed WoWsers who came to the workshop from a hiring/managerial perspective, and also from ladies who have gotten recent feedback on resumes from prospective employers.

Thanks again! Off to edit-

Bethany

Update: added photos here.

On the SFWOW email group, we have a few different subjects where we can post messages. This is to facilitate email filters more than anything, as some subjects are more interesting to some rather than others.

Recently the (community) posts came under a little debate. There are too many of them. So everyone has chimed in on what kind of posts we’d like to see more of and what kind of posts we’d like to see less of. In response to that thread, I wrote my own little history of the (community):

I’ve been on this list since 1995 when it was known as sf-webgrrls. In the beginning the list was all about UNIX and Networking in the IP sense of the word and html tags. Our web browsers were Netscape and Mosaic. Web sites were gray. Hardrives had 256 megs of storage space. Information was saved on floppies. Pine was the email client of choice. Marketing wasn’t even a topic of discussion and all the women on the list were hardcore tech oriented people and this list was a much needed list as women were few and far between in the NOCs of the Bay Area.

Then web site design became an issue, testing web sites to see if they would crash became a concept, then marketing products via web sites, then web site launches, product launches, party invitations, and The Webbies. Oh, and who could forget connectivity and bandwidth? Everyone was incredibly busy, working 12, 14 hour days everyday, and spending a lot of money. And how do you create a nested table? Do I need a home router?

Then 2000 happened (for me) and 2001 (for others). I got layed off, you got layed off. Are we scared yet? Have we lost our homes yet? Are we moving out of the area? How long can I eek out on unemployment? How can I transition into another line of work? Is there still enough work out there to go freelance? But it was all good, wasn’t it? Does anyone have a workaround for the MSG in top ramen?

Suddenly we went from an incredibly headdy place to a very weird place. And it was rather sudden. There were days when this list was a real lifeline for some of us - keeping us connected to a group of somewhat like-minded people going through similar circumstances. (community), which used to be (off topic), posts were more frequent. (Tech) became less important because a lot of us weren’t working. Out in the world, Tech itself was stagnating, languishing in the ethers.

It’s only been in the last year that jobs have been starting to ramp up here in The Bay Area. Still nowhere near pre-2000 levels, Craigslist has had a lot of tech postings in the last year compared to the four years prior. I can remember the days not so long ago when an entire week’s worth of job postings showed up on the front page of the software/qa/dba section of craigslist.

(community) is what got us through the downtime. I enjoy being able to give travel advice and info (and plugging my site in the process). I like having a place to ask for a recommendation for housesitters (I am one!), restaurants to take clients, office space for rent, roommates needed (or how to get rid of one), and ok, a really good nail salon. It’s important to be able to ask your peers for these recs. Asking somehwere else, well, those folks just don’t know me like you all do.

So what’s the point, you may be asking yourself? This is a cyclical list. To get back to our tech roots will take a little conscious effort. I also agree with Andreas who posted a response to this thread, that a lot of the questions I have these days are business related. But I think there is still a lot more tech to be discussed.

So, if you are new, welcome to the list! If it isn’t what you expected then make it so. It’s your list after all.

Lauren has this great idea, which is to start an SF WoW blog, and here I get to write the very first post! She asked me about the history of San Francisco Women on the Web (SF WoW- not to be confused with World of Warcraft) and how the group has changed since its beginning. Relevant topic now because it’s quite a lively debate on the list- those who remember it as a golden era of burgeoning technology, and those like me who have a love/hate relationship with that time.

We started before anybody would confuse us with World of Warcraft, for one. I remember the conversation where we came up with the name- Valerie Hoecke, who basically founded the group told us what the trademark lawyer had said about creating a name: it should be something specific to SF, and about the internet, something basically recognizeable, but still unique. Anyways, it was a huge improvement on the old name: SF WebGrrls. Growl- we’re nasty, hot, webmistressy girls! If you typed one wrong letter, that’s what you would get too. We got in a debate with the mothership in NYC (all of the nationwide WebGrrls did) about charging membership dues, and being for-profit. Valerie had the great idea of ceding and going for non-profit status. This was all in 1998. At that point, we’d had a few years of happy WebGrrl activities, and then we morphed into SF WoW.

The High Point

We were pretty much self-running at the point we transitioned, so I don’t remember, organizationally, any real shift. We had immensely successful programs: Top 25 Women on the Web was a 4-year running award ceremony, and PIMs (Platform Indepenedent Mixers) were as big as Pink Parties when they started. Along with that, there was a flip side. Flaky volunteers abounded, flamewars on the list, racial-political-etc. issues came up and swarmed around us. Cat discussions filled up your inbox… like kitty litter. We had a series of HTML workshops for teaching those that wanted to get into the next big thing: the internet (w00t!). Though most of us who started knew HTML already. I got in a great Perl study group that met every Monday at Bean There in Lower Haight, and we plowed through Randal Schwartz’s Learning Pearl. 30 peope RSVP’d to attend and only 5 made it. Flakiness abounded.

The Low Point

The Dot Com Bomb ripped our heart out, and the last thing we wanted to do was organize parties around the technology that ruined our bank account. Some things kept running in this period- PIMs, renamed Scrappies (scrappily organized), which is the photo above- myself and Ali Nufire in 2004, at Metropol. I remember one steering crew meeting when a director was leaving, and we offered to give her a bottle of wine as a parting gift. “Can you give me a Safeway coupon so I can buy groceries?” I can’t resist that story, as it’s a great anecdote, but not really … truthful. Sure, she said that, but then again, her and a few other list members were sad casualties of the pairing down and de-fluffing of tech companies (another post entirely). As one longterm SF Wowzer (that’s the thing you call someone in SF WoW, or just “Wowzer”) Andreas said, and he’s a guy, “There are always jobs for good people.” So sure, there was a huge falloff in jobs during 2001-3, but that doesn’t mean that the list floundered. More like, it quieted, focussed, and yet still managed to keep running.

Now

Two years ago, we decided to spend the existing assets of SF WoW on a series of parties. The idea was to invest capital in the group, to rejuvenate it or have at least a nice swan song. It ended up rejuvenating. Our Annual Party, on (or near) January 15th, 2005, we spent some cash on a nice restaurant, catering, and wine, and had one of the best event turnouts since Top 25. I heard, over and over that night, how people were glad ‘SF WoW is back’.

We also moved the list to Yahoo Groups and managed to survive Bush’s election. We had some very articulate, verbal pro-Bush supporters on the list so for about two years so the list became completely wrapped up in political turmoil. Our able volunteers managed to get the list over to Yahoo and prohibit political posts. Yep, that’s right. We agreed to disagree and just not talk about it! Even now, despite what goes on, people still chime in with “… and I’m so glad we got rid of politics” haha. Now the list is searchable- which is truly great. We have increased by 600 subscribers, from 1200 in the “low point”. I don’t actually know the numbers when we moved to SF WoW (someone please comment who knows) but it may have been in the 800s.

Not to be totally ingenuous- I recently posted on the list a long email about how bad I thought our discussions were getting “cats, nails, yoghurt”, and asked for members to re-examine why they were on a women’s networking and business list. Basically, to recommit to the mission. That has started some very interesting threads that I hope will carry over to this blog for those in the extended SF WoW community to read and contribute.