Category Archives: Hopper – Anita Borg Institute

Here are some of the photos I took at the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (17-20 October 2007, Orlando,
Florida). Sun was a Platinum Sponsor: we had 24 women attend, 10 of us were
on panels or running BOFs, 3 of us were

GHC Community: Official Bloggers. My daughter Jessica was on the “Girl
Geeks” panel which I moderated and she was also an
official conference blogger.

Robin Jeffries cuts Systers 20th Birthday cake:

Poster Session and 1st night reception:

Gender and Social Networking Sites Poster:

Efficiently Handling Wildcard Queries in XML Poster:

Determining Scribble Intention in Musical Notes Poster:

Hardware Security Protocols for IP Protection Poster:

Jeanette Wing speaks at 1st Keynote Session:

Sun’s Recruiting Table:

Sun’s Recruiting Table:

Sun’s Recruiting Table:

Sun’s Recruiting Table:

Official Bloggers and Notetakers:

Girl Geeks Panel Members:

Girl Geeks Panel in Session:

Girl Geeks Panel Afterwards:

Hopper Conference Badges and Ribbons:

Fran Allen and Jessica:

Robin Jeffries and Jessica at Awards Banquet:

Sun Table 1 at Awards Banquet:

Sun Table 2 at Awards Banquet:

Dancing at Awards Banquet:

Sun in Green Room at Sponsors’ Night:

Sun in Green Room at Sponsors’ Night:

Sun in Green Room at Sponsors’ Night:

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

Images Copyright 2007 by Katy Dickinson

I attended the “Workplace Mentoring” panel this last afternoon
of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. On the panel
were representatives from HP, Clarke University, Intel, MentorNet, and
Google. Mostly, they told war stories and gave best
practices advice. Resources recommended were:

• 
  http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw, CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing research (CRA-W), look for mentoring workshop information
• In Action: Creating Mentoring and Coaching Programs
  by Linda Stromei, 2001 (ISBN-10: 1562862847 and
  ISBN-13: 978-1562862848)
• 
  http://www.ncwit.org/practices.box.mentoring.html
  “Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work”
• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton, 2001 (ISBN-10: 0743201140 and ISBN-13: 978-0743201148
• http://research.sun.com/SEED/
  Engineering Mentoring: SEED Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development
  program, data and flowcharts

There were a variety of experiences and programs described at many
levels of maturity and success. Other program representatives were
identified in the audience. Some of the topics discussed in detail
were the difference between mentoring and patronage, the three-way
complex relationship between mentors, mentees, and the mentee’s
manager, cultural influences and differing expectations of mentoring,
and how “mentoring” was translated.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

The “Invited Change Agents” panel at this second day of the

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing features the
three women who won this year’s 2007 Anita Borg Change Agent Awards:

• Wafa Abdul Rahman AlMansoori (Bahrain)
• Zeinab Safar (Egypt)
• Irina Khomeriki (Georgia)

This award was created by Turing Award and inaugural Anita Borg Technical
Leadership Award winner, Fran Allen (IBM Fellow, retired). Fran was in
today’s audience. Change agents
work in their community to attract and support women in technology.
Recipients are recognized for their technical leadership and advocacy work.
The Hopper Conference is remarkable for the geographic diversity of its
participants (and for its lack of gender diversity, being almost all women);
so, these three are not the only women here from their areas of the world.
However, they are remarkable for their accomplishments and vision.

Dr. Safar talked about some of the barriers she faces in Egypt:

• 30% women illiterate, 20% men illiterate
• Language, social, and cultural barriers for girls and women
• Lack of access to computers for girls (boys have more access if there
  are computers available)
• Encouragement and permission is needed for girls to become educated (fathers need to make opportunity for women to be trained). However,
  once girls are in the school system, they can continue and succeed.
  IT is popular and women succeed in the field professionally and
  represent 30% of the IT sector.

Dr. Khomeriki and Dr. AlMansoori said that their countries shared
many of these same problems. They each added that there was a generation
difference, with the younger people being more computer capable.
Dr. AlMansoori said that Bahrain literacy is 98% in the under-50 age group.
She said that men needed to be mentors for women so that women could learn
to do more than keep the home and take care of children.

Dr. Safar said that she hoped women would do something for women,
to help women in Egypt
to learn more about Information Technology. She looks to NGOs
(non-governmental organizations) and private donors (like industry and the
Anita Borg Institute) for support. Dr. Khomeriki talked about internet
use in Georgia (3.75 users per 100 people, often by way of a smokey
cyber cafe) and how important it was to have quick information access.
Dr. AlMansoori said it was hard to get program funding in Bahrain
because everyone knows her country is rich. Also, Bahrain is a small
country and only boys can work out of the country, so women have fewer
job opportunities.

The moderator asked a question from one of last year’s Change Agent
Award winners: what had the three learned by attending Hopper 2007,
and what would they do differently?

• Dr. Safar said that she should have brought a student, and also
  since the Hopper Conference includes about half students, that she should
  get more students to participate in her conferences in Egypt.
• Dr. Khomeriki said she had a new point of view.
• Dr. AlMansoori
  said she would have looked for a mentor to enrich her
  experience. She plans to establish a mentoring program in Bahrain for
  students, Engineers, and fresh graduates to bring out their best. A
  mentoring program will encourage people to seek help from others who
  know how to do things better. She wants them to know that seeking
  improvement is not admitting inability. She is looking for help to
  set up this new mentoring program.

I gave Dr. AlMansoori the 2006
“Mentoring for Employee Development” 2-page handout from the National
Center for Women & Information Technology
(NCWIT), a reference to Sun’s
http://research.sun.com/SEED/
web site about the SEED Engineering mentoring program which I manage,
and my card. I hope she will follow up with me! It would be very interesting
to follow up on today’s discussion.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

I am up early this morning after dancing late at last night’s
banquet for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing because Maria Klawe
is speaking. Maria Klawe is amazing – she is now President, Harvey
Mudd College, after serving as Dean of Engineering at Princeton.

Maria’s wants Engineers to do great technical work but
also have a full life and make a difference in the world too. Having
seen Maria dancing last night, I know she lives what she recommends.

The paradox which Maria highlighted in today’s keynote talk is that
there are increasing percentages of women in Computer Science
Faculty, grad students, and leadership positions in industry and
academia; however, undergraduate CS women student numbers continue
to decrease. Right now, 20% of Computer Science PhD students in the USA
and Canada are women, while only 14% of CS undergrads are women. Yet,
the worldwide demand for workers with CS degrees is higher now than
ever before (she believes that trend will probably continue for the
next 10 years).

Maria encouraged outreach to schools, parents, and teachers to help.
She said if each of the 1,400 women at Hopper 2007
could convince 3 girls to go into CS, the problem would start to reverse.
She advises finding opportunities to talk to any organization (about
leadership or whatever) and then insert truths about CS as an aside.
To talk with girls, go where they are: to art classes or camp rather
than to High School CS classes. Craft messages for High School math,
bio, chem, art and other
classes. Maria asked the audience to raise their hands if they would commit
to talk with at least one (preferably 20!) High School girls. Most of
us did!

Maria Klawe’s advice on how to attract female college students to Computer
Science:

• Fabulous CS intro (and later) classes
• Get some CS required, have Dean advise all students to take CS classes
• Bring frosh to Hopper
• Post-frosh summer research experiences
• Make it easy to switch into CS (and offer CS in the summer)
• Provide CS double major option and flexibility
• Make a digital pre-med program

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

“Girl Geeks in High School: Technical Experiences of Future Inventors” was
the panel I moderated this afternoon at the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women
in Computing here in Orlando, Florida. See my

3 August 2007 blog entry for a full panel description. My daughter
Jessica and I worked on developing this panel for over six months.
She and three High School girls from the Silicon Valley joined me on the
stage today. Both she and I are blogging about it. (I haven’t read
Jessica’s blog entry yet but you can read it at
Feeling Elephants.)

I think the panel went well, both for the girls and for the audience.
In our hour, we covered both
questions the girls and I had discussed in advance plus new questions
from the audience. We talked about how the girls use technology
in school and for fun and what was working best for them. There was
some range of opinions but the girls agreed on many points:

• There were some differences between male and female teachers
  of science, math, and technology but the gender of the teacher
  generally didn’t matter.
• The gender of mentors mattered – females were much preferred.
• Laptops could be of great benefit in class but there was also
  temptation to misuse them during less interesting classes.
• No one used tablets nor had they seen them used effectively.
• Hands-on and interactive projects teach better and are more
  interesting.
• Many of their peers and adults also did not understand their
  interest in Engineering. However, their teachers and parents had
  encouraged and supported them.
• All of them came from families in which technology was
  used comfortably.

A very interesting question from the audience was whether the four
girls saw themselves as users or creators of technology. They said
they saw themselves “using to create” (being somewhere in-between
using and creating). However, their
examples of how they used technology were very sophisticated – far
beyond the abilities of a passive simple user.

I agree with one of the audience members who told me later that she
would be fascinated to see what these very talented and charming
young women did in the next twenty years. I do look forward to watching
their progress.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

“Introducing the Computing Community Consortium – Facilitating Visions
for Our Future” was a presentation I attended this first afternoon
of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing here in Orlando, Florida.
Susan Graham of U.C. Berkeley presented information about the
newly-created Computing Community Consortium
(CCC) which is funded by the
U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and was established by the Computing
Research Association (CRA). CCC is to create venues for community
participation in developing research visions and stimulating new research
activities. The CCC website says:

Under an agreement with the National Science Foundation, CRA will establish a consortium of computing experts that will provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects.
Under the three-year, $6 million agreement, CRA will create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the field. The CCC will create venues for community participation for developing visions and creating new research activities.

It is interesting (if confusing) to listen to unfamiliar
professional jargon. Although I helped to teach a class at U.C. Berkeley
Engineering for many years, I have never formally been a part of a
university. I have also never worked for the government. So, the steady
flow of new acronyms and organization/funding assumptions used in describing
CCC took some immediate mental translation. In fact, because of these
language barriers, I am not entirely sure I understand how CCC works, so
this is a hard blog entry to write.

As an example of the kind of research CCC supports, Jen Rexford of Princeton
talked about Geni (Global Environment for Network Innovations), a project with the goal of creating an academic
grass-roots community to improve Information Technology infrastructure.
Creating a new Internet, thinking from scratch to create a new
long-term vision, seems to be at least part of Geni’s work. More on the

Geni initial design and science plan is available. Dr. Rexford
said that the research community needs to think big to play a lead role
in how the Internet will evolve.

I asked about the relationship of this academic research community
with the open source community as well as with industry. I wanted to know
if CCC’s visionary work was mostly to be done by academic researchers or
would include a larger technical community. In my question, I used the
example of Sun’s OpenSolaris open source community to illustrate the kind of work and complex
communication that goes into creating technology collaboratively. From
Dr. Graham’s answer, I think that CCC will mostly focus on academic work but
individual CCC projects will get some input from industry. Dr. Graham said
that industry had a shorter term vision while the academic research
community developed visions more than 5 years out. In my experience,
industry does create longer-term visions. We talked after the presentation
and I hope to discuss the question further.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

Solaris and OpenSolaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

“Invited CTOs” was the second panel I attended at this first morning
of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing here in Orlando, Florida.
Represented are Chief Technology Officers from Mayfield, Intel,
Symantec, Thoughtworks, and Network Appliance. I was pleased to
see Mark Bregman (CTO of Symantec), with whom I worked on the Silicon Valley

Heart Walk last month. I was sorry to see just one woman on the
panel, but that is reality.

One of the first themes discussed by this panel was how a CTO is
different from a most-senior Engineer or most-senior Manager or
Executive. From what the panelists say, this is also a regular
topic of conversation both inside and outside of companies.
“CTO” may stand for Chief Talking Officer or Chief Travelling Officer.
Justin Rattner of Intel said: “My job is about communication –
talking about our technologies. The ability to communicate effectively
across a broad range of technical subjects is very important. Influence
directions, nudge people, guide people – get them to make crucial decisions.
Cultivate technical workforce and then communicate with them.”
Another panelist said that being a CTO is being a technology
influencer rather than being a technology innovator.
(I am sitting in the way back of a big room because that is where
the electrical outlet for my laptop is so I can’t see who is talking…)

The most fascinating topic for me was:
What does it take for a woman to become a CTO or Fellow? Why does the
population of women in technology companies drop dramatically in the
mid-grades and higher? The first answer when this topic was raised was that
persistence and determination matter – you can’t get promoted if you
leave. Maria Klawe (President, Harvey Mudd College) then asked an
applauded question – “Do women choose to leave or get driven out?”
The panelists discussed management track vs. technical track and how they
often saw talented women encouraged to shift to the management track
(that is, discouraged from staying on the technical job ladder).

In answer to my question about how they had worked against the problem
that many women lack confidence in their own ideas and get lured away
into non-technical executive jobs because they don’t think they will
ever get promoted to Fellow, Mark pointed out that this could be a
cultural problem as well as a problem for women. He then said that
mentoring could help: a one-on-one encouraging relationship with a
very senior person promotes persistence and success. (The benefits of
mentoring was a regular theme and favored remedy mentioned by all of the
panelists.) Rebecca Parsons (CTO of Thoughtworks) said that
each of us needs to take responsibility to push back when arrogance
or agressiveness shut down questions or new ideas. Being shut down in
public will make many people stop trying and leave. None of us can
condone or sit silently listening to this kind of bad behavior if we
want to support the flow of diverse ideas and people in technical
leadership.

Official
GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the
GHC Forum. You
can find me at
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.