Tag Archives: Middle East

May 20, 2011 · 9:02 pm

TechWomen Mentor Training

I was one of the teachers for the first TechWomen Mentor Workshop today. HP Labs in Palo Alto generously hosted the event. We were joined by most of the 38 Technical Mentors and more than a dozen Cultural Mentors from over 40 Silicon Valley companies. These impressive professional women will coach the 38 Mentees from 6 countries and territories who will be arriving in June from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It was a day full of good questions, excitement, and anticipation.

TechWomen is funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), and implemented in partnership with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI). I have been the Mentoring Process Architect for TechWomen since September 2010, working with ABI. It is a joy to see the program finally starting!

Among many topics, we discussed schedules and expectations, technical and business competencies, vocabulary, learning goals, mentoring and community resources. The TechWomen program team put together a Mentor Guide which included many of these materials. Additional community resources which came out in discussion:

Zabihah (S.F. Bay Area) – for those who want to eat zabihah (conforming to Islamic dietary codes) food
Muslim Community Association (Santa Clara CA)

Some elements of the TechWomen program were inspired by the SEED mentoring program I created and managed for Sun Microsystems for 10 years. Details on SEED are available in the free Sun Labs Technical Report “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009” (published in 2009).

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Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Huawei, Mentoring, Middle East, SEED, Sun Labs, Sun Microsystems, teaching, technical women, TechWomen

May 17, 2011 · 8:52 pm

Jessica Graduated from CMU with Honors!

My daughter Jessica was graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with honors last weekend. Ten of her proud family flew to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from Boston, Pasadena, San Francisco, and San Jose to celebrate the occasion. My father, Wade Dickinson, who attended Carnegie Tech before graduating from West Point was particularly proud to see his granddaughter graduate from his alma mater.

Jessica majored in Ethics, History, and Public Policy (that’s one major offered by CMU in Humanities and Social Sciences). You can see a video of her advisor talking about Jessica’s accomplishments. Jessica was presented with a blank diploma folder because she will return to CMU as a 5th Year Scholar next year, to work on a special project and also complete her Minor in Vocal Music and concentration in Arabic. Jessica got to wear what she calls “commencement flare” in addition to her simple black robes:

A red stole for being an Andrew Carnegie Scholar
A maroon stole for spending a semester studying at CMU-Q in Doha, Qatar
A purple cord with tassels for being an honors student

Unfortunately, Jessica’s fiance Matthew was graduating at the same time from William and Mary hundreds of miles away, so we did not get to attend his commencement. The family did get to spend an afternoon visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of architecture, Fallingwater, which is like touring an lovely modern sculpture. This is the 75th anniversary for the house built on a waterfall.

Jessica is packing up her house this week to return home to the San Francisco Bay Area for the summer. She is getting married in August, then she and Matt will live in Pittsburgh next year.

Jessica and Paul at Fallingwater

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Tagged as CMU, Jessica, marriage, Matthew, Middle East, Paul, Qatar, Wade

March 8, 2011 · 10:13 am

International Women’s Day, TechWomen

I just talked with my husband by Skype at midnight his time, morning my time. He is in Shenzhen China on a business trip, and I am in San Jose California. John said that about about 9 pm, there were celebratory explosions in the street outside his hotel, presumably to honor International Women’s Day. In 2007, I blogged about enjoying Women’s Day in India. John and I both work for Huawei. It will be interesting to see how our China-based company celebrates International Women’s Day today at the R&D center in Santa Clara.

I am hoping that in honor of the day, we will see even more potential mentors applying for the TechWomen mentoring program. TechWomen will pair women in Silicon Valley with their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading technology companies in June 2011. If you are a qualified mentor, please apply using the form on http://www.techwomen.org/get-involved/. TechWomen is funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), and implemented in partnership with the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology (ABI).

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Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as China, Huawei, John, Mentoring, Middle East, technical women, TechWomen

November 9, 2010 · 5:17 pm

My Famous Daughter

Last week, CMU’s student online newspaper “The Tartan” featured a photo of my wonderful daughter Jessica working on her summer internship application workshop. This week, “The Tartan” reprinted one of her blog entries with photos from Qatar, called “Tales from abroad: Doha”. It tells the story of a stray budgie she cared for the night before coming home from a term at CMU-Q. Jessica called me this morning, so excited!

Secretary Clinton Speaks on Mentoring

I was very impressed with the remarks given by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Fortune’s “12th Annual Most Powerful Women Summit” on 6 October 2010 in Washington D.C. Her powerful support for mentoring, particularly for women and girls, was inspiring. The full text of her talk is on the blog secretaryclinton.wordpress.com. One passage of Secretary Clinton’s speech that I found moving:

I am a firm believer in the power of mentoring. There are women and girls in our country and around the world who have the talent, the intellect, the drive to succeed, but who lack the support. I have become convinced that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. And you never know when what you do or say can open that door to opportunity for someone who is ready to walk through it, but could not get under, around, or over it without your help. And still in too many places, support for women is in short supply. But through mentoring, we can help meet that need. And it’s low-cost, high-impact, and deeply rewarding.

I was happy that in her 6 October speech, Secretary Clinton talked about the new TechWomen Program. Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) recently announced at the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing that the TechWomen mentoring initiative will be administered by the Institute of International Education and its West Coast Center in San Francisco, in partnership with ABI. Secretary Clinton said:

Now, we are just beginning a new initiative called TechWomen that I announced in April during the President’s Entrepreneurship Summit here in Washington. Through TechWomen, we will match women in Muslim-majority countries with women working in tech companies here in the U.S. And we will send American mentors to their protégés’ countries to engage on a wider scale with the people there. We obviously want to harness one of America’s great strengths – our excellence in technology and innovation – and use it to build effective and lasting partnerships with rising women leaders in Muslim countries. And I invite you to participate in that.

As a member of the Advisory Board of ABI for over five years, I am so pleased that ABI is able to partner in the administration of the TechWomen Program.

Two publications about mentoring which I recommend to those who want to know more about this powerful tool for change:

Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009 By Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot, and Helen Gracon (Sun Laboratories Technical Report TR-2009-185), 2009

Intelligent Mentoring: How IBM Creates Value through People, Knowledge, and Relationships By Audrey J. Murrell, Sheila Forte-Trammell, Diana A. Bing (IBM Press), 2008

Academic Honors

My daughter Jessica has recently received two academic honors:

Selected as a 2011 Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar – an award given annually to 40 seniors from across Carnegie Mellon University
Accepted as a CMU 5th Year Scholar – this program provides an opportunity for a small number of exceptional students to remain on campus for one full year following the completion of their normal course of study

Jessica is an Ethics, History and Public Policy major, with a minor in Vocal Performance, and a concentration in Middle Eastern Languages. You can see Jessica’s introductory video about what she plans to do with her 5th undergraduate year on her blog. She recorded it from Qatar where she studied during her Junior year while taking classes at CMU-Q and the Georgetown University of Foreign Service. Did I mention I am proud of my girl? Did I? Did I? (I bet you guessed…)

Here is Jessica with the awesome and inspiring Dr. Duy-Loan Le (Texas Instruments’ Senior Fellow) at the the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing last week:

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Tagged as CMU, Jessica, Middle East, Qatar, technical women

June 30, 2010 · 10:36 pm

Weaving in Harrania, Egypt

Because our daughter Jessica is a weaver, John and Paul and Jessica and I made a point to visit the amazing Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Harrania, near Giza, during our recent trip to Egypt. We had to insist that our guide take us there (Wissa Wassef does not give the guides kickbacks) but it was well worth making a fuss to see. We went back a second time later! Here is a description of how Ramses Wissa Wassef started this impressive craft center:

Ramses’ interest in tapestry weaving began in 1941 when he was asked by a social welfare organisation to design a small centre in Cairo. While designing the building he asked permission to teach a small group of the children to weave, thus beginning his “experiment in creativity.” Weaving seemed the perfect medium to bring together his appreciation for traditional craftsmanship with the innate creativity of children, which he believed was damaged by routine and formalised education. After apprenticing himself to a weaver to master the basic techniques and exploring natural dyes Ramses began to pass on these skills to a small group of the schoolchildren. Using a high-warp loom, similar to those found millenia before in Ancient Egypt, the children began to weave in local wool dyed with natural dyes such as indigo, cochineal, madder, and reseda. Encouraged by the success of these experiments in 1951 Ramses and his wife Sophie began building a workshop near the small village of Harrania, ten miles from Cairo. At that time no weaving was done in the area, although since the success of the Centre imitations have become widespread. [From About the Art Centre]

We bought two books, some postcards, a ceramic sheep and a bowl, and a delightful small woven tapestry at Wissa Wassef. The larger statues in the gardens were remarkable but there was no way we could get one home. The weaving is so tight on our tapestry that I cannot put my fingernail between the threads. Most of the tapestries in the Wissa Wassef museum were very large; I am pleased to have a small but lovely sample of this work. The books are:

Egyptian Landscapes: 50 Years of Tapestry Weaving at the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre, Cairo by Hilary Weir, Suzanne Wissa Wassef, Yoanna Wissa Wassef, Opus Publishing Ltd (2006)
Threads of Life: A Journey in Creativity by E. A. De Stefano, Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center (1991)

We also toured two commercial rug factories while we were in Harrania. One place was producing some very good work – the El Harrania Factory. The owner generously gave my daughter some of his wool as a souvenir and said he trained at Wissa Wassef. The second factory we went to was unremarkable for either quality or creativity (but the prices were very high) – that was the one our guide wanted us to go to!

Wissa Wassef Art Centre