Tag Archives: technical women

October 7, 2010 · 10:31 pm

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:

1 Comment

Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

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

October 7, 2010 · 9:00 pm

Making it Right

One of my professional credentials is that I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. (This means I know about quality management, not that I am a martial artist.) One of the truisms of quality management is that if you mess up for a customer, making it right can strengthen your relationship with that customer.

I experienced this myself last week, during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with my order from OvernightPrints. I have been in too many panels or presentations when someone refers to a helpful resource and very few of the audience successfully record that information. At best, this results in plaintive repeated audience requests for the speaker to give the reference information again (“What was that title you mentioned?” “Please repeat that phone number.” “You said h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w and then what came next?”). At worst, everyone just misses out. For my Hopper Conference panel “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”, I wanted to do better.

I ordered regular business cards printed with our panel’s key reference information. The cards were supposed to arrive the day before the panel so there would be time to distribute in advance. I paid a great deal extra to be sure of timely arrival. The promised day came and went with no cards, despite repeated and increasingly urgent phone calls by me to OvernightPrints. The cards did finally arrive, less than an hour before my panel started. This was unneeded aggravation and caused me to spend time on the phone rather than fully participating in several Hopper Conference events. The cards were a hit but we distributed only half of the number I had printed because of delayed arrival.

When I returned home from Atlanta, Georgia, I called OvernightPrints. They apologized, which was not good enough. After discussion, they ended up refunding the shipping charges, accepting back and giving me a refund for the cards we could not distribute (they paid for the unused cards to be shipped back), and giving me a discount against future orders. OvernightPrints made it right and kept my business.

Here is what the cards looked like:

Leave a comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, News & Reviews

Tagged as Six Sigma, technical women

October 6, 2010 · 11:22 pm

10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC10)

Think of how it feels to smooth on pleasant-smelling hand lotion after a long day outside in the winter. Or, how it feels to swallow a cool drink after hours in the hot sun. That delightful sensation of rehydration, of filling in the gaps, is a little like how it feels for a technical woman to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. All year long, every meeting in which I am the only woman is a small dessication, a little drying out. By autumn, I am so ready to spend three fulfilling days in the company of thousands of intelligent, capable, technical women from academia, industry, and government.

The 10th Hopper Conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the 2nd year that GHC was sold out months in advance. There were 2,147 Attendees (964 Students), from 29 Countries, and 436 Speakers. I chaired a panel on “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”. My daughter Jessica (a Senior at Carnegie Mellon University) presented a poster on Other People’s Money, called- “OPM: How to Get the Funding You Need to Do the Work You Love”. Jessica and I have been attending the Hopper Conference together for the last four years.

About my panel:

Panelists:
Katy Dickinson (Huawei Technologies), Panel Chair
Frances E. Allen (IBM)
Marcy Alstott (Hewlett-Packard)
Lucinda M Sanders (NCWIT – National Center for Women & Information Technology)
Robert Walker (Kent State University)
Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

Panel Description:
There are hundreds of awards available to women in computing. In industry, promotions and high-status titles can serve the same function as awards. Some organizations offer higher pay, public acknowledgment, or seniority to winners of major awards. What difference does it make if you get an award? How do we ensure that more women students, professionals, and academics will get into the queue and on the lists of those honored?

What’s the Hopper Conference all about?

Teaching

Sharing Experience, Knowledge, Resources

Learning

Connections, Building Networks

Inside your company

To the worldwide technical community

Honoring Achievements

Fun!

Two of the most inspiring presentations during this excellent conference were the keynote talk by Dr. Duy-Loan Le, Texas Instruments’ Senior Fellow, and Dr. Fernanda Viegas, Google Research Scientist, speaking on “Politics to Art: Visualization as a Medium”. We also heard from Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and many other remarkable women. We danced, visited the Georgia Tech Usability Labs, and had a party with whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium. It was great – I came back to work full of new knowledge, refreshed, and motivated.

Here are some GHC10 pictures:

Leave a comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute

Tagged as Jessica, technical women

September 26, 2010 · 2:37 pm

Resources about Awards, GHC2010

Members of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference panel called “Advancing Your Career Through Awards” met by phone on Friday to plan what we will do next week at GHC2010. The panel includes:

Katy Dickinson (Huawei Technologies), Panel Chair

Frances E. Allen (IBM)

Marcy Alstott (Hewlett-Packard)

Lucinda M Sanders (NCWIT – National Center for Women & Information Technology)

Robert Walker (Kent State University)

Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

One of our decisions in the meeting was to create a business card handout including key information for those interested in technical awards for women. I ordered the cards from OvernightPrints, which will deliver them to me at the Hopper Conference hotel (if all goes well). The resources listed are:

Award-Winning Career Timelines In Computer Science and Engineering (the new web pages developed by my committee, just published by ABI)

The Raise Project (Recognition of the Achievements of Women In Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine – lists of awards)

The back says “Nominate a Great Technical Woman“. Here is what the cards will look like:

Leave a comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute

Tagged as technical women

September 25, 2010 · 12:20 pm

Award-Winning Career Timelines In Computer Science and Engineering, GHC2010

A recent Anita Borg Institute press release starts out: “A conversation with Fran Allen held several years ago has blossomed into a new career resource women in technology. This is to announce the availability of the Anita Borg Institutes’ “Award-winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering” web pages, at URL http://anitaborg.org/award-winning-career-timelines/. The web pages present the biographies of a variety of successful technical women whose careers can serve as a touch point and model for other women working in technology. The women presented have succeeded in industry, government, and the academic world (and some of them in all three areas!). All of the women on this timeline have won major awards and been recognized over many years by a range of admirable organizations and institutions. …”

Since Fran and I had that conversation, my amazing committee has created two Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference panels, plus the newly-released Award-Winning Career Timelines web pages. Our second GHC panel “Advancing Your Career Through Awards” will be presented next week at the sold-out GHC2010 in Atlanta, Georgia:

Panelists: Katy Dickinson (Huawei Technologies), Frances E. Allen (IBM), Marcy Alstott (Hewlett-Packard), Lucinda M Sanders (NCWIT), Robert Walker (Kent State University) and Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

There are hundreds of awards available to women in computing. In industry, promotions and high-status titles can serve the same function as awards. Some organizations offer higher pay, public acknowledgment, or seniority to winners of major awards. What difference does it make if you get an award? How do we ensure that more women students, professionals, and academics will get into the queue and on the lists of those honored?

My daughter Jessica is also presenting at GHC2010. About her poster:

OPM: How to Get the Funding You Need to Do the Work You Love

Presenter: Jessica Dickinson Goodman (Carnegie Mellon University)

Whether a travel grant to present at a conference, a nationally competitive scholarship, or a few hundred dollars for printing costs, applying for Other People’s Money (OPM) is a necessary evil for women in computing. This poster is informed by the experiences of institutional grant distributors and successful grant-seekers and will unveil the grant application process, to help attendees gain the knowledge they need to get the funding they need.

Jessica and I have been attending the Hopper Conference together since 2007 when she was a Freshman at CMU. She is in her Senior year now and will be a CMU 5th Year Scholar next year in Pittsburgh, PA.

Here are Jessica and my son Paul and my soon-to-be-son-in-law Matt at the Lair of the Golden Bear family camp in Pinecrest, CA last month:

Leave a comment

Filed under Home & Family, Hopper - Anita Borg Institute

Tagged as Jessica, Lair of the Bear, Matthew, Paul, technical women

July 21, 2010 · 11:20 pm

Not Very Yes

My husband John just accepted an offer of work from Huawei – hooray! I am very happy for him to get a good job as a Software Engineer after so long. John and I are in different groups but are at the same company together for the third time. Huawei is a leading telecom solutions provider based in Shenzhen, China (near Hong Kong). John and I are working in their Santa Clara, California, center.

I have been working as Huawei’s Chief Analyst, Software Development Trends, for the past month. It is an interesting place. In the thirty years I have worked in research and development, I am used to being in the minority because I am a woman. At Huawei, I am also one of a small group whose primary language is English, and I am even more unusual in being a born American.

Despite our cultural and language differences, my new co-workers have been helpful and welcoming. The lady in the office next door has shared her honeysuckle tea and her cookies. I brought in some of the roses and nandina from my garden for her and others who have helped me. I am learning how to work with both the Chinese nationals and my fellow “foreign experts”.

As in many cultures, saying a direct “no” seems to be impolite in China. I have started listening for the ways in which my co-workers give an indirect negative response, such as: