It's Social Science week
I didn't know there was such a thing, but I guess the social scientists I met today at the Technology and Gender Inequalities seminar hadn't heard of Science Week either. Some interesting points (from memory - notes at the office, doh). Ingrid Schoon reported that women's aspirations to work in SET (at age 16) were more critical than men's, when considering whether they ended up in SET careers aged 30. (So men are perhaps more likely just to "fall" into a SET career, whereas women only go for it if they really want to.) If teachers thought that a girl was good at maths, she was more likely to opt for a SET career. Single sex schools didn't seem to affect whether girls chose SET or not (surprising - goes against the received wisdom on that front).
Mia Gray talked about networking, mentoring and social capital with reference to a study about two Cambridge chip companies (can you guess who it is yet?). Admittedly a small sample, but she found that tech support and testing roles (low level) were dominated by women, and that men dominated the higher echelons of development engineering and management. Men tended to perceive and understand the hierarchy, to be able to say who was on the way up the ladder, and how they might manoeuvre their way to promotion. Women - in the same company - reported a flat structure, with no promotion prospects! Astonishing. The men also tended to fully utilise their networks, getting informal information about job opportunities, how best to fit in to the company culture, and so on. It seemed to genuinely surprise the social scientists that networking like this didn't involve an equal sharing of information with all your contacts, but that information exchange was more subtle. Some people get more, you might invest in people in the hope of returns later, and there's sometimes an understanding of favours being exchanged. Much of this, she speculates, comes back to the two-body problem: women move jobs to follow their partners, and their networks (both professional and social) suffer dreadfully when this happens, further setting back their careers. The importance and interaction between social networks related to the home and geographical location, as well as professional networks both within an industry, a company and a location, was emphasised.
Dale Southerton talked about time, and how "harried" we are these days. He says we don't have more to do than we used to, but that our ability to co-ordinate with others is reduced as everyone has such individualised commitments. Each task is either fixed in time, or flexible; in the past, people in the same community had similar fixed commitments (market opening, men going off to work, tea, etc) and so fitting in flexibly-timed activities with others in between these was easy. Now we each have different fixed activities, and many things (such as shopping) can now be performed over a wider time range; so fitting things where others need to be involved in between fixed slots becomes tricky. We end up with hot spots (when many things must happen in a short time), and cold spots (also known as chill time, relaxation, me time, pottering time and so on) when not much is happening. The hot spots are balanced by times when not much is going on - this isn't necessarily the same as a cold spot, though, as it may include time which we can't use efficiently, because the activities we want to do aren't feasible because of time period (or spatial) limitations. People end up packing activities densely - creating their own hot spots - in an attempt to leave free time to unwind in.
Miriam Glucksmann talked about ready meals, which made a nice change :-) Interesting statistics about European consumption of such food - Italians hardly touch ready meals; the Germans eat almost as many as the British, but prefer frozen rather than chilled. The recent return to women employing other women to work in the home was also mentioned. Hua Dong discussed inclusive design practices for consumer products, and the importance of the design community remembering that product users are not all young men who wear a lot of black...
Anyway, it was interesting to meet a different community working on technology and gender issues, and good to see that they got to meet some proper female techies too (myself, insofar as I count, Ursula Martin and Pam Wain) as well as people simply interested in the field (such as blogger Geoff Jones).
(No report from the Vint Cerf talk at Google, because glancing back at my notes there wasn't much to say.)
Mia Gray talked about networking, mentoring and social capital with reference to a study about two Cambridge chip companies (can you guess who it is yet?). Admittedly a small sample, but she found that tech support and testing roles (low level) were dominated by women, and that men dominated the higher echelons of development engineering and management. Men tended to perceive and understand the hierarchy, to be able to say who was on the way up the ladder, and how they might manoeuvre their way to promotion. Women - in the same company - reported a flat structure, with no promotion prospects! Astonishing. The men also tended to fully utilise their networks, getting informal information about job opportunities, how best to fit in to the company culture, and so on. It seemed to genuinely surprise the social scientists that networking like this didn't involve an equal sharing of information with all your contacts, but that information exchange was more subtle. Some people get more, you might invest in people in the hope of returns later, and there's sometimes an understanding of favours being exchanged. Much of this, she speculates, comes back to the two-body problem: women move jobs to follow their partners, and their networks (both professional and social) suffer dreadfully when this happens, further setting back their careers. The importance and interaction between social networks related to the home and geographical location, as well as professional networks both within an industry, a company and a location, was emphasised.
Dale Southerton talked about time, and how "harried" we are these days. He says we don't have more to do than we used to, but that our ability to co-ordinate with others is reduced as everyone has such individualised commitments. Each task is either fixed in time, or flexible; in the past, people in the same community had similar fixed commitments (market opening, men going off to work, tea, etc) and so fitting in flexibly-timed activities with others in between these was easy. Now we each have different fixed activities, and many things (such as shopping) can now be performed over a wider time range; so fitting things where others need to be involved in between fixed slots becomes tricky. We end up with hot spots (when many things must happen in a short time), and cold spots (also known as chill time, relaxation, me time, pottering time and so on) when not much is happening. The hot spots are balanced by times when not much is going on - this isn't necessarily the same as a cold spot, though, as it may include time which we can't use efficiently, because the activities we want to do aren't feasible because of time period (or spatial) limitations. People end up packing activities densely - creating their own hot spots - in an attempt to leave free time to unwind in.
Miriam Glucksmann talked about ready meals, which made a nice change :-) Interesting statistics about European consumption of such food - Italians hardly touch ready meals; the Germans eat almost as many as the British, but prefer frozen rather than chilled. The recent return to women employing other women to work in the home was also mentioned. Hua Dong discussed inclusive design practices for consumer products, and the importance of the design community remembering that product users are not all young men who wear a lot of black...
Anyway, it was interesting to meet a different community working on technology and gender issues, and good to see that they got to meet some proper female techies too (myself, insofar as I count, Ursula Martin and Pam Wain) as well as people simply interested in the field (such as blogger Geoff Jones).
(No report from the Vint Cerf talk at Google, because glancing back at my notes there wasn't much to say.)