Change Agent Awards Panel
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Note: This is more of a transcript than notes - I hope nobody minds!
Introductions:
Reyyan Ayfer: If I want to say something about myself, I am a workaholic. I am the person who has to make my ideas come true. I have a very tough life but I like it.
Zahara Khan: I would say that I never thought that I was a risk taker until the end of 2006. I had a very steady job, and that’s when I finally decided to take some risks. I left my job and volunteered, well, joined forces, with another dynamic lady, who I am going to nominate for the next year’s award. She’s my role model and mentor. That’s when we decided to form d.o.t.z Technologies. I knew I would not have any money for myself for at least 2 years. I finally decided to go ahead with it. After two years, I have already set up another social enterprise. I think that risk was the best thing that I’ve done in my life. That has changed my life completely. I think if I had shied away from that opportunity, I would have had a good life, but I think I would not have had the fulfilled life that I have right now. Being a conscious risk taker is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Dorcas Muthoni: For me, I think the most important thing about everything I do, business and mentoring young girls, is just to make an impact. I have passed through the hands of many people, and now I can give to the ones who came after me. I want to make an impact in my country, and share with the younger people what I’ve learned that could make them better than I am.
Moderator: There is a widespread view that the technical industry is gender neutral. Many women do not believe this and believe there is definitely a gender disadvantage. Can you comment on this?
Reyyan Ayfer: When you are in IT, you are a problem solver and troubleshooter, and people expect you to solve every problem that they face with computers. Usually men are better at hardware, but I have to try everything to decide whether it’s a software problem or hardware problem. That’s what I’ve found frustrating in my life: I always had to try hard and work hard to keep up with men, and I thought the problem was with me. But no, I have learned that it wasn’t me.
Dorcas Muthoni: Is gender a factor in technologies? My answer to that, especially in my region, is that I think gender is a major factor in determining who has access to technology or to benefits from technology. This is mainly because access to finance and social or cultural setting prevent us from having equal opportunities. Other things are time, location, literacy, technical skills - many things. This is something we need to think about. In terms of interventions, I think there are a few things we can do. In Africa, we don’t have good telephone or internet access, but we could make sure that those are accessible to women. I don’t think that women are being proactive about it. Sometimes, trying to create special places for them doesn’t work. We just need to encourage them to be proactive and be good at what they do, so that younger women will grow up to have these opportunities. Zahara Khan: It’s the same almost in all developing countries. I will try to focus my response to the experiences that I’ve had as an IT professional and to the work life that a woman in the industry faces. I think whenever we are looking at gender, we should look at it in a broader social context. Gender issues are not just limited to IT, medicine, or health. It depends on the perceived role and place a woman has in the society, and that affects how we treat women in every profession, be it teaching or medicine, or civil engineering or computer science. The gender bias actually starts very early on in the life of a female. It starts from, for example, my parents thinking what kind of career choice that I, being a girl, should have. Teaching? Yes. Doctor, maybe nursing, yes. But a geologist? Not sure. Rocket scientist? Not possible, no way. There are many “male” professions and “female” professions. Suppose my parents say, “Fine, let her get a proper education.” Most of us don’t get the opportunity to enter the higher education system. Whenever I talk to my coworkers or fellow students, I tell them that we are the privileged ones. Back home, in Pakistan, getting this opportunity is a privilege. We have been very lucky to have the parents that we’ve had. Suppose it’s me, and I’ve graduated - would I be allowed to work and have a career? Not sure. Even if I’m allowed to, or fight for it and get permission, when you go to a job interview it’s very strange. Every single interview I’ve been to, I’ve been asked, “What are your plans for getting married?” If not in the near future, then you’re a good candidate. “Do you plan on getting married in three years?” I don’t know. What if I find someone and get married the next day? “What if you get married, and your husband and in-laws tell you not to work? And what happens if you get children?” I’m pretty sure nobody asks these questions to any men. These issues come up again and again. “Will you be able to manage this software project because you’ll have to stay late, and will you be allowed to stay late because you’re a girl?” You’ll be expected to work like a male, but you won’t be given the environment to enable that. The bias just starts very early on and is a social issue.
Reyyan Ayfer: May I add something? I have 2 boys, and they broke every toy they had to understand how they work (until they got transparent toys). I have never seen a girl breaking toys to see how it works. Boys are more inclined to understand how things work, so when it comes to hardware and IT, they are naturally one step ahead.
Mod: What unique opportunities does technology create for women in your region, and what specific barriers (economic, cultural) that technology presents in terms of cultural or societal divisions?
Reyyan Ayfer: When you say technology, the new generation is living with technology. They can’t live without technology – ipods, cell phones, internet. When we talk about my country, for example, the big cities are no problem. But in rural places, internet is available only in internet cafes, to which only 14-24 year-old boys go, and most play games. Research shows that technology in terms of computers and internet is growing, but mostly males are two or three times more likely to use it than females. Usually, females use technology for communication or for reaching out for information. Boys play games, and that’s not a bad thing – they learn bout the hardware. They need more memory and different video cards, and so they play with the hardware. When it comes to the computer class, they are a step ahead, and make girls feel bad and want to select other fields. So I think the opportunities for women are, when they have the technology, using online education for women who cannot go to universities, and getting women together, connecting with people, and feeling better about technology.
Dorcas Muthoni: I think that the best frontier that’s coming up for the African region in terms of technology is mobile technology. Communication is more available, there is a better infrastructure, and people have access to more information. There hasn’t a lot of opportunities for content to be passed through to women. Some of the things we suffer from are challenges to women because of lack of access to information, so we need things like mobile phones and technology to access information. Most important, if people build applications to allow content distribution of mobile platforms, there are a lot of opportunities in terms of technology, and that amounts to a growth in industry and new businesses. When we have cellular companies coming up, there are opportunities for women to build telephone bureaus and cyber cafes. If we are to look at women being more proactive about benefitting from technology, there are a lot of opportunities.
Zahara Khan: I would say that technology creates opportunities for women in rural areas and also for women in urban areas. The working women who for one reason or another can’t have a full-time job, who are stay at home moms, can work at a distance. I’ll give you some examples from our company. We are a female majority company - not by choice; it just happened - and our HR manager works from another city, about a 3-3.5 hours drive away. She just comes twice every month. Our admin person who is also our marketing person works from home. So this is the kind of opportunity that technology provides to women in urban areas. Also, 70% of our graduates from medical schools are women, but many of them don’t work. We are using technology to connect these women to women in underserved areas who don’t have medical facilities. So a woman doctor can earn income and further her career, and the women in the underserved areas now have health services. […] and literacy is the biggest problem….
Mod: One last question: Given all you have learned or seen at the Grace Hopper Conference, are there things you are going to try at home when you return to your business and university?
Reyyan Ayfer: Yes, this is the 4th Grace Hopper Conference that I’ve attended. After the 1st, I was amazed. I became aware of the situation of women in computing, and I started to talk to my students and talk to my colleagues, and I started to think about what we can do to help women. I have many planes. I have a lot to do when I go back. I think I will start with an outreach project.
Zahara Khan: A few things. I’m going to go back to the president of Pakistan’s Software House Association and my company’s chairperson, and I hope to access the universities and female students there and the working women in the software houses and other industries and bring them here. We need to send more – I only met 3 more Pakistani women here, that’s a shame – and I want to take this back home and encourage women to come here. Secondly, I am also thinking about bugging them enough to start working on a regional conference. Also, I want to create some kind of a support system for the work that I am doing. To continue with the linkages I’ve created here and continue that work.
Dorcas Muthoni: This is my first time here, and I think this is a fantastic conference. There are many things I’ve seen that I can do and encourage women back home to do, such as mentor high school girls into computing, so that we can help them have enough information and strength to defend their choices. We find that girls get distracted by other careers, because they don’t have complete information. We tell them what we do and what they can be. We have a big problem when a girl wants to do technology and their family is not informed about it. I want to incorporate more high school and college girls into workshops and perhaps also encourage them to recruit university women into retention programs. This is a great opportunity for women to network into industry. The other thing I noticed is that I didn’t see a lot of people traveling from Africa to come here; I will share Grace Hopper with them and see if we can bring more women next year.
Reyyan Ayfer: [To Dorcas] What was the biggest obstacle in front of you when you founded OPENWORLD LTD?
Dorcas Muthoni: I knew that people were going to ask how I had decided to go into entrepreneurship, instead of trying to get up corporate ladders. I had very little education in business, so one of the things I did was to keep this for myself and go into business and prove that it was a good thing to do. When my company got business, media started calling me and asking me how I did things, and people started seeing the other side. The biggest challenge was that people – family- were going to ask why I wanted to go this way and if it was going to be successful. So I kept it quiet until I could have proof of success. When you are discouraged, you might want to try that.
Dorcas Muthoni:[To Zahara] What are the challenges of social entrepreneurship?
Zahara Khan: A big challenge is that nobody knows what social entrepreneurship is. I’ve been talking to people in business schools at home and they don’t know what social enterprise is. The biggest challenge was funding. Not in terms of NGO funding, although we are working in the social or public sector – NGO’s domain. Whenever we tell people are are working in social and health sectors, and they assume we are an NGO. But we had to find a VC for our business, to find someone who could fund us so we could implement our project. We were very lucky to find the Acumen Fund. It was sheer luck. It happened that they had just set up a local office recently. Finding business venture capital is the biggest issue.
Zahara Khan: [To Reyyan] First of all, are many women in technology at a policy level?
Reyyan Ayfer: No, they are not decision makers. Those are male. There is an IT policy. We are a EU member candidate, so we have to follow the Lisbon strategy, but they don’t involve females in the workforce.
Zahara Khan: My second question was, do you in your curriculum …[?]
Reyyan Ayfer: Not in the curriculum. The universities have clubs and student support services and career development services, and one is on entrepreneurship training or leading. There are many women who, just after university, started their own work, but not in IT. They start cookie shops or tourism. For examples, there is a girl who is producing cute, simple bags and selling them.
Audience Questions:
Q: About the gender gap of IT: I’m a parent of a 13 year old boy, so I’m wondering if we perpetuating this gender gap ourselves. You get the idea that if we want to go out shopping for our girl, we would buy her kitchen sets and dolls? Would we buy her legos or construction sets? Even if we did, her peer group would ostracize her for these toys. So because of all that, I was wondering if our society is perpetuating our gender gap today.
Reyyan Ayfer: Of course, parents buy toys according to gender. For example, all of the little girls have computers for a little communication, and then they want to socialize and want to talk to people. I mean, I had to limit the amount of game playing of my boys so they would have time to sleep. I think it’s in the genes.
Mod: I think every Women’s Studies department is trying tt figure out what the answer is to this.
Dorcas Muthoni: Back to games, I don’t know how many women have designed games that are being played, and I kind of feel that sometimes maybe this lack of diversity in the production of these games should be a challenge to us as programmers to try and go into that industry. That would make the games more responsive to girls and prevent this manifestation of how people view girls and boys.
Q: We talked a bit about what you are taking back to your country from the GH conference. I would like to hear about what you would like us to learn from you. How can we better this conference? We still only have a small portion of women coming from non-commonwealth countries. How can we make this more global?
Reyyan Ayfer: Actually, Grace Hopper is an expensive conference. For a student to attend here it is at least 2500 or 3000 dollars. That is too much for us. Maybe some support, like scholarships especially for students from developing countries, would help.
Zahara Khan: I agree, because it cost about the same for us Just to give you an idea, you have to buy a ticket and travel to get your visa, and you can’t go alone to get your visa, being a girl. So I would suggest a little bit of financial help. Plus, nobody back home knows about this. At least, let’s start by letting them know that Grace Hopper and the Anita Borg institute Is out there. Then they can work on arranging for finances. Not everybody in Pakistan is poor; they just need to hear about this opportunity?
Mod: Just to give us an idea, what is a monthly salary of an IT women that we would target?
Zahara Khan: It depends at which level. A fresh grad would be 10-15000 rupees, 20,000 if they are lucky. The ticket is 112,000 rupees, so you can do the math.
Dorcas Muthoni: I want to echo what they said. Perhaps you can even give partial scholarships. The other thing that I think would be good would be to make the Grace Hopper website interactive, so the whole conference theme is not a certain event that happens once a year, but that it’s a theme that continues through the year.
Q: I used to be a lecturer in Pakistan, and I encouraged a student to submit something to Grace Hopper. She submitted a poster and was accepted, but didn’t receive a scholarship. One thing I would like to mention is that the cost is so high that finding a scholarship from countries where the earning rate is very low is difficult, if not impossible. I was wondering if some scholarship preference could be given to participants. When you go back, is there something you can do about the finances? I know I can convince girls to submit to Grace Hopper, but I’d like to have hope of funding so they can attend.
BJ Wishinsky: Especially this year, we have online communities who are blogging and taking notes on the wiki, and shooting videos, and all of this is out there. There are women who are all over who couldn’t come to the conference who are following that. They are participating somewhat through that. I imagine that would be of interest for those who cannot attend.
