Exponent

Exponent Amplifying the Female Voices in Tech Discourses

Ramezani, Roya Exponent: School of Visual ARTS, 2016.—1st ed.

ISBN - 13: 213-0-4648-6764-3 History; Future; Desig; USA

School of Visual ARTS Press Products of Design 136 West 21st Street, Manhattan, USA info@SVA.edu www.SVA.com Written by Roya Ramezani Advisors: Allan Chochinov Andrew Schloss Abby Covert © Designed , by Roya Ramezani © School of Visual ARTS All rights reserved Distributed under license Creative Commons First Edition, April 2016 Printed in New York

To my parents...

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION Exponent is a word war I. Because I’m a woman in Tech II. Words are weapons

GOALS & OBJECTIVES This is a campaign I. Gender Diversity Issue in Tech and Science II. Revealing Design Opportunities III. Opportunity: Creating a Sense of Agency and Urgency IV. Raising awareness about the Gender Imbalanced Internet

AUDIENCE & ECOSYSTEM Who are the stakeholders?

I. Audience of Exponent II. Why Considering All the Stakeholders III. The Ecosystem of Exponent

RESEARCH & EXPLORATIONS Who are the scholars?

I. Who’s doing what in Silicon Valley II. The books and Articles III. What do subject matter experts say

DESIGN INTERVENTIONS Turning discoveries and explorations into design outputs I. Design with pixels, App screens II. Design with people, Service design III. Design with impact, Campaign design IV. Design with consequences, Product design ACKNOLEDGEMENT LEXICON BIBLIOGRAPHY

The gender gap in the tech industry is no news to anyone. Although there have been numerous initiatives trying to close the gender gap in the technology industry, none of them address the gender gap in the online discourses around technology. There is a huge disparity between genders when it comes to numbers of ideas and voices expressed in online commentary platforms. Women are not equal contributors in online conversations, which is experiencing the same problems as the offline world; women are less willing to assert their opinions in public.

The online world has become an influential part of our offline lives and our identities. Gender equality in the world will not be achieved by ignoring the imbalances we face in the virtual community. Closing the gender gap in technology requires increasing the number of women thought leaders and their contribution to online discussions about technology, as well as increasing female employees in the technology companies.

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My thesis focuses on empowering women in technology to become thought leaders and contribute to key commentary forums, which in turn feed all other media and drive thought leadership across technology industry. I envision a world in which the best ideas, regardless of the person’s gender, will have a chance to be heard and shape the technology industry and the world.

I conducted research on the reasons behind women’s lack of voice in technology, and the potential ways by which we can increase their engagement in online opinion making forums. The first part of my thesis focuses on encouraging women to write by removing obstacles such as online harassment; the second part

focuses on enabling women to write by empowering them. Empowerment is a state of mind in which they feel like they have something worth saying and their opinion matters to an audience. This is a result of developing a sense of agency which I am trying to cultivate in women in technology.

In my thesis, I have been working on interventions that increase women’s involvement in online discussions through providing: a) community support b) empowerment tools and c) education and skills.

I studied science my whole school life and when it was time to choose a major for college, I naturally picked physics since I already had a physics olympiad medal and I was good at it.

I have always been the smart student in my class and I was admired for my math and physics skills. My whole life was solving problems in calculus and physics and I always knew more than anybody else in my class. In sixth grade, our math teacher would ask me to teach the class since I already had a reputation for tutoring my peers after hours. My fellow students claimed I was super good at explaining, which was probably partly due to similar 12-year-old mental models.

Therefore, I had all these accomplishments throughout my life and got into a college with an acceptance rate of one percent.

In college, I studied physics for two years and then I had a crisis. My life turned upside down. I was not enjoying physics and math anymore; I was introduced to design and design thinking as a way to tackle problems, which seemed much more interesting to me. I have been solving problems all my life but something inside me was telling me design was my dream job. Design challenges and wicked problems cannot be put into fixed formulas. I was thirsting for the complex ecosystems around each problem and the difficulties they would bring. I made the decision to transfer to interaction design and the technological world. All of a sudden, I was not the smartest student in class anymore. As a matter of fact, I was one of the worst. I had no formal design education background so my visual skills were awful and my knowledge of the industry and technological world was even worse. As a human, there are few things worse than having your identity being taken away from you; my identity as the smartest student in class was taken

from me. I was experiencing very difficult times, regretting my decision to transfer, and telling myself stories about how I was never going to be a good designer.

My mother, my hero, was watching me suffer. One late night, I was working on an assignment in the living room. The code was not coming along and I could not figure out what the bug was. My mother came to the room and I burst into tears when I saw her. I said, “I feel desperate.”

She told me something that made it possible for me to be here, writing this book. She said, “Roya! I know how difficult it is for you. You made a decision and you feel like it was a wrong move. But remember life is like a game of chess. No one has ever won a game of chess by taking only forward moves… sometimes you

have to move backwards to take better steps forward.” These few words from my mother made me tell a different story to myself about myself. I stopped questioning my abilities and began focusing on how I could teach myself what other students already knew. Words are powerful and so are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we use powerful words to tell the story, our story will be empowered and so will we.

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WHY Looking back at the introduction of the computer science field and the technology industry, we can notice that women were not left out from the conversation. What happened throughout these years that caused this gender disparity? There are many causes and challenges facing women working in technology that led to this issue becoming so big.

The few women who made it to the top, namely Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, while inspiring, pointed out some of the challenges. Some individuals attribute the low number of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to the pipeline issue. Whereas, if we can get young girls interested in math and science, the number of women in these industries will increase over time. Some others find the harassment and discrimination that happens in workplaces to be the reason behind the issue, while others point to the fact that it is not easy for women to find balance between family and work. These debates are all around women’s participation in the offline world, and not enough attention has been paid to the online world.

When we look closer at the issue of diversity in technology, we notice that there is a lack female voices on online forums in the STEM field. Women technologists’ contributions to these online media are important because these discourses will shape and shift tech industry over time.

This means women have little contribution in how the technology industry moves forward in the future.

I strongly believe in this quote by one of my users, “Your construct will define your conduct.” Construct as a noun is defined as an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be “subjective” and not based on empirical evidence. Individuals subjective ideas and theories will define their behaviors and actions. In order to have strong actions, people need to have strong subjective opinions. I am encouraging women to have strong opinions, develop the right language to communicate their opinions, and to express their ideas to the world.

WHAT My research suggests that one of the core reasons for women’s lack of participation is low sense of agency.

A sense of agency is essential for humans to feel in control of their live and to believe in their capacity to influence their own thoughts and behaviors. One of the ways by which we can cultivate the sense of agency is through boosting self-confidence.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are critical in shaping our confidence. The stories we tell ourselves, about our capabilities and our worth, are a crucial part of our path to success. Undermining language not only makes us seem weak in front of our audience, but it eventually affects us by influencing negatively who we think we are and what we can do. In order to boost women’s self-confidence, I decided to create interventions that would help them develop a powerful language to use while talking to themselves or others.

HOW I designed an experience for women thought leaders in technology. The experience was a campaign held during the week of March 8th, International Women’s Day. This series of 15-minute interviews by female experts in technology was meant to amplify those voices for other women in technology. They shared their stories with other women, using their powerful language. They talked about their failures, proud moments, and pieces of wisdom.

Men and women have different cognitive abilities. I have developed a product that focuses on women’s cognitive advantages. It is a keyboard that is easier to use by people with better fine motor skills and color vision. Males outperform females in spatial mental rotation and navigation tasks, while females often do better on object location or recognition as well as verbal memory tasks and fine motor skills. The keyboard has extra keys that are opinion making verbs such as Disagree, Believe, Declare etc.

The extra keys will help women be aware of their undermining language and get rid of this destructive habit.

Whether writing or talking about any specific field, individuals need to speak the language of that field.

Each industry has its own language and people will be immediately more powerful and trusted if they speak that right language. Public presentation skills are also important when individuals talk about communicating and sharing ideas. I have developed an application that helps women learn and speak the language of their field through speech rehearsal.

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American workforce consists of women significantly which has happened through time, however improvement of the situation is slow and uneven across industries. Women continue to make up the majority of employees in the education sector, service jobs, and health care such as nursing while men dominate in construction, tech, and utilities.(U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, 2013).

High-tech, in particular, is an industry where women continue to be vastly underrepresented. The gender share of women employed in information and technology(IT) occupations is below average ranking anywhere between 7 and 40 percent among computer network engineers to web developers(Women’s Bureau,2013).

In non traditional industries ,women are facing particular challenges regarding their career success not only due to the lack of female representation among senior management teams, but the gender biases resulting from the less diverse employee groups. The low participation of women in Tech and science has been, indeed, a matter of concern for many years. “According to the most recent Taulbee Survey conducted by the Computing Research Association in North America, only 14.7% of computer science bachelor’s degrees went to women. The U.S. Department of Education’s data shows the female participation level in computing peaked at about 35% in 1984, more than twice as high as it is today”. When we look at the workplace, we see the same issue. “According to McKinsey & Company’s 2015 Women in the Workplace study, women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline — with the biggest disparity in senior leadership positions.”

There has been a fair amount of attention given to the gender-diversity issue over the past two years, when several major technology companies released workforce diversity data, indicating a significant underrepresentation of women in science and technical roles.

Big tech companies try to point a finger to the narrow pipeline of women with computer related degrees to explain this underrepresentation issue, however the company culture inside some of these companies also seems to be a major factor. There might not be anything inherently anti-feminine about computers and software programming, however throughout the years, the industry has been dominated by men in tech. Similar to science and maths, somewhere down the line it has eventually become the norm to just accept it as a fact that women were not as interested in or good at code as men were. And while these stereotypes create countless problems of representation, gender-based discrimination and outright sexism, the fading of female technologists has also led to another phenomenon: the rise of the brogrammers.

When talking about gender diversity in tech, we need to realize that it’s not just the women in the workforce who are missing out on these opportunities. It’s affecting companies and their overall performance, limiting the range of ideas heard and affecting the company’s overall path forward. The relationships between gender diversity and business performance have been proven by multiple studies.

Since 1996, a group of industry chief executives and human resource professionals have been working together under the auspices of a nonprofit organization called the Business Opportunities for Leadership Diversity(BOLD) Initiative to help American corporations learn how to leverage their cultural diversity for competitive advantage. These leaders espouse the now popular “businesscase” for diversity—the view that a more diverse workforce will increase organizational effectiveness. For them, providing more opportunities for women and minorities is a business imperative. Realizing, however, that they lacked clear evidence to support this view, either within their own organizations or more generally across American industry, these business leaders called for definitive re-search to assess the diversity-performance link. An initial study commissioned by BOLD found that no organizations were collecting the data needed to assess the effects of their diversity practices on firm performance (Corporate Leadership Council, 1997).

Therefore, in 1997, the BOLD Initiative asked a group of researchers from a cross section of universities to design a large-scale field re-search project to examine the relationships between gender and racial diversity and business performance.

Research has suggested that, within a work group, diversity with respect to members’ demographic backgrounds can have a powerful effect on both turnover from the group and on the group’s performance on cognitive tasks (i.e., “thinking” tasks that involve generating plans or ideas, solving problems, or making decisions). While such diversity tends to increase turnover, its effects on cognitive task performance are more mixed, sometimes enhancing performance and sometimes impairing it.

An understanding of how diversity leads to these outcomes may help managers enhance work group effectiveness. Thus, in this paper I develop a theoretical model to explain the turnover and mixed performance consequences of demographic diversity in work groups.

“The so called “brogrammers” are a new generation of engineers and app developers who party hard, swill cheap beer, hold bikini contests, and still find the time to code. The portmanteau is an amalgamation of ‘programmer’ and ‘bro’; the latter a term of endearment members of fraternities in American universities and party enthusiasts use to refer to each other. The brogrammer differs from others in his profession in that he lives up to The Social Network stereotype of what a programmer should be: full of ambition, using his skills and success as a way to boost his social credit on campus.” One of the main issues raised by this is the fraternizing culture’s “exclusionary aspect,” which further “alienates women from an already male-dominated profession,” says Rebecca Greenfield. It’s “a club ladies can’t join, unless they’re wearing bikinis, or serving beers, or grinding.” And the problem was particularly evident at the last year’s tech conferences and events.

The proposed model suggests that each demographic diversity variable (e.g., diversity with respect to age, gender, race, group tenure, organization tenure, education, or functional background) can be classified according to its level of visibility and its level of job-relatedness.

Visibility is the extent to which the variable is easily observed by group members, and job-relatedness is the extent to which the variable directly shapes perspectives and skills related to cognitive tasks.

The model then suggests that the visibility and job-relatedness of a diversity variable indirectly influence how much turnover and/or performance enhancement the variable yields.

More specifically, the visibility and job-relatedness of a diversity variable influence the levels of affective (emotional) and substantive (task) conflict in the group, and the levels affective and substantive conflict, in turn, influence the amount of turnover from the group and the group’s performance.

After generating six research propositions based on the model, including three addressing demographic diversity variable- conflict linkages and three addressing conflict-turnover and conflict-performance linkages, I discuss boundary conditions of the model and offer recommendations for future research.

The value-in-diversity perspective argues that a diverse workforce, relative to a homogeneous one, is generally beneficial for business, including but not limited to corporate profits and earnings. This is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either nonconsequential to business success or actually detrimental by creating conflict, undermining cohesion, and thus decreasing productivity. Using data from the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey, a national sample of for-profit business organizations, this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value-indiversity thesis.

The results support seven of these hypotheses: racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits.

Gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits.

I discuss the implications of these findings relative to alternative views of diversity in the workplace.

=“Wikis are not very friendly – that’s for sure! I guess I also in the rare 15% because I have not only edited but created Wikipedia pages in the past!

Like you, I wish the interface was nicer but I think the whole wiki-point is “stripped down” or perhaps it’s just “for geeks only”.”

The New York Times piece on Wikipedia’s gender gap has given rise to dozens of great online conversations about why so few women edit Wikipedia. I’ve been reading ALL of it, because I believe we need to understand the origins of our gender gap before we can solve it. And the people talking –on science sites and in online communities and on historian’s blogs— are exactly the ones we should be listening to, because they’re all basically one degree of separation from us already, just by virtue of caring enough to talk about the problem.

“Want to know why I’m not editing Wikipedia? I’m busy doing science.”

So below is a bunch of comments, culled from discussions on many different sites — people talking about experiences on Wikipedia that make them not want to edit. Please note I’ve only included quotes from women, and I’ve aimed to limit the selections to first-person stories more than general speculation and theorizing.

1) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly.

2) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are too busy.

It’s true that study after study after study has found that around the world, women have less free time than men.But it’s worth also noting though, that a 1992 survey investigating why women didn’t participate much in an academic discussion list found that women were in fact LESS likely to describe themselves as “too busy” to contribute, than men. “Both men and women,” study author Susan Herring wrote, “said their main reason for not participating was because they were intimidated by the tone of the discussions, though women gave this reason more often than men did. Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the “slings and arrows” that list members posted “entertaining” (as long as they weren’t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list.

One women said it made her want to drop out of the field altogether.”

Not only the Internet isn’t inclusive in terms of access to it and its communication channels, it’s also not so gender inclusive in how it welcomes its users. 66% of the offline population in the US are women and they face four times more harassments than their male counterparts. surprisingly, state and federal legislation and common law had done almost nothing about this sort of crime and some police officials have no idea what some of the social media platforms are and how someone might be threatened online. There aren’t any instructions for young girls and children for how to deal with such issues. Telling them to ignore such harassing messages is what media is currently suggesting women to do but we won’t be able to solve this huge issue by sweeping it under the rug. Men get harassed too but women face far more of it.

It wasn’t until the mass of Twitter threats sent to Caroline Criado-Perez in 2013, that the broad international media coverage of the incident has led to “online harassment” being a word that is bandied around with increasing frequency. Some of the people who sent her those messages also got prosecuted for their actions.

The term is still vaguely defined, but it is generally understood in relation to the high profile campaigns.

The legal definition of harassment, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, is: “A course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose” or “Words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person.”

This is of course a very broad definition, which state and federal legislation and common law have narrowed and refined in various ways. Some of the categories include hate speech, cyber stalking, sexual or pornographic content, and identity theft. I will focus on Women online harassment because they face far more of it and it’s something I personally have been affected by.There is a considerable amount of documentation indicating that online harassment disproportionally impacts women. I recently reviewed Danielle Criton’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace and the text matches up with anecdotal accounts and with my own and my peers’ personal experience as I mentioned earlier.

The U.S, National Violence Against Women Survey estimates that 60% of cyber stalking victims are women.

The National Center for Victims of Crime estimates that women actually make up 70%. Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA) collected information from over 3,000 reports of cyber harassment between 2000 and 2011 and found 72.5% were female. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 74% of individuals stalked both online and offline are female.

3) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence.

“I think my experience may explain some of it – I’ve never edited anything because I’ve never felt I had the necessary expertise in a subject.

It was always “oh, I’m sure there’s someone who knows a lot more than me! Besides, who am I to go change what the person before me has written?” Which, now that I think about it, is a very socialised-female kind of behaviour. Boys don’t tend to be encouraged to doubt themselves and defer to others nearly as much.”

“I thought I’d do something about [the gender gap], by updating a wikipedia page on an institution I’ve attended (one of the few things I have felt knowledgeable enough about to contribute to in the past). Sure enough, since I last looked (over a year ago) someone has updated the page to say that women are required to wear skirts and dresses. It’s not true, (although it may be wishful thinking on the part of some old-fashioned administrators). Still . . . I hesitated to correct it . . . because . . . because it’s already on the page . . . because I might be wrong . . . because someone more knowledgeable or influential might have written that . . .”

Not everyone feels self-doubting, though: “It’s not that it intimidates me. It’s more than, well, if I spend three hours carefully composing a concise article on something, complete with blasted citations and attention to formatting consistency, the chances of it being poof!gone the next day are still high, and on top of all my work I don’t get anything back apart from the ineffable sensation of contributing to humanity’s knowledge base. I want friends who will excitedly inform me how pleased they were by my penultimate paragraph, dammit. I want a way to team up with someone who knows the markup and can help iron out problems before stuff gets published. I want a social backbone to keep me contributing and caring, one that doesn’t depend on the frequency of my contributions.

Contests for “best article about birds in November”. Basically, give me a LJ-flavored wikipedia editors fan community.”

4) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are conflictaverse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture.

“My research into the gender dynamics of online discussion forums found that men tend to be more adversarial, and to tolerate contentious debate, more than women,” said Susan Herring to a reporter from Discovery News. “Women, in contrast, tend to be more polite and supportive, as well as less assertive … and (they) tend to be turned off by contentiousness, and may avoid online environments that they perceive as contentious.”

This assertion is supported by women themselves — both those who don’t edit Wikipedia, and those who do: “Even the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it. I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman.”

“Wikipedia can be a fighty place, no doubt. To stick around there can require you to be willing to do the virtual equivalent of stomping on someone’s foot when they get in your face, which a lot of women, myself included, find difficult.”

From a commenter on Feministing: “I agree that Wikipedia can seem hostile and cliquish. Quite simply, I am sensitive and the internet is not generally kind to sensitive people. I am not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia.”

“From the inside,” writes Justine Cassell, professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased.

Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.”

“I think [the gender gap] has to do with many Wikipedia editors being bullies. Women tend to take their marbles and go home instead of putting a lot of effort into something where they get slapped around. I work on biographies of obscure women writers, rather under the radar stuff… contribute to more prominent articles makes one paranoid, anyone can come along and undo your work and leave nasty messages and you get very little oversight.”

“I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but finally quit because I grew tired of the “king of the mountain” attitude they have. You work your tail off on an entry for several YEARS only to have some pimply faced college kid knock it off by putting all manner of crazy stuff on there such as need for “reliable” sources when if they’d taken a moment to actually look at the reference they’d see they were perfectly reliable! I’m done with Wikipedia. It’s not only sexist but agist as well.”

5) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted. From a commenter on Pandagon: “When I read about the shortage of women writing for Wikipedia, I immediately thought of this article and the ensuing discussion and the extent to which I do not have the time or emotional energy to fight this fight, over and over.”

Another commenter on the same forum: “Even if I don’t explicitly identify as female in my Wikipedia handle (and I don’t), I still find myself facing attitudes of sexism and gender discrimination, attempts at silencing, “tone” arguments, and an enforced, hegemonic viewpoint that attempts to erase my gender when editing.” Barbara Fister writes in Inside Higher Ed magazine: “Since the New York Times covered the issue, I’ve heard more stories than I can count of women who gave up contributing because their material was edited out, almost always because it was deemed insufficiently

significant. It’s hard to imagine a more insulting rejection, considering the massive amounts of detail provided on gaming, television shows, and arcane bits of military history.”

From a commenter on Feministing: “There was a discussion about [women contributing to Wikipedia] on a violence against women prevention list-serve I am on. The issue was that the Wikipedia entries on the Violence Against Women Movement and Act were very misleading, incorrect in some cases, and slightly sarcastic and minimizing to the work of women rights advocates. Every time an advocate would try to make corrections and update the entries, it would be removed and edited back to it’s original misleading version. I think many advocates felt like it was pointless to try and change it-or didn’t have the same kind of time and energy around it that these majority male editors have to maintain sexist and incorrect posts.”

From a Wikipedia editor at Metafilter: “I can add all kinds of things to male YA authors’ pages with minimal cites and no one says a word. Whereas, every time I try to add a female YA author, or contribute to their pages, I invariably end up with some obnoxious gatekeeper complaining that my cites from Publisher’s Weekly and School Library Journal aren’t NEARLY enough, and besides, this author isn’t SIGNIFICANT enough to have an entry, who cares if she published three books? They’re not NOTEWORTHY. Meanwhile, 1-Book Nobody Dude’s Wikipedia page is 14 printable pages long.”

6) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they find its overall atmosphere misogynist. “One hostile-to-women thing about Wikipedia I have noticed is that if a movie has a rape scene in it, the wiki article will often say it was a sex scene. When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike “sex”, the word “rape” is not neutral, so it should be left out according to NPOV. Example (this one actually ended up changing “sex” to “make love”, which, oh wow.), example. There are probably more but it’s pretty depressing to seek them out. (It’s not true in cases where the movie is explicitly about rape, like the rape revenge genre that’s got its own page, but please don’t tell me that should assuage my concerns.)

There are a few other things I’ve found frustrating about Wikipedia, but discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.” A Wikipedia editor commenting at the blog Shiny Ideas: “Any woman identified as a woman who edits Wikipedia and dares to stumble into some territory some male or group of males has staked out will quickly find that the double standard lives and they will be criticized and their words twisted, even when men who say the same things are ignored or cut some slack. If they dare to persist in holding their ground or acting as equals in the conversation the criticism may escalate to insults and off and on wiki harassment. If a woman

complains about a man’s incivility in its various complaint forums, her complaints are not as likely to be taken as seriously as when men complain about other men or about the occasional woman who rocks their world with incivility equal to their own.”

7) Some women find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting.

From a comment on the Atlantic Monthly site from a female Wikipedia administrator: “Thankfully, I have never been harassed (much) based on my gender. But, for example, an editor with whom I frequently collaborate used to maintain a gallery of hot chicks in bikinis as a subpage of his user page. It was ultimately deleted after a deletion discussion, but he was totally oblivious to the fact that things like that create an environment where women do not feel welcome.”

“For what it’s worth, I am offended by the existence of pornography, for a variety of reasons none of which involve my being squeamish about sex,” said a female Wikipedian on the Gender Gap mailing list. “I am not offended by including pornographic images on articles about those types of images. Indeed, I expect Wikipedia to have images illustrating articles whenever possible; I don’t see why we should make an exception for articles about sexuality.”

Another female editor: “In my personal experience, when I have come across material I found offensive I was discouraged from editing in the immediate area (or even commenting) and leaving my name in any way associated with the material. I personally would never generalize this discouragement to other areas of the wiki however. It hasn’t always been explicit material that I have found unpalatable. But I have always felt that there is level of material (of many varieties) on the wikis that I cannot not strongly object to as counter-mission that I wish to campaign for it’s deletion, but that I object to enough on a personal level that I will not do anything to help curate it. Certainly my participation in certain topical areas is discouraged by this. But I don’t know that this fact should be seen as problematic. Isn’t necessary that there be some pieces of material on the Wikimedia projects for every single individual to find objectionable and offensive?”

And another: “I do not find sexually explicit images offensive. There is nothing inherently unencyclopedic about an explicit image, and often they do a better job than a line drawing might (see Coital Alignment Technique, for example. If that line drawing actually gives you an idea of what’s going on, you have better x-ray vision than me. A photo would work far better).”

8) Some women whose primary language has grammatical gender find being addressed by Wikipedia as male off-putting. From a female Portuguese Wikipedian: “I have no problem with the male “Usuário” (in portuguese). And sincerely, I don’t think the fact of see a male word will push me out Wikippedia.

We are quite used to use a male word in portuguese when we don’t know the gender of someone, but yes, would be nice to see a “Usuária” in my page :D” And from a female German Wikipedian: “I’m one of those women Wikimedia would like to encourage (I’m interested, but I haven’t edited much more than a few typing errors anonymously). I don’t think male words will push people out of Wikipedia – that is, they won’t push out the women that are already in. But I do think that female words could encourage some of the women who are still hesitating and unsure. It says: “Yes, we’re talking to you!” I don’t feel unwanted if someone doesn’t use the female words. But I don’t feel wanted either.

I someone does use female words, it feels like it’s more directed to me.”

9) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites.

From a commenter at Metafilter: “Although I mostly avoid editing wikipedia because of the rampant jerkwad factor, and partially because I can’t be bothered to learn the markup to my meticulous satisfaction, a large part of my reason for not contributing my highly esoteric knowledge is that I’m busy contributing elsewhere. Fandom stuff keeps me really busy – we have our own ways of archiving and record keeping and spreading knowledge, and it’s all very skewed towards female. The few times I’ve touched wikipedia, I’ve been struck by how isolating it can feel. It’s a very fend for yourself kind of place for me.

Anywhere else online, my first impulse is to put out feelers. I make friends, ask for links to FAQs and guides, and inevitably someone takes me under their wing and shows me the ropes of whatever niche culture I’m obsessed with that month. It’s very collaborative, and prioritizes friendships and enjoyment of pre-existing work over results.

Wikipedia isn’t like that, as far as I’ve experienced. There’s no reciprocal culture; to just plunge oneself into the thick of things and start adding information can be highly intimidating, and there’s no structure set up to find like-minded people to assist one’s first attempts. Instead I just find lots and lots of links to lots of informationdense pages.”

If The New York Times—or any other publication—wants to include more women as writers and sources, here’s simply what it has to do: Pay attention. As the Ms. Blog reported in early August, a recently launched website, Who Writes for the New York Times, keeps track of gender imbalances in a way that could help the Times’ editors achieve gender parity. The site provides an invaluable public service by counting, in real time, how many men and how many women have authored pieces that appear on the newspaper’s online front page.

Says Andrew Briggs, creator of Who Writes, The monolithically male voice of The New York Times is something we all need to talk about. The site acts as a daily reminder that the … voices who speak to us represent a very small slice of the pie. … I built the system to be an automaton: It’s this small wind-up toy in a corner of the Internet that looks at the home page of the NYT every five minutes and records what it sees. …

The site will keep running as long as I let it and keep paying the bills.

ScreenShotNYTLike a blood pressure monitor or cardiogram, the site reveals either health or dysfunction.

Briggs’ aspirations for the site are similar to those of a doctor: He wants the “patient” to improve. I would like to see more women featured by The New York Times, and the system will know if and when that happens. More than that, I would like to see more investigation into and discussion about the mechanisms that define what we consume. Decisions are being made for us and, generally, I don’t think we The Times has long been criticized for representing so few women journalists on its front pages. When it comes to sources, the paper’s gender bias looks even worse. Alexi Layton and Alicia Shepard took a Wlook at the female-male ratio to see who gets cited in news stories and published their findings last month: In an analysis of 352 front-page stories from the Times in January and February 2013, we found that Times reporters quoted 3.4 times as many male sources as female sources. A spokesperson for the paper, associate managing editor for standards Phil Corbett, expressed disappointment at how wide the gap was, and said the Times wants to do better: This situation illustrates the importance of pushing for a more diverse newsroom—in gender, race and

ethnicity, background, religion and other factors—which remains a priority for us. Corbett didn’t offer a plan for improvement, however. Instead, he noted that reporters on deadline tend to rely on sources they already know, and worried that instituting quotas would be a “blunt instrument that could create as many problems as it solves.” Paying attention to how many women and men write for and are cited by the Times is not a blunt instrument. Rather, as a prelude to change, paying attention ensures that gender equity becomes a genuine priority and not merely a hypothetical one. As sociologist Allan G. Johnson notes, notes: patterns of oppression and privilege are rooted in systems that we all participate in and make happen.

4

According to a US Census report, women still remain underrepresented in sciences, maths, tech and engineering careers, where just 26 percent of workers are female. But when it comes to people in the tech sector, the number of women has actually decreased over the past three decades: “whereas in 1990 around 33 percent of programmers were women, that number has dropped steadily to just 27 percent today.” What are maybe even more surprising are the divisions of labour within tech related jobs: in 2014, only 22.1 percent of software developers and 23 percent of software programmers were women. Clerical sections of the industry have a better female representation, where women represent 40 percent of database administration positions. The tech companies state that they’re starting to address the problem by acknowledging it. Google, for instance, is training its managers to be more aware of hidden biases, so they don’t, for example, give false lower performance evaluations to women. Facebook is working with professional organizations and other nonprofit groups to get more girls and minority children interested in science and technology. A major issue facing the industry is the number of female computer science students present at universities. That number has fallen in the last 20 years, when the percentage of women in other industries like biology and chemistry has risen.” Sure, the tech community has come a long way.

When Dylan Farrow posted a letter on this blog accusing Woody Allen of sexual assault, female commenters overwhelmingly supported her; male commenters were evenly split.

These were among my findings when I studied nearly a million comments made on The New York Times website.

Women and men differ substantially in how they engage with online media.

And these differences may have profound implications for media, gender equality, and even our democracy.

Regardless of whether you believe Dylan Farrow’s story, the gender gap in sympathy (which several other studies have found as well) should trouble you. It implies that in Congress, the police, or the military, where women are underrepresented, opinions will be skewed against survivors of sexual assault. (The importance of equal representation applies to men as well, of course: we would not want sexual assault trials to have entirely female jurors.) And because men and women’s opinions differ in many other ways as well, the undemocratic implication is simple: when one gender is underrepresented, the views that are heard will not fairly represent the views that are held. Women were clearly underrepresented in my data. They made only a quarter of comments, even though their comments got more recommendations from other readers on average. Even when they did speak up, they tended to cluster in stereotypically “female” areas: they were most common on articles about parenting, caring for the old, fashion and dining.

It seems unlikely that these effects are confined to The New York Times; studies of online commenting find broad signs of inequality. (While women are well-represented on some websites, like the image-sharing site Pinterest, these sites do not tend to focus on expressing and defending opinions. Online forums that do often have mostly male commenters: examples include Wikipedia edit pages, the social news site Reddit, and the question-answering sites Quora and Stack Overflow.) I also spoke to Katherine Coffman, an economist whose results echoed mine: she found that women were less willing than men to contribute their ideas in stereotypically male areas. She further found that getting women to contribute their ideas more often in male areas (even without selecting for women who had good ones) would improve group decisions. Accomplishing this online becomes increasingly important as online forums like newspaper comment pages become the modern-day Athenian agorae. So how do we do it?

We could start by better protecting women from online harassment.

They face far more of it — twenty-five times as many harassing messages in chatrooms, rape and death threats that social media companies often do little about — and it really can keep them quiet: feminist Anita Sarkeesian cancelled a talk after receiving online death threats, and the founder of the #YesAllWomen campaign had to temporarily lock her Twitter account.

Ironically, the vicious comments on articles about feminism often justify feminism. Even on The New York Times forums, where comments are moderated, I found evidence suggesting that women might feel uncomfortable online: they were, for example, less likely to include their last names. While there are no easy solutions to this problem (a case before the Supreme Court highlights First Amendment concerns) recently a woman who had been receiving death threats on Twitter reported that they stopped after she offered an $11,000 reward for information. It might be worth seeing if a larger reward fund — backed, perhaps, by Twitter or the other multibillion dollar social media platforms on which these death threats are propagated — could more systematically reduce the number of threats women receive online.

There are also ways online newspapers specifically might increase female participation. Increasing the number of women writing articles might increase the number of women commenting on articles. Women are underrepresented among newspaper reporters, and in my data, articles written by women had a higher percentage of comments from women, even when I controlled for the section of the newspaper in which the article appeared. Telling women that their comments received more recommendations might also encourage them to comment more; previous studies have found that women are less likely than men to persist in commenting when their comments do not receive positive responses.

We should also consider the algorithms used to recommend articles to readers. The New York Times, like many websites, recommends articles that are similar to those a reader has previously read. This can perpetuate gender divisions if, for example, a woman is recommended primarily articles on the Parenting Blog simply because she read a few articles there in the past.

Instead, we could experiment with a recommendation algorithm that occasionally directs readers to articles they might not otherwise read. In an age where code touches millions of lives, algorithms have social implications: they do not merely reflect our reality, they also shape it. When I worked at Coursera, a company that offers online classes, we discovered that a student’s gender predicted what courses they’d be interested in, and we developed an algorithm that used this to recommend courses.

But we did not end up using the algorithm because it would have, for example, steered women away from computer science classes. If we are to change the future, we cannot mathematically make it reflect the past.

While I believe these measures would be useful, getting women to be heard equally in online debates will require more than a few lines of code, because the forces that keep women from speaking up online begin offline: women volunteer answers less even in childhood.

I discussed these dynamics with Robin Ely, who is among the faculty leading Harvard Business School’s initiative to cultivate a classroom culture in which all students, including women, participate fully. Students need to speak up to participate in the learning model of the School, but women face a double bind: when they speak up tentatively they may be perceived as less competent, but when they speak up confidently they can be perceived as being too aggressive. Hence, some women may choose to stay silent on controversial issues. Instead, Ely recommended thinking of speaking up as an act of leadership: a way to advance a cause worth caring about. While we focus instinctively on how to get women to talk more, there’s another possibility: that men should talk less. This is entirely plausible because most online comments win no prizes for profundity, and yet it never occurred to me while I was originally analyzing the data, or to any of the people who commented on the analysis. This highlights, I think, an assumption even women who speak up often internalize: that women should achieve equality by becoming like men rather than the other way around. But in

female-dominated environments, social norms can change, and constantly speaking up can seem rude rather than effective. In a perfect world, people might reflect more carefully before posting online; but in the current world, we need women to speak up if they are to be heard above the cacophony. So based on my data, I would make two suggestions to the women who read this.

First, don’t worry too much about whether your comment is worthy of Cicero. Hundreds of thousands of comments imply you have something worth saying; Katherine Coffman’s study implies that we’d make better decisions if women spoke up more; and even if your comment is inane, our democracy will function better if we get a gender-balanced sample of stupidity. Second, don’t worry too much about what others will think.

Showing support for a survivor of sexual assault makes it more likely they will continue to tell their story. This is worth the risk of seeming aggressive.

Emma Pierson is currently studying statistics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and writes about statistics on her blog, Obsession with Regression. Nicolas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, encourages his readers to express their views on his commentaries. But where are the women? How many post their opinions? Recently Kristof suggested that his readers look at a blog posting on his site by Emma Pierson, “How to get more women to join the debate.”

(Pierson is a student currently studying statistics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University). She has discovered a major gender gap when reviewing comments made on The New York Times website.

However, here we are in 2016, and it appears that the ratio has stayed almost the same for the past twenty years or so. During the first half of 2014, Google alongside some other tech giant companies released its diversity report. The very low number of women employees among Google’s total employees initiated a wave of discussion and prompted other technology companies, such as Pinterest, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, to follow suit.

“Across the board, men make up between 60 and 70 percent of the total number of employees “ On the other hand, there are few women in both technical and leadership positions.

It’s really surprising, 10 to 15 percent on average, and even fewer are Hispanics or African Americans (Lightner & Molla, 2014). Notably, smaller tech companies such as Pandora and Indiegogo boast an impressive 49 and 45 percent female employees, respectively (Mangalindan, 2014). On the downside, when it comes to ethnic diversity among its employees, both companies fare much worse than other larger tech firms.

The issue is in no way just limited to Silicon Valley and its tech giants. In the UK, where a burgeoning tech sector has been making headlines, the goal is for women to make up 30 percent of the STEM workforce by 2020: a pitiful target that speaks volumes about the state of the sector.

Women and girls are being let down by this booming industry all over the world – and it is especially tragic that bros now dominate the creative capitals of tech when we remember the first coder in history was actually a woman. Ada Lovelace, the Victorian woman credited with writing the first piece of code for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine in 1842, would surely be disappointed to know women have failed to follow in her footsteps, and that instead the industry has been overrun by single-minded bros.

The Internet offers a cloak of anonymity and the chance to wash oneself off of any ethics, or even decency, and allows people to make threats with impunity. We need to recognize this fact, and work to create safe online zones for those at risk. Social media giants should recognize the vulnerabilities laid bare and exposed via their sites, and aim to develop more hassle-free and efficient harassment and complaint-reporting mechanisms, as well as software.

Of course, it goes without saying that this abuse is part of a more pervasive, larger problem. This abuse is merely a reflection of real-life sexism, playing out on reel/virtual life. While strides have been made, there is still a structural and institutionalized system of bias, even if it is not easily visible to the public’s eye. For all our modernday talk of third wave feminism’s rise in the developed nations such as the USA, these Internet harassment numbers belie some sobering realities. While birth control and paid maternity leave, as well as the wage parity still remain frontline issues, the reports of rape and sexual assault in high-profile colleges—be it the nowfamous story of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress-carrying awareness campaign, to Duke’s fraternity student’s facing rape allegations—rape culture is omnipresent and speaks to a larger global social underbelly of prejudice.

Even countries such as Norway, which fare better than most in terms of UN rankings and equality indexes, have yet to eradicate institutional inequality. Statistics exist showing that a disappointing 17% of the country’s

mayors are women. Also, female representation on local councils is low, at a mere 36%. Clearly, there exists a political representational gap that needs fulfillment.

There are some clear structural inequalities at play, be it in Norway, USA, Yemen or India. No doubt, the problem of sexism plays out disproportionately according to different spheres of politics, economy, culture(s) and such. However, sexism is universal, even if not explicitly manifesting for some. Death threats directed at a female gamer based in San Francisco, or a photographer in London are proof that the online world is only holding a mirror to reality. Be it in the so-called ‘progressive’ global North, or in the ‘developing’ global South, women are marginalized. Let’s not allow a new advent of Internet anonymity to push women to the back of the queue for equality, yet again. Everyone receives abuse online but the sheer hatred thrown at women bloggers has left some in fear for their lives. Last week, Kathy Sierra, a well-known software programmer and Java expert, announced that she had cancelled her speaking engagements and was “afraid to leave my yard” after being threatened with suffocation, rape and hanging.

The threats didn’t come from a stalker or a jilted lover and they weren’t responses to a controversial book or speech. Sierra’s harassers were largely anonymous, and all the threats had been made online.

Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent - her attackers not only verbally assaulting her (“fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat”) but also posting photomontages of her on other sites: one with a noose next to her head and another depicting her screaming with a thong covering her face. Since she wrote about the abuse on her website, the harassment has increased. “People are posting all my private data online everywhere social-security number, and home address - a retaliation for speaking out.”

While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world - cat-calls, for instance, or being “rated” on our looks.

It’s all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web - the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.

On some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape like mentality. One recent blog thread, attacking two women bloggers, contained comments like, “I would fuck them both in the ass,”; “Without us you would be raped, beaten and killed for nothing,”; and “Don’t worry, you or your friends are too ugly to be put on the black market.”

Jill Filipovic, a 23-year-old law student who also writes on the popular blog, Feministe, recently had some photographs of her uploaded and subjected to abusive comments on an online forum for students in New York. “The people who were posting comments about me were speculating as to how many abortions I’ve had, and they talked about ‘hate-fucking’ me,” says Filipovic. “I don’t think a man would get that; the harassment of women is far more sexualised - men may be told that they’re idiots, but they aren’t called ‘whores’.”

Most disturbing is how accepted this is. When women are harassed on the street, it is considered inappropriate.

Online, though, sexual harassment is not only tolerated - it’s often lauded.

Blog threads or forums where women are attacked attract hundreds of comments, and their traffic rates rocket. Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist?

Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: “There’s the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home.”

Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn’t long before comments about my appearance (“Who’s the intern?; “I do like Gray Shirt’s three-quarter pose.”) started popping up.

One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was “posing” so as to “make [my] breasts as obvious as possible”. The post, titled “Let’s take a closer look at those breasts,” ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn’t possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex.

Althouse herself said that I should have “worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too”. All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap. I won’t even get into the hundreds of other blogs and websites that linked to the “controversy.” It was, without doubt, the most humiliating experience of my life - all because I dared be photographed with a political figure.

But a picture does seem to be considered enough reason to go on a harassment rampage. Some argue that the increased visibility afforded people by the internet - who doesn’t have a blog, MySpace page, or Flickr account these days? - means that harassment should be expected, even acceptable. When feminist and liberal bloggers slammed Althouse for her attack on me, she argued that having been in a photo where I was “posing” made me fair game. When Filipovic complained about her ha-

rassment, the site responded: “For a woman who has made 4,000 pictures of herself publicly available on Flickr, and who is a self-proclaimed feminist author of a widely-disseminated blog, she has gotten pretty shy about overexposure.” Ah, the “she was asking for it” defence.”I think there’s a tendency to put the blame on the victims of stalking, harassment or even sexual violence when the victim is a woman - and especially when she’s a woman who has made herself public,” says Filipovic. “Public space has traditionally been reserved for men, and women are supposed to be quiet.” Sierra thinks that online threats, even if they are coming from a small group of people, have tremendous potential to scare women from fully participating online.

“How many rape/fantasy threats does it take to make women want to lay low? Not many,” she says.

But even women who don’t put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female usernames averaged 163 threatening and/ or sexually explicit messages a day.

“The promise of the early internet,” says Marwick, “was that it would liberate us from our bodies, and all the oppressions associated with prejudice. We’d communicate soulto-soul, and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race.” In reality, what ended up happening was that, online, the default identity became male and white - unless told otherwise, you would assume you were talking to a white man. “So people who brought up their ethnicity, or people who complained about sexism in online communications, were seen as ‘playing the race/gender card’ or trying to stir up trouble,” says Marwick.

And while online harassment doesn’t necessarily create the same immediate safety concerns as street harassment, the consequences are arguably more severe. If someone calls you a “slut” on the street, it stings - but you can move on. If someone calls you a “slut” online, there’s a public record as long as the site exists.

Let me tell you, it’s not easy to build a career as a feminist writer when you have people coming up to you in pubs asking if you’re the “Clinton boob girl” or if one of the first items that comes up in a Google search of your name is “boobgate”. And for young women applying for jobs, the reality is terrifying. Imagine a potential employer searching for information and coming across a thread about what a “whore” you are.

Thankfully, women are fighting back. Sparked by the violent harassment of Sierra, one blogger started a “stop cyberbullying” campaign.

This was picked up by hundreds of other bloggers and an international women’s technology organisation, Take Back the Tech, a global network of women who encourage people to “take back online spaces” by writing, video blogging, or podcasting about online harassment. It won’t mean the end of misogyny on the web, but it is a start. Such campaigns show that women are ready to demand freedom from harassment and fear in our new public spaces. In the same way that we should be able to walk down the street without fear of being raped, women shouldn’t have to stay quiet online - or pretend to be men - to be free of threats and harassment. It is time to take back the sites. The gender gap in the tech industry is no news to anyone. Although there have been numerous initiatives trying to close the gender gap in the tech industry, none of them addresses the gender gap in the online discourses around tech.

Women aren’t equal contributors of the conversations which is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public.

There is a huge disparity between genders when it comes to numbers of ideas and voices expressed on online commentary platforms. The online world has become an influential part of our offline lives and our identities.

Gender equality in the world will not be achieved by ignoring the imbalances we face in the virtual community. Closing the gender gap in tech requires increasing the number of women thought leaders, contribution to online discussions about tech, as much as increasing female employees in the tech companies. Express focuses on empowering women in tech to become thought leaders and contribute to key commentary forums which feed all other media and drive thought leadership across tech industry. I envision a world in which the best ideas—regardless of the person’s gender or race—will have a chance to be heard and shape the tech industry and the world.

I conducted research both on the reasons behind women’s lack of voice in tech, and the potential ways by which we can increase their engagement on online opinion making forums. The first part lead to Express focusing on encouraging women to write by removing obstacles such as online harassment (which I focused on the first semester) and the second part lead a focus on enabling women to write by empowering them.

Empowerment is a state of mind that they feel they have something worth saying and their opinion matters to an audience. This is a result of developing a sense of agency which I’m trying to cultivate in women in tech.

In my thesis, I’ve been working on interventions that increase women’s involvement in online discussions through providing a.community support b.empowering tools c.education and skills. a. I’m designing an experience for young females in tech. It’s a campaign that will be held on the week of March 8th, the international women’s day. It’s a series of interviews by female experts in tech in which they share a story with the young women who are new field. It’s a story they wish they knew when they started their careers.

b. Men and Women have different cognitive abilities. I’m developing a product that focuses on women’s cognitive advantages.

It’s a keyboard that is easier to use by people with better fine motor skills and color vision. c. When writing or talking about any specific field, you’ll need to speak the language of that field.

Each industry has its own language and you’ll be immediately more powerful and accepted if you speak that right language. I’m developing an app that helps users learn and speak the language of their field. For example as a designer in tech you’ll be able to talk in the design language.

For this sprint we had one week to come up with an idea for an app that was related to our thesis topic. When we think about data and more specifically personal data, one of the first things that comes to mind is the issue of privacy. I did a co-creation workshop on the issue of privacy in which I invited four people. I divided my participants into two groups and gave them possible future scenarios. The possible future was a future in which everybody would share everything with everyone about their lives.Then I asked them about the opportunities and threats they see. two of my participants were pro technology and already sharing things such as their location or food items constantly. The other two were against technology and didn’t even have social media

accounts. I realized that both groups were worried about the lack of control over personal data so I created D.SIDE. D.SIDE is an app that let the users decide whether they would like to pay for a service with their money or their personal data. We know that there are a lot of free apps out there but they’re not really free. They track a lot of personal information about each user in the background and that’s how this transaction seems to be free. I believe users should be able to choose, they need to be aware of this fact.

App store should provide users with these information. It only says “free” on the top right corner when you try to download an app but it doesn’t provide any information about the kind of data that specific app would be collecting from us. We are so used to these free services that we cannot imagine living without them. If I loose my Google maps for example, I won’t be able to go anywhere without stopping every second and asking people for direction. It might not even be reliable information. With D.SIDE users will be able to use the service but choose to pay with their money or if they don’t mind being tracked, they can state it on the app.

The app performs as a shield or gaurd and when it’s run, it will screen all the downloaded apps on the device and lists all the ways each specific app is collecting data from the users. Then the users will be given the options to cut off aceess for an app and pay with their money to be able to continue using that service. There are a lot of people who don’t mind being tracked but my point is simple, it’s their right to know, to be aware of this matter and then if they still choose to be tracked, then it will be fair. D.SIDE is all about giving back the control to the users and bringing awareness on the issue of privacy and personal data.

Not only the Internet isn’t inclusive in terms of access to it and its communication channels, it’s also not so gender inclusive in how it welcomes its users. 66% of the offline population in the US are women and they face four times more harassments than their male counterparts. surprisingly, state and federal legislation and common law had done almost nothing about this sort of crime and some police officials have no idea what some of the social media platforms are and how someone might be threatened online. There aren’t any instructions for young girls and children for how to deal with such issues. Telling them to ignore such harassing messages is what media is currently suggesting women to do but we won’t be able to solve this huge issue by sweeping it under the rug. Men get harassed too. It wasn’t until the mass of Twitter threats sent to Caroline Criado-Perez

in 2013, that the broad international media coverage of the incident has led to “online harassment” being a word that is bandied around with increasing frequency. Some of the people who sent her those messages also got prosecuted for their actions.

The term is still vaguely defined, but it is generally understoos in relation to the high profile campaigns. The legal definition of harassment, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, is: “A course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose” or “Words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person.”

This is of course a very broad definition, which state and federal legislation and common law have narrowed and refined in various ways. Some of the categories include hate speech, cyber stalking, sexual or pornographic content, and identity theft. I will focus on Women online harassment because they face far more of it and it’s something I personally have been affected by.There is a considerable amount of documentation indicating that online harassment disproportionally impacts women. I recently reviewed Danielle Criton’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace and the text matches up with anecdotal accounts and with my own and my peers’ personal experience as I mentioned earlier. The U.S, National Violence Against Women Survey estimates that 60% of cyber stalking victims are women. The Na-

tional Center for Victims of Crime estimates that women actually make up 70%. Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA) collected information from over 3,000 reports of cyber harassment between 2000 and 2011 and found 72.5% were female. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 74% of individuals stalked both online and offline are female. When focusing on the issue of cyber harassment towards women, three types of users come to mind. The first group would be women who got harassed before and are considered the victims. The second group would be women who don’t participate online. They aren’t expressing their opinion on the websites such as Reddit or Wikipedia.

They became the passive consumers of these platforms while they should be active participants like their male counterparts. Only a quarter of comments made on NYTimes articles are written by women. Women get harassed four times more than men and that can really keep them quiet. The third group would be people who do harass women online. They could be men or women but they’re more likely to be men attacking women because they spoke out and they have an audience. It will be difficult to reach out to the people who bullied others so I’ll be talking to people who aren’t active online. Those women will be my main users. I will ask them questions about their daily lives and how they use internet on a daily basis to see where I can intervene.

For feminists the underscoring of human differences, rather than similarities is a delicate matter. Historically, so many people have been inclined to define differences as deficits. It was mostly in the favor of males and their abilities, making women seem inadequate or not complete, the second sex. This kind of interpretation of variance has led to the separation of men as “superior” and to the labeling of differing groups as “inferior”.

The biological differences give each sex its own advantage. For example women’s cognitive abilities are better in terms of fine motor skills and men are better at visual-spatial skills.

These differences won’t make any sex superior. In the first half of the 20th century, the Eugenics Movement and the Holocaust were examples of how the devaluing of human differences can be taken to horrific extremes, resulting in government policies that condoned the sterilization, persecution, and death of millions of innocent people. Unfortunately, today, the world is not free of discrimination or of the oppression of differing groups, as exemplified by the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims in the Balkans, as well as the severe restrictions placed on women in countries across the globe, such as Saudi Arabia, where women were stripped of most of their liberties, including their right to vote. I’d like to give women the tools, both physical/digital and emotional(giving them a sense of agency) that encourages them to say something.

Who Narrates the world?

NYTimes and Twitter have almost become gender balanced platform!

No! They have not! Let me explain it in details. When we talk about people’s engagement on online platforms, there are two types of users, the active participants and the passive consumers. NYTimes is a gender balanced platform when we look at its users of readers. When we look at the data regarding who actually contributes to the content creation, we notice a huge disparity not only in the articles but also in the readers’ comments at the bottom of each article.

The commonly used confusing term acquired by social network platforms is AMU which stands for Active Monthly Users. An “active user” is defined as a user who has interacted with the community in the last 30 days while logged in. This metric is different from MUV, Monthly Unique Visitors, which includes unregistered readers who are only consumers and not creators of content. The key here is the kind of interaction which is not fully explained in the definition. The user-platform interaction needs further clarification.

The content that is created by writing your own opinion piece determines active contribution not just merely sharing or favoriting other users’ contents. Even though women are equal active users of these platforms, distributing information by sharing and liking, they fall behind their male counterparts in being active content contributors. Social platforms such as twitter claim that they have a balanced AMU which is true only if you consider “sharing or liking contents produced by other users” as active participation.

I consider liking or sharing stories told by others, an act of content consumerism. Active participation requires telling your own story which is the result of having an opinion about something and expressing it your own way. Twitter might have a gender balanced content consumers aka active users but certainly not a gender balanced content creators.

5

‘Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.’ ~Napoleon Hil

A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur unconsciously.

In the American Journal of Psychology (1903) it is defined in this way: “A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.” Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory. The process by which new behaviors become automatic is habit formation. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioral patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways, but it is possible to form new habits through repetition.

As behaviors are repeated in a consistent context, there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the action. This increases the automaticity of the behavior in that context. Features of an automatic behavior are all or some of: efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionally, un-

controllability. As the habit is forming, it can be analyzed in three parts: the cue, the behavior, and the reward. The cue is the thing that causes the habit to come about, the trigger of the habitual behavior. This could be anything that one’s mind associates with that habit and one will automatically let a habit come to the surface. The behavior is the actual habit that one exhibits, and the reward, a positive feeling, therefore continues the “habit loop”.

A habit may initially be triggered by a goal, but over time that goal becomes less necessary and the habit becomes more automatic.

These interventions focus on developing new habit loops through repetition and consistency of indicators.

Mood Loom Mood Loom is an intervention designed to combat the issue of destructive habits through physical activity engagements. There are a lot of apps and services trying to cultivate good habits in users but I believe physical interactions with your hands will be more powerful.

Users will set a healthy habit they would like to achieve through the app and set their starting date. Every day they will weave a few rows after they achieved their daily goal and the color of the thread represents their feeling, how they felt about the quality of their activity. Then they will take a picture of the loom. The app analyzes the color rows and logs them into user’s profile. The app will keep track of your productivity based on your input, the amount of weaving and colors as well as the time of the day you did it. If you procrastinate or forget to do your activity one day, it will remind you through notifications and asks you to make up for it the next day.

D.SIDE APP For this sprint we had one week to come up with an idea for an app that was related to our thesis topic. When we think about data and more specifically personal data, one of the first things that comes to mind is the issue of privacy. I did a co-creation workshop on the issue of privacy in which I invited four people. I divided my participants into two groups and gave them possible future scenarios. The possible future was a future in which everybody would share everything with everyone about their lives.Then I asked them about the opportunities and threats they see. two of my participants were pro technology and already sharing things such as their location or food items constantly. The other two were against technology and didn’t even have social media accounts.

I realized that both groups were worried about the lack of control over personal data so I created D.SIDE. D.SIDE is an app that let the users decide whether they would like to pay for a service with their money or their personal data. We know that there are a lot of free apps out there but they’re not really free. They track a lot of personal information about each user

in the background and that’s how this transaction seems to be free. I believe users should be able to choose, they need to be aware of this fact.

App store should provide users with these information. It only says “free” on the top right corner when you try to download an app but it doesn’t provide any information about the kind of data that specific app would be collecting from us. We are so used to these free services that we cannot imagine living without them.

If I loose my Google maps for example, I won’t be able to go anywhere without stopping every second and asking people for direction. It might not even be reliable information.

With D.SIDE users are able to take advantage of the service but choose to pay with their money or if they don’t mind being tracked, they can state it on the app. The app performs as a shield or guard and when it’s run, it will screen all the downloaded apps on the device and lists all the ways each specific app is collecting data from the users. Then the users will be given the options to cut off access for an app and pay with their money to be able to continue using that service.

There are a lot of people who don’t mind being tracked but my point is simple, it’s their right to know, to be aware of this matter and then if they still choose to be tracked, then it will be fair. D.SIDE is all about giving back the control to the users and bringing awareness on the issue of privacy and personal data.

Visualizing User Feedback When we look at the stats on shopping and writing reviews, we see that even though women do most of the online shopping, they write reviews far less than men. The five star rating systems aren’t the most compelling way to assess a service or product. I started to look at how might we design a better way for people to express their opinions and comments about a service or products. As a designer, we always try to understand our users, feel their pain points and empathize with them. Throughout the development process, we take the unfinished prototypes to them and ask them to rate and evaluate them. Even after the product is launched we go back and read the user reviews in order to improve our product. Then we go back to our user journey map and try to pin and make sense of the pain point on the experience map. I created this new rating system based on user’s experience map and visual elements in diagrams. The users can draw their overall experience journey with a service and evaluate each step. One of

the benefits of the 5 star rating system is that the users can make a judgment about the quality of a service by quickly looking at the starts. The colors show the satisfaction so when other users look at the map at a glance, they can discover whether it’s a positive or negative experience in a quick way.

Visualizing User Feedback When we look at the stats on shopping and writing reviews, we see that even though women do most of the online shopping, they write reviews far less than men. The five star rating systems aren’t the most compelling way to assess a service or product. I started to look at how might we design a better way for people to express their opinions and comments about a service or products. As a designer, we always try to understand our users, feel their pain points and empathize with them. Throughout the development process, we take the unfinished prototypes to them and ask them to rate and evaluate them. Even after the product is launched we go back and read the user reviews in order to improve our product. Then we go back to our user journey map and try to pin and make sense of the pain point on the experience map. I created this new rating system based on user’s experience map and visual elements in diagrams. The users can draw their overall experience journey with a service and evaluate each step. One of

the benefits of the 5 star rating system is that the users can make a judgment about the quality of a service by quickly looking at the starts. The colors show the satisfaction so when other users look at the map at a glance, they can discover whether it’s a positive or negative experience in a quick way.

I strongly believe in this quote by one of my users that your construct will define your conduct. Construct as a noun is defined as an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be “subjective” and not based on empirical evidence. Your subjective ideas and theories will define your behaviors and actions. In order to have strong actions, you need to have strong subjective opinions.

For this intervention, I looked at my thesis products through an speculative future lens. I imagined two future scenarios, Utopian and Dystopian. My imaginary futures take place in year 2075. As with most product designs in tech, the early product lines will lead to most complex and evolutionary pieces. Steve Jobs had the idea of pocket computers in early days of Apple. However, Apple had to go through macintosh, Mac Books, iPads, iPhones to finally get to apple watches. The same goes with my line of product. This speculative keyboard is one of the earliest products within companies history. It’s built in 2016 and in 2075 it will evolve into a new object that exists within the context of my Dystopian future scenario.

Dystopian Future: It’s year 2075 now. Since the introduction of the express keyboard in 2015, we have continued to make smaller and smaller devices. The scientists focused mostly on extracting differences between genders and the results went directly into the product line. Every product is built to advantage women. Men have a hard time figuring out the technology and usage of the devices. express keyboard was the beginning of all these chips implemented in men’s bodies today.

It was when that the idea of atomized life was conceived. As Sinclair Smith writes in his book, we have become a society of robots and not individual men, and we can’t live without our batteries just like a robot can’t. Fifty years ago when virtual reality wasn’t huge, women would actually move their bodies and go to places, take a walk and do things with their hands. women’s hand were not the same as now, fingers had a pattern on them called finger prints. Each person had their own fingerprints that were specific to them. Instead of a UUID(User Unique ID) devices each person would be security checked with their fingerprints. Criminals would actually be present on the crime scene and the first step for the police would be to collect all the fingerprints that exist on the scene. Working was also different. the verb was actually “to go” to work.

Instead of doing everything from their stations, people were moving around, leaving their homes(a place where all the family members would physically

exist and live) each morning and coming back home at the end of the day.

People would move around their body more, move to study, move to travel, and even move to go to the bathroom. There was no VR glasses and people were looking at their surroundings with their eyes. The advent of the the VR industry alongside computer and technological improvements that advantage women led us have virtual lives that we have today. Triggered by the 2068 CC(computer collapse), women started to become more critical of how they’ve changed from their ancestors. Millions of men have died from that collapse because they didn’t have the basic skills to move around and find food. Historically we’re programmed to move around on our feet and use our hands and eyes.

Humans can get back to it. That’s what the modern designers should be doing. They should find ways to empower men, to take out their chips in their bodies and free them from being slaves. They can be as strong as women and have jobs in tech which is a female-dominated industry.

Utopian Future: appy new year! Let’s go through some of the great news of the past year.

2074 has been an incredible year in the past 100 years when the machines started to show up called computers.

Women have been excluded or marginalized for a long time. Having equal virtual environment has become a goal. In his presidency campaign, Sinclair Smith has promised to bring this dream to life and he did many great things that set the base for today’s successes. Last year is an incredible key point in history. Finally in 2074, after all the sacrifices and efforts of activists, politicians and designers, we were able to achieve this goal.

Now women make half of the content on the Hub and the computer and chip industry has more women in their workforce than men. Computers aren’t made by men for men anymore. We saw the emergence of all these different interfaces and tangible screens in late 30s. It wasn’t possible for everybody to use different senses in interacting with their devices if it wasn’t for the designers. Designers became the the agents of change.

We owe them our strong senses because we could’ve gone a different path and move away from who we actually are as humans, losing connection from our bodies and our past. Product designers are the reason we have such a strong intelligence of our materialized surrounding and they were who brought these material to life and created emotional bonds between human and them. As we owe the revolutionary changes in the world to Designers in many ways for example the earth we live in with clean air, the year 2074 has been named after the president and designer, Sinclair Smith.

Express keyboard Undermining language not only makes us seem weak in front of our audience but it eventually affects us by influencing negatively who we think we are and what we can do.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves our capabilities and our worth are a crucial part of our success path. There are many research findings that prove the effect of powerful words on humans and their success and it was something I experienced myself.

Self sabotaging can take many forms from procrastination to undermining themselves with words. The latter was something that I personally had a lot of challenge with at some point in my life. I studied science my whole school life and when it was time to choose a major for college, I naturally picked Physics since I already had a Physics olympiad medal and I was good at it. I’ve always been the smart student in my class and I would be admired for my Math and Physics skills. My whole life was solving problems in Calculus and Physics and I always knew more than anybody else in my class. In 6th grade, our Math teacher would ask me to teach the class since I already had a reputation by tutoring my peers after hours.

They claimed I was super good at explaining which was probably partly due to similar 12-year-old mental models.

So I had all these accomplishments throughout years and got into a college with acceptance rate of one percent. I studied Physics for two years and then I had a crisis. My life turned upside down. I wasn’t enjoying Physics and Math anymore. I got introduced to Design and Design thinking as a way to tackle problems and it seemed much more interesting to me. I’ve been solving problems all my life but something inside me was telling me that was my dream job. Design challenges and wicked problems can’t be put in fixed formulas.The complex ecosystems around each problem and the difficulties it would bring was exactly what I was thirsty for. So I transferred to Interaction Design and the tech world. All of a sudden I wasn’t the smartest kid in class anymore. As a matter of fact, I was one of the worst. I had no formal design education background so my visual skills were awful and my knowledge of the industry and tech world was even worse. As a human, there’s nothing worse than your identity being taken away from you.

My identity as the smartest student in class was taken from me. I was having very difficult times. I was regretting my decision to transfer and I kept telling myself stories about how I’m never going to be a good designer.

My mom, My hero, was watching me suffering along this way.

One late night, I was working on an assignment in the living room.

The code wasn’t coming along and I couldn’t figure out what the bug was. My mom came to the room and I burst into tears when I saw her and I said: I feel desperate.

The idea of making this keyboard came to me when I was doing research on the self sabotaging language that women use, techniques to avoid them and to replace them with assertive action verbs. Tara Mohr wrote an article that resonated with me deeply, talking about how our Inner Critics undermine our self confidence and create limitations that make us feel—and behave—small. This concept was one of the theses in Mohr’s book,Playing Big, which suggests techniques about how women can begin to break some of these destructive, often culturally inherited habits.

“I love talking about this topic because it brings about so many “aha!” moments when I speak to women: So many have no idea they do all sorts of self-sabotaging things in speech and writing. It’s pretty amazing to suddenly see your unconscious habits and then be able to let go of them. Here are some of the “little things” women do in speech and writing that aren’t really “little.” In fact, they have a huge impact in causing us to come across as less competent and confident:

1. Inserting just: “I just want to check in and see…” “I just think…” Just tends to make us sound a little apologetic and defensive about what we’re saying. Think about the difference between the sound of “I just want to check in and see…” and “I want to check in and see…” or the difference between “I just think” and “I think…”

2. Inserting actually: “I actually disagree…” “I actually have a question.”

It actually makes us sound surprised that we disagree or have a question— not good!

3. Using qualifiers: “I’m no expert in this, but…” or “I know you all have been researching this for a long time, but…” undermines your position before you’ve even stated your opinion.

4. Asking, “Does that make sense?” or “Am I making sense?”: I used to do this all the time. We do it with good intentions: We want to check in with the other people in the conversation and make sure we’ve been clear. The problem is, “does that make sense” comes across either as condescending (like your audience can’t understand) or it implies you feel you’ve been incoherent.

A better way to close is something like “I look forward to hearing your thoughts.” You can leave it up to the other party to let you know if they are confused about something, rather than implying that you “didn’t make sense.”

Express keyboard I get so many emails from women who are excited to share with me how people responded to them differently once they 1) stopped using the undermining phrases in their speech and writing and 2) communicated warmth in a more positive way (a friendly greeting and closing, for example). Many women—especially more junior women—share that when they took all the qualifiers out of their emails, they started getting much quicker and more substantive responses to their requests. This issue can be tackled by using softwares that warn you when you use these words. There’s a Google chrome plugin called Sorry, No Sorry that underlines when you are using undermining language in your emails and asks you to find an alternative way of writing that line.

It is very powerful in avoiding the weak language but falls short in addressing a replacement or working the other way around and cultivating a powerful word habit. Express keyboard approaches this issue by offering extra keys that are action opinion(commentary?subjective?) verbs such as I disagree, I believe, I declare, etc. The keyboard is made for women. It shouldn’t be misinterpreted with Petticoat 5 computers for women by women.

Let me explain. Going back to my Dystopian future, Women will take over and the tech industry is run by

women. Instead of reaching equality, there’s discrimination against men. The devices are built based on men and women’s biological differences and more specifically cognitive abilities. The devices are built based on women’s cognitive advantages which makes it harder or impossible for men to use. For example, 10% of men suffer from color blindness whereas that number drops to 0.5% in women. The express keyboard of 2075 has keys that are based on red and green colors and look the same in the eyes of a color blind. So they won’t be able to tell the difference between keys.

The express keyboard of 2015 is designed to make women use strong language when writing. Women have better fine motor skills. Associate Professor Elin Reikerås and Professor Thomas Moser of the Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger have studied young children’s motor skills and early gender differences, and compared the results to a study conducted in the UK. The results of the study showed that girls performed better in self-help skills, fine motor skills and general movement skills.

I decided to make the keys on the keyboard smaller because women had better dexterity. I had now extra space and could add more keys. I decided that those keys could be the action keys that are missing from most women’s language.

The express keyboard of 2015 is designed to make women use strong language when writing. Women have better fine motor skills. Associate Professor Elin Reikerås and Professor Thomas Moser of the Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger have studied young children’s motor skills and early gender differences, and compared the results to a study conducted in the UK. The results of the study showed that girls performed better in self-help skills, fine motor skills and general movement skills.

I decided to make the keys on the keyboard smaller because women had better dexterity. I had now extra space and could add more keys.

I decided that those keys could be the action keys that are missing from most women’s language.

Even with the exponential rise of touch screens, there are still plenty of situations where pushing buttons trumps tapping on glass. Apple’s iPhone home button is a physical button to press. It could have been a button to touch on the glass. They made a design decision to deliberately keep the home button tactile. Even though it wasn’t inline with Jony Ive and Steve Jobs’s joint crusade against buttons. The thing is, it’s a crusade against the unnecessary button, which is why we’ll always have a home button on our iPhones, a kind of ejector seat for when things go wrong.

There are two highly supported Kickstarter campaigns to go out and make a button for Android devices,

which often lack physical switches of any kind. The Pressy is a physical switch that slots into your phone’s headphone socket and provides you with something to actually press. In fact, it seems like Users are really interested in this button. So interested that they has coughed up a collective $132,000 in a matter of a day, blowing past the $40,000 goal. Another example would be Amazon’s Dash button. It’s a physical button that can be implemented in any place and will allow shoppers to reorder frequently used domestic products like laundry detergent or paper towels with the click of a real-life button. Domino Pizza had the same approach to their pizza delivery system. You can have your favorite pizza by just pushing a button. Flic is a physical button that you can buy and control your favorite App with it. It is a small wireless button that you can stick anywhere.

It connects to your iOS or Android device and you can use the app to associate your favorite action to the button. All these buttons share a common value: the pleasure and satisfactory click feeling you can expect from buttons. Express keyboard uses physical keys to cultivate the powerful language in women. The form is inspired by the first commercially produced typewriter called the Hansen Writing Ball. It was invented in 1865 and patented and put into production in 1870. penhagen. The Hansen ball was a 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble an oversized pincushion.

The most commonly used keyboard is the QWERTY keyboard. The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived inMilwaukee, Wisconsin.

The construction of the type writer had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called “up-stroke” design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place common ly used letter-pairs (like “th” or “st”) so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. The QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to preventing jams they had to do that. There is another origin story in the Smithsonian that the qwerty keyboard was made for telegraph operators and has this layout to make it easy for the telegraph operator to work.

Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter “A” is located on the home row, which requires the typist’s fingers to leave the home row for most words. I think it’s time to move

away from the QWERTY keyboards and go towards some new keyboard layouts that make sense with today’s world. We don’t have the typebars jamming on the typewriters so why are we still using the keyboard that was intended to slow us down? there are 10 letters in English that are used 80% of the time. I made those keys the home row. Express keyboard places the common combination of letters such as “th”, “sh” next to each other and therefore increases the speed of typing. It gives women advantages by making them type faster and use a more powerful language.

They are prompted to be more mindful of their verbs and try to use those keys often as it tracks all the things they type and gives them an overview of how undermining or powerful they wrote that day.

Exponent Labs One of the best practices for adapting a powerful language is to observe and mimic people who are successfully doing it. I created Exponent labs with having two goals in mind. The first goal was to create a platform for women developing their voice, to learn and get inspired by powerful female voices in their industries. It’s a series of interviews that women thought leaders in in tech and science will share stories about their challenges, their proud moments and tips of wisdom based on their experience. I wanted this interviewing experience delightful for my participants as they were gifting their time to the campaign. I decided to create a visualization of their voice so that they could see the power of their language.

Cymatics came to mind. I created a device that connects to the microphone and transfers the sound vibration of the speaker to water so that it can be seen. Everyone has a distinct voice, different from all others; almost like a fingerprint, one’s voice is unique and can act as an identifier.

The human voice is composed of a multitude of different components, making each voice different; namely, pitch, tone, and rate. Pitch is an integral part of the human voice. The pitch of the voice is defined as the “rate of vibration of the vocal folds” . The sound of the voice changes as the rate of vibrations varies.

As the number of vibrations per second increases, so does the pitch, meaning the voice would sound higher. How are these vibrations and pitches created? The vibrations, and the speed at which they vibrate, are dependent on the length and thickness of the vocal cords, as well as the tightening and relaxation of the muscles surrounding them. This explains why women generally have higher voices than men do; women tend to have higher voices because they have shorter vocal cords. The interesting fact is that the length and thickness of the vocal cords, however, are not the only factors that affect one’s pitch.

The pitch of someone’s voice can also be affected by emotions, moods and inflection. Interestingly, our emotions can also affect the pitch of our voices.

When people become frightened or excited, the muscles around the voice box (or larynx) unconsciously contract, putting strain on the vocal cords, making the pitch higher. The voice tends to change, sliding up and down the pitch scale, as we express different emotions, thoughts and feelings. I wanted to visualize these emotions and feelings so I got help from colors and visible light spectrum.

The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 390 to 700 nm. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 430–770 THz. The voiced speech of a typical adult female will have a fundamental frequency from 165 to 255 Hz.

I paired the visible spectrum frequency with voice frequency and created 6 segments. Each segment represents one color from the spectrum. Then I created a video invitation and asked women thought leaders to donate their voice to Exponent voice DNA bank. I video taped the water from above so the audience can see the change in the speaker’s pitch as the emotion changes in the speaker.

The interviews were 15 minutes long. These interviews along with their sound visualizations are posted on the online platform for women technologists and scientists to go and listen to and develop their own strong language.

My second goal was to bring together a community of role-models for women in tech and science. Role-models are important in cultivating women’s interest and success in STEM fields.

Young female students are more likely to choose to pursue a STEM career or education if they have a role model in mind. There is research on the gap between men and women in STEM fields that reveals the scarcity of readily available role models for women as they consider careers in tech. This scarcity of role models in Tech and Science harms women in two related ways. “First, as girls begin to consider college majors and career trajectories, the choice of STEM fields is not reinforced by respected role models; second, the lack of female role models reinforces some negative stereotypes held by young women about STEM fields. Specifically, researchers note that the “male geek” stereotype about computer scientists actively dissuades women from considering the field. Once women reach college and enroll in classes, role models and mentors can help them persevere in STEM majors. Research from several disciplines suggests that the presence of female peers, teaching assistants, and faculty members4 increases female retention in STEM majors. On the flipside, the absence of female role models and mentors has a clear negative impact. Women cited a lack of role models as a significant reason for leaving the fields of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and computer science.

Role models also combat negative stereotypes women hold about the nature STEM careers. “As the AAUW’s 2000 report, Tech Savvy, makes clear, the negative stereotype that STEM fields are dominated by “nerdy” men who work in isolation from other people and real-life problems contributes heavily to the continued gender disparity in STEM fields in both higher education and industry.7 Further, girls tend to prefer careers in which they have opportunities to help others. When interviewed, girls report that they do not recognize the collaborative, social, or human applications of STEM fields such as engineering and computer science.”

The reality of life in STEM fields is, of course, significantly different from these perceptions. Yet, convincing girls that in STEM fields, collaboration is the rule, not the exception, can be difficult to do. Similarly, girls need to be provided with clear examples of how all STEM fields have socially relevant applications. Role-models and mentors can prove to be very effective in this vein. By familiarizing girls with women whose daily work experiences include a high degree of connectedness to others and an ongoing and meaningful engagement with her society, schools can begin to reshape the conceptions that girls have about STEM fields.

“Role-models can be thought of as lighthouses: they offer a steady point of reference as we travel through complicated waters.” Unfortunately there’s a lack of female role models within tech and science industries. It’s an exposure problem. “Limited exposure to the fields and to people within those fields, as well as role models and mentors, is keeping more women from entering high tech,” says Dr. Caralynn Nowinski, 35, associate vice president for innovation and economic development in Chicago at the University of Illinois and interim executive director and chief operating officer of UI Labs.

A new survey by online job marketplace Elance found that men and women share similar opinions when it comes to women working in the tech industry. The results, which consisted of answers from close to 7,000 freelancers mainly in the U.S., found that both males and females agree on the top deterrents keeping women out of the tech industry, the changes that need to be made, and the overall outlook of women in tech moving forward. Most notably, both male and females respondents reported that a lack of “female role models” in the tech community is the top deterrent for why more women aren’t pursuing tech-related careers. “Lack of role models, is one of the main reasons holding back a lot of women.

LEXICON Cognitive functioning difference: Throughout the ages, the differences between men and women have been debated by scientists, comedians, and everyone in between. Sayings such as “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” attempt to describe how different males and females are from each other. Beyond human curiosity, the differences are important in policy issues. There are gender differences in cognitive abilities. The major enigma is whether males or females perform better in various cognitive tasks. Much research has been performed on the dichotomy between the brains of men and women. One widely accepted biological difference is that men have better visual-spatial ability, such as mental rotation of complex 3-D structures, while women are more capable at verbal processing tasks such as remembering words.

Gender Confidence Gap: We’ve long been hearing anecdotal evidence of women being more hesitant than men to speak up in meetings, apply for jobs, and accomplish other tasks that require faith in themselves. Now, science has also confirmed it that the gender confidence gap exists. Men throughout the world do indeed have higher self-esteem than women, though there are a few fascinating cultural differences.

Embodied Cognition: Embodied cognition is the belief that many features of human beings’ cognition are shaped by aspects of the body and are beyond the brain.

The features of cognition include high level mental constructs such as concepts and categories and human performance on various cognitive tasks such as reasoning or judgment.

Embodied cognition has become a base for creating interfaces that are highly focused on people’s embodied cognition. These interfaces seem to be more intuitive and integrate well in human’s daily lives.

Natural User Interface: In computing, a natural user interface, or NUI, or natural interface is the common term used by designers and developers of human&machine interfaces to refer to a user interface that is effectively invisible. It remains invisible as the user continuously learns increasingly complex interactions.

It became dominant when humans made progress in machine learning field and there are people working on different natural interfaces for women specifically trying to focus on women’s cognitive advantages.

Passive Content Consumption: Humans can use Internet content in three ways, They can produce content actively, they can share the contents created by other members of the community or they can consume the content created by others. People who are passively just reading, watching information and not expressing their own opinion and perspective on a topic.

Sense of Agency: The sense of agency is a feeling that one has that she/he are capable of doing something. The sense of agency or sense of control refers to “the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one’s own volitional actions” in the world. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movements or thinking thoughts. I’m focusing on the thinking part, creating this sense of agency in women so that they start expressing their opinions about their industry.

Sense of Urgency: There needs to be a sense of urgency and need for women to feel that they should say something about a cause they care about. That sense of responsibility will translate into: my opinion matters and I need to take action.

Cyber Harassment Women are not contributing to the discussions that are occurring on online platforms. This pattern is seen mostly on male dominated industries where as we see the opposite when it comes to the 4 Fs, Food, Fashion, Family and Furniture. When they do express their opinion, they are not welcome. Women face far more online harassment than their male counterparts and that can really keep them quiet. Cyber bullying can take many forms from stereotypes and calling names to death threats.

Language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. In this book, Language acquisition refers to acquisition of the language of your industry, the ability to clearly comprehend and speak professionally about what you do and why.

Online commentary platforms: These platforms are where people get their news from. The articles and opinion pieces as well as comments are compiled there, all relevant comments and discussions regarding diverse topics. I’m focusing on the gender diversity issues that is dominating most of the platforms that focus on tech, politics, science and business.

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Special thanks to my advisors: Allan Chochinov Andrew Schloss Abby Covert