No woman on my software team. Anything missing?

After working for years in the same software company, I feel cold chills whenever I imagine myself going to an interview to another place. I lost the habit. I remember being scared of them. I think Thank goodness that I still like my company, Intuit. My company stays high on the list of best employers, and that puts a safe distance between my interview phobias and the need to venture out there. Silly me, though. From time to time, I let my mind wander into hypotheticals, and I ask myself what would happen if I were to look for another job in another company? What questions do people ask these days? And an even more bizarre question: Do I have an advantage or a disadvantage as a woman in software?

Finding the answer to this last question is not easy, of course. Either a "yes" or "no" answer would be quite controversial, given that it would reveal an industry gender bias. Perhaps it would be better not even to ask. And yet I asked. I did it by conducting a small investigation. I asked the question, “Why do you want a woman on your software team?” and I got twenty-nine brave respondents to answer, out of which six were women. I also perused many studies that asked similar questions about women engineers and managers.

While my sample is too small to qualify as a rigorous study, the answers seem to fall into patterns that reflect common perceptions about women in software. When reading the rest of my analysis, please take everything with a grain of salt. A quick non-anonymous survey cannot answer with certainty this complex question.

The results fall into eight main categories. For each category, I have listed several quotes from my sample. Sometimes I compared my survey's responses to data from other studies to assess how accurate these perceptions were.

#1. Women are team catalysts
“They are less likely to be directly confrontational (unless you really annoy them), and more likely to channel their competitiveness into making the whole team better.” 
“[A woman] is more about nurturing and less about competition. [A woman] is more about teamwork.” 

The data: 
• The research confirms that this perception may be true. In Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women, Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone document the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the group's individual members and that the tendency to cooperate effectively increases with the number of women in a group.
• However, collaborative behavior can at times hurt women, by causing them to appear indecisive or too deferential, as recently argued in Collaboration’s Hidden Tax on Women’s Careers.

#2. Women have alternative points of view and exhibit deeper customer empathy
“Diversity of opinion matters when doing a challenging design.” 
“They certainly seem to have a different way of thinking and looking at problems that's extremely valuable.” 
“If the company's product is targeted at consumers, not having women on the team can significantly hamper growth in the female demographic.”

The data:
• The research reveals that indeed diversity can be very beneficial. A Washington Post blog on diversity refers to six different studies across many domains, including the performance of Standard and Poor’s top 1,500 firms, the accuracy of Wall Street traders, and the quality of scientific academic research.
• However, diversity is more important to women and minorities than it is to white men. A Glassdor.com survey found that 72 percent of women consider workforce diversity important versus 62 percent of men. To add to the controversy, Penelope Trunk, a woman entrepreneur, is quoted in an article on how to combat the all-male startups, "You can't go to work every day and have arguments. When the best answer is the fastest answer, you don't want a diverse team." 

#3. Gender should not matter at all when hiring 
“Someone’s gender should not affect you hiring them, or even warrant you considering them differently. That is called discrimination.” 
“There's no difference between them as far as gender goes. Some of the men brought their personal issues (alcoholism, marriage problems) into the office and took it out on the staff. [Some] women managers had psychological problems (poor self-esteem, hoarding, need to control/micromanage) and drove staff crazy.”

The related data:
• Forced diversity can hurt firm performance. A study by Dittmar and Ahern analyzed the impact of a 2003 Norwegian law requiring all public-limited firms to have at least 40 percent representation of women on their boards of directors. They found that when a firm experienced at least a 10 percent increase in women on its board, Tobin's Q dropped 18 percent (Tobin's Q ratio is a measure of firm assets in relation to a firm's market value). Reason: the imposed quota forced companies to choose directors they would not have chosen otherwise.
• The interview style matters. Changing job interviews to be less about individual skill and more about collaboration increases the odds of hiring women. 

#4. Women work harder than men
“They have worked harder to get where they are and are better on average than men in the same roles.”
“I work with numerous engineering women. They're some of the most driven people I've ever met.”

The data seem to show that women work at least as hard as men.
• One study shows that women in authority position receive more negative reactions, even when they say the exact same verbatim scripts. This bias affects their hiring or career decisions, and they often need to work harder to prove themselves.
• Not a big percentage of women in technology dare to work part-time because doing so puts their careers at risk, for three main reasons invoked by employers: 1. If the company needs to cover the work with multiple part-time people, the efficiency of a team goes down as the team size grows. 2. To work on critical systems requires employees to be immediately reachable. 3. The less time one spends outside of work, the more time one spends thinking about how to solve difficult problems at work. 

#5. Women improve the workplace culture
“In my experience and others, when working at more homogenous, ‘brogrammer’ type environments, the teams tended to skew to certain conversations and culture, which made some folks (even male) very uncomfortable.”
“The presence of women on a software team is often an indication of a team characterized by tolerance, sense of humor, and overall good team dynamics.”

#6. Women make better managers and leaders
“Gentle when giving feedback, and caring of my concerns.”
“God bless a woman’s communication ability. They know how to encourage and inspire employees. They even could observe 43 muscles in your face to understand and feel your changes.”

The data show that, as bosses, women are equal to or better than men.
• A study finds that women are better managers than men, based on the fact that that the employees who work for a female boss are, on average, 6% more engaged than those who work for a male manager. (Female employees who work for a female manager are the most engaged of any group of workers.) 
• However, not everyone agrees: the data from surveys show that fewer employees prefer female bosses to male bosses (although most have no gender preference). Women can be penalized for being “too aggressive,” even when their behavior is identical to men’s. Even among women, a larger percentage prefer having a male boss over a female one, due to so-called “queen-bee” competitiveness between women, or because some female bosses appear to lack empathy for their female employees who struggle more than they did. The good news is that the trend is positive, with the gap closing. 

#7 Women are more detailed-oriented than men
“In my experience, women are far more adept at drilling down on requirements, both high-level and detailed, to understand the whole picture before diving in and starting implementation.”
“Women are much better at contemplating the big picture, taking care of all details with scrupulosity.”

I didn’t find any relevant data here, but I suspect that women and men are comparable. Personally, I’m in awe of my husband who organizes the plates in the dishwasher as if aligning them with a precision micrometer instrument. I still don’t know how he does it.

#8 Women are better multitaskers than men
“It may be a gross over-generalization, but they seem to be much more organized and detail-oriented than the fellas.”

The data are inconclusive:
• Some studies show that women are better at multitasking because they tend to prioritize better, organize their time, and keep calm under pressure.
• However, studies show that men tend to think they are better at multitasking than they are in reality, and women tend to believe they're worse than they are. Researchers admit that it is possible that for certain tasks (e.g., those that test spatial ability) men might be better at multitasking.

Maybe not everybody thinks it is important to have women on their teams, but many do. That is encouraging to me, and for my fellow women in software. I’m relieved that it seems there is no need for us to “act more like a man.” Being a woman is perfectly fine. It may even be a plus. 

On a more personal note, I found it fascinating how each quality seems to have its corresponding pitfalls. I am a highly collaborative person, which I thought was one of my greatest assets. However, studies show that I should switch at times to being more assertive, or else I could be perceived as slow to make decisions.

I’m optimistic. The world is changing, and the biases will disappear one day. My company and many other great employers lead the way in championing the diversity that women bring to teams. You can lead this battle, too. If anyone is telling you that it’s okay to have no woman in their software team, please respond that they don’t know what they're losing. And that goes for any team, not only in software.

What’s even better for kids than chores?

We are like most families who have a cleaning lady: we clean the house before she comes to our house. Everyone is frantic that morning of the week, making sure that there are no toys spread on the floor and the beds look perfectly made. The kids join in the panic, and I bark orders at them.

This description summarizes all the chores my boys need to do unless we also count taking showers or dressing by themselves. “Not a difficult list for a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old,” one may think.

I've asked myself whether my kids should do more. I know of other parents who list items like taking out the garbage, setting the table or preparing light meals. Not in our house. To be honest, taking out the trash without leaving a trace of invisible drops for the ants to attack seems to be such a delicate and high-skill job that my very detail-oriented husband doesn’t even let me do it.

By Heralder ([1]) [CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Am I raising spoiled kids who have no notion of responsibility whatsoever? I don’t think so. In my family, we invented something even better than chores for kids. We created labors. No, don’t think about women laboring to give birth. Think of the legendary Hercules and his impossible feats that no other human could achieve. “Oh, my!” you might now whisper with some concern. “What kind of labors do my kids need to do and what happens if they fail them?”

Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, my youngest son was invited to bring his Nerf gun to a birthday party. His old one was not working, so he needed a new one. He knew what he needed to do: he inquired, “Mommy, how many labors will it cost me?” I asked him if he could suggest how many, and he answered, “Four.” Then we created his list together, based on his input.

Here is the result:
1.    Read the first book of Chronicles of Narnia.
2.    Solve eight 5th-grade math Olympiad problems.
3.    Play a violin song with no mistakes (he started violin classes a month ago).
4.    Learn five Spanish lessons by himself.

I had to buy his Nerf gun “on credit” because he couldn’t finish his labors in time for the party, but now he is almost three-fourths done.

For my older kid, the labors usually revolve around food, like eating mashed potatoes or feta cheese with tomatoes. For the untrained eye, they seem easy. However, for this eleven-year-old picky eater, they are synonymous with lifting houses into the air. Most of the time, he gives these foods a try. Rarely, he says “No, thank you!” to sampling them because he is okay with the mantra of “You can live a happy life without too many toys.” By extension, I hope that he will realize that you can live a happy life without most luxuries. He might become a frugal person.

How often do my kids choose to do labors? Pretty much any time they want to buy a new toy or electronics, which seems to happen with certainty around holidays and their birthdays.

Last holiday season while I was driving them to school, the oldest one asked me, “Mommy, why do we need to do labors for Christmas, when other kids get free toys?” The younger one joined the mutiny. “You know, unlike us, other children get more than a couple of toys.“

I thanked them for their question, and I took my time to present them with the advantages of their situation. They get motivated to learn new things. Also, unlike other kids, they can earn new toys continuously every day of the year, if they so choose. They can plan on countless trips to Disneyland or other such parks. For them, there is no upper limit. Plus, they are in the enviable situation that they enjoy every new thing ten times more than their friends because to carefully choose, dream, wait, and work for an award adds extra flavor to it. It’s almost like magic.

I never liked chores as a kid. I thought of them as repetitive and boring. On the other hand, labors give my boys the power to choose when to start the long effort for something they find worthy. Labors start with a dream that excites. They are fun for my children, and that makes me happy as well.

The death of an all-star software company

Twenty years ago I took a job as a software engineer in a company with an unusually high density of stars. Lucky me! I thought. I expected it to be the best experience ever and I was super-excited. Fast forward to the end: instead of creating the best work of our lives, we failed to deliver something that seemed doable. This outcome still haunts me today. How could this have happened?! What went wrong? Two decades later, I’m still bothered that I haven't found the definitive answer yet.  

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sparkler.jpg
When I joined that company and I looked at the caliber of the people around me, I was sure that I had hit the jackpot and that we would deliver stellar results in record time. I knew that the difference between a top performer and the others was huge. Conservative estimates have stated that a star could be three times as productive as others. In the highly specialized and creative work of software, the differential could be even higher, with a factor of six to ten. When I multiplied these factors by the number of superstars around me, the cumulative mathematical results seemed unbeatable. I was not expecting that in less than two years the company would fail on all fronts and cease to exist.

At the time I joined the company, many good things were fueling its explosive growth.

•   The company already had a growing customer base. For several years, this company had contracted with several pharmaceutical giants to conduct clinical trials. These trials required tracking a lot of data, across many patients, for many years, so it seemed that the existing contracts alone would generate a healthy and steady income.    
•    The leadership had a good business vision. The nation's baby boomers were getting older and the need for new medications and cost-effective healthcare was on the rise. There was high demand for good software products to automate and support these needs. The company was ready to tap into this potential market by extending its existing relationship with the hospitals, doctors, patients and pharmaceutical companies. The range of potential new products was staggering, from software for holding digital patient files across all care providers to products aimed at automating billing and patient scheduling.

•    There was money to spend on the best of everything. Given the potential for growth, the company attracted sizable investment. With this money, it had the means to hire multiple star developers and managers and it tripled in size.

The start
At the beginning, the new team took a look at the existing products and decided that they needed to be rewritten from scratch. These products were old: they exhibited obsolete DOS screens and they were impossible to adapt to new requirements. We had to move to the slicker look of the Windows user interface and we needed to redesign the back-end to scale up to millions of patients and all their data. We wanted to do it in a way that made everything customizable and extensible. In a way, starting fresh made things a lot simpler, because we didn’t need to spend time maintaining the old products or finding ways to integrate with them. We were free to design and implement a brand new system. It was reasonable to expect that in a year we would deliver at least the first scaled-down versions of a couple of products.

The company organized us in several "pizza-size" development teams. Each team had a clear mandate of the software to develop. Everything seemed poised for a success. But this was when things started to go wrong. As time passed, instead of solving the issues and marching towards success, things were deteriorating by the day.


The main issues I observed
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sokol1924.jpg
1. The stars wasted their energy fighting with the other stars. The fighting was always for the best idea and it didn’t seem to happen for the wrong reasons. People didn’t want to grab more power and they didn't dislike one another. They just wanted to make sure that the best alternative won. It started at the top. The VP of engineering was fighting with the VP of marketing, but I was not too clear what were their issues because I was busy with the technical arguments that were happening at my level. My days were spent going from one design meeting to another, trying to contribute and take sides on the technical choices ahead of us. Should we stay with a relational database or try for an object-oriented database? Should we use CORBA or DCOM to call mini-services remotely? (Mind you, 20 years ago there was no REST protocol invented yet.) The architects were fighting the engineers, the highly paid consultants were fighting the full-time employees, and in general the engineers were fighting each other. It was not unusual to hear a convincing presentation that made a lot of sense, followed by someone else bringing an even better argument for the exact opposite approach. 

2. The teams developed unclear boundaries. As the design and development started to progress, many teams took the commendable path of developing their code as shareable components for the other teams to leverage. The problem was, teams started to compete in developing the same shareable components. That made it unclear whose components the other groups should use. One criterion was to adopt the component that was further along the development cycle, but that was changing all the time. After a few attempts to integrate with components that were not mature enough and had bugs, the groups began to take their destiny into their own hands. They decided to create everything internally and ignore the duplication from the other groups. The architects voiced concerns with this approach, which could lead to a serious lack of interoperability later, but the teams continued on their own individual paths. It seemed safer to be self-contained than it was to link your deliverables to another team that would bring you down as well if they failed.

3. We were experiencing slow decision-making. Even though everyone was looking at the same data, different people were arriving at different conclusions. That was making it hard to arrive at decisions that stuck for very long. As a result, either we had to talk and re-talk about the same thing multiple times or we had to escalate to upper management, which was put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide in favor of some stars and against others. Given the fact that it was sometimes hard to judge who was wrong, the decisions were taking awhile. We were a small company but moving no faster than a giant one.

4. The old-timers had a passive-aggressive attitude. Many of the previous employees were unhappy with the influx of new people who were stealing the spotlight. In their opinion, the newcomers exhibited lots of confidence, were treated as celebrities, dismissed the existing products as a shabby legacy, but were not showing yet any real success in return. The old-timers were not entirely hostile, but rather passive and a bit discouraged. At times, their frustrations flared visibly, but they always retreated back to their reserved attitude. They seemed to indicate that if the newcomers were to fail, it would be their own fault.

5. The stars were over-complicating things. The stars were really smart and fast, and they were very much inclined to select the latest glamorous technology. It was not unusual for them to start proposing solutions from software articles that had been published only weeks before. Were these latest frameworks and software tricks really necessary for the nascent first version of our applications? Probably not. But it was difficult to question or discourage the attitude that we wanted to use the best of the bleeding edge. For example, when the superstar of my team decided to go with developing everything as an ActiveX, we expressed some concerns about its inherent complexity and productivity, but we eventually went along with the idea. As a result, we almost ground to a halt before building our first simple screen, because creating a solid ActiveX library proved a lot harder than we anticipated. Demonstrating that simplicity is often best, the only team in the company that was able to deliver something was the one that declared their project as a “lackluster, no-glamour, quick implementation.” This group went ahead with what they knew, put their heads down, stayed away from the noise, and delivered something. Meanwhile, our fancy ActiveX project went nowhere.

6. We started to point fingers at each other. After butting heads so often, some people started to openly attack their perceived enemies. Many, including me, decided to stay in the middle and not take any sides. That is, until one day, in a meeting, I got so influenced by the negative attacks around me that without thinking I joined the mob and did the finger-pointing myself. At the moment, I felt relieved that I was expressing my frustrations more publicly. It was only after the meeting when I realized what I had done. Without thinking much, I had attacked the architects, saying that they should guide us more, despite the fact that I knew that they were working hard to put us on the right track and mediate the conflicts. Some of the ones I attacked were even close friends. How could I have done something like this? I can only explain it as a momentary, irrational, emotional outburst—for a moment it felt good to join the attacks.

7. We were not operating as a cohesive team. While many issues were between teams, our group never gelled internally either. People were not trusting each other or feeling enthusiastic about sticking together. The company made efforts to sponsor team-building events. For example, the entire company went golfing and we had happy hour every Friday at 4:30. But it seemed that we always sought and bonded with the same people, the ones we were already friends with, and we never seemed to engage much with the ones we viewed as rivals. In a way, the team-building efforts polarized us rather than uniting us.

Conclusion
Back to the question of why the company failed: I felt that the main issue was the fact that we didn’t collaborate well, either within or between teams. Having a high density of stars didn’t help. In fact, it might have made things even worse.

There is recent research to support this assessment. Professor Thomas Malone, founding director of MIT Center for Collective Intelligence published a series of interviews about studies he has conducted or participated in. The studies found that cohesive groups have a collective intelligence that has relatively little to do with individual intelligence. What matters most is how well people collaborate. When a few members dominate the group, don’t listen well, and don’t share criticism constructively, then the team IQ tanks. Professor Malone indicated that one solution is to increase the proportion of women in the team.

This is not to say that having stars is a bad thing. After all, eliminating stars would deny a company the extraordinary multiplicative power of a super-performer. But it’s clear that focusing on the number of stars alone is not going to bring the results one might hope.

Various solutions have been proposed. Some think that it is better to grow a star by grooming internal talent rather than snatching outside stars. Others suggest there are three keys to team success:

1. Treat your best people like a shared asset rather than the property of a particular unit.
2. Create incentives that discourage infighting while rewarding team success.
3. Have the people who are responsible for the execution own the recruiting and be constantly on the lookout for talent that fits the anticipated needs.

In retrospect, I’m grateful to have witnessed such a failure, because it was a great lesson of the power of collective intelligence (or the lack of it). It’s still not clear to me how a company should deal with the amazing stars who can produce incredible results but cannot collaborate well because they intimidate and dominate others despite their best efforts.

Maybe you have an answer to this question. What would you do if you had to power to decide?
 

How to make a kid like math?

The last batch of math district tests came back and the results were so great that I immediately wanted to share them with someone else. I located my husband in the house and I asked him, “For math, do you know what percentile range is the little one?” (Best results are closer to one hundred.)

My younger boy, now in fourth grade, is very good at math, so my husband ventured a very high number: “Is it ninety?” I replied with excitement, “Even more—his score is ninety-nine. And for the older one, it is eighty-six.”

I saw my husband's eyes grow wide with delight. As great as the percentile for my younger boy was, the results for our older kid, a fifth-grader, were even more impressive because he has always struggled with school and he needed extra help all the time.

It looks that somehow, we stumbled on a simple recipe to connect our kids with math. It only took us about eight years to have the confirmation that we were on the right track. So, what did we do exactly? Here are my six tricks to help a kid like math.

1. Parents must care

There are many things that parents would love for their kids to be good at. My own list is long, and it includes making friends, being curious about everything, doing unselfish deeds, playing sports, and reading. But math is close to the top, contending for the spotlight, because it is an essential skill for so many professions. Without math, my kids’ career choices would be seriously limited. I didn’t want my boys to turn their backs on math, if they had the bad luck to encounter bad teachers or if they were not born with a natural gift for it.

To show how much I cared about it, I volunteered at school helping other kids with math. That experience gave me ideas about how to help my own kids, and it kept me informed about teaching math in a grade-appropriate way.

2. Start young and make it fun

I cannot recall how many times the kids and I hollered the numbers song in the car when they were toddlers. At home, the boys had many educational toys that dealt with numbers. One of their favorite DVDs was on the same subject. Meals were another great time to play and learn. I would ask them, “Can you give Mommy five Cheerios, please? No, not four. I asked for five. One Cheerio for each of your fingers. That’s it! Great job!”

With the attitude that math is a game, both my kids grew up thinking of math as both easy and fun. Over time, we tried tons of games that were age-appropriate. Some were more successful than others. Today, my younger kid likes solving Sudoku, and he discovered an interesting variation of it that contains extra arithmetic challenges. On weekends we all play Rummy-O or "tabinet", a Romanian card game that entices kids to practice addition.

Nowadays, whenever I ask my kids what is their favorite school subject, they answer “math”. The younger one even declared that Mondays are no longer the worst day of the week because he has math enrichment at school.

3. Practice makes perfect

My two kids have very different learning styles. My older one does math homework every night, and if he doesn't have any assigned by his teacher, I select something for him. He learns math on a constant basis. My younger one learns in intense bursts of a few weeks, usually because he gets fired up by some challenge, like a school test or getting an award from us. After each burst, he takes a break from math and moves his learning interest to some other thing. For both boys, the total amount of time they spend on math is about the same over a month's time.

For some subjects, like multiplication, we started years in advance, during our weekend hikes. The monotony of walking for hours was interrupted by learning how much is 5 x 5, 6 x 6, etc. That gave them ample time to practice long before they had to master this skill at school.

I constantly look at what they learn, and help them when they get stuck. Every success they have, I never forget to praise them. Talking about praise…

4. Remind them that they are good at math

Nothing will fire up more a kid than praise. It shouldn't be every night because it might lose its potency if it’s overused. But, whenever they had a success—if they learned something challenging, or they practiced a little longer—I reminded them that they are good at math and that I was proud of them. Sometimes I added some extra enthusiasm, like “I also loved math as a kid. I always thought it was so much fun to solve a tough problem,” or “Wow, at this rate, you will start teaching me math.”

5. Show that math is part of everyday life

The other day, while I was driving them to school, my boys asked me, “Mommy, why do we need to learn math?” My hands tensed a little on the wheel, thinking that maybe their question was hinting that there were getting tired of this subject. I started to remind them how math was everywhere around us. "When you told me about the temperature of boiling water in Celsius and Fahrenheit, was this related in any way to math? How about yesterday, when we split a pizza for dinner? How do you calculate how much money you have in your piggy bank?"

I didn’t have to continue for long because they started to come up with their own examples. At some point, they went on a tangent, starting to talk about something else, related to the temperatures of the other planets.

The point is, from time to time, it’s good to remind your kids that math is everywhere, and ask for their help to calculate things in real life.

6. Make math a year round activity

Kids have a tendency to lose academic skills and knowledge during the summer. It doesn’t have to be this way. My kids do summer homework every day for about forty-five minutes, and usually it includes math and reading. I like to teach them in advance some of the curriculum of the year to come so that they'll continue to think school is simple.

For my kids, the most successful summer workbook was called Brain Quest, because it was colorful and covered many subjects, from language arts and writing to math and science. Because vacations and weekends, which are their most fun-packed time, are also used for learning, now, when my kids think about math, the thought triggers positive feelings.


It sounds pretty simple, I hope. Good luck and let me know if these tricks worked for you, too.

Why your daughters should work in software

I don’t have daughters, I have two boys, a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old. Given that both my husband and I have worked in software for a quarter of a century, there is a chance that our offspring might end up in this field as well. That is, if you believe in genes, Mendel and his peas, and all that stuff.

However, if they were girls, I would have NOT given them much of a chance to make it all the way to a software job. To prove that genetics still works, after hearing what they want to be when growing up, I would have started to enumerate our aunts that have worked as teachers, artists, journalists, or doctors. Why? It’s because of the current statistics. Numerous postings on the internet show that, despite an increased effort to attract girls to computer science, the number of them receiving bachelor's degrees has decreased relative to boys. Ouch!

My first reaction is to say, “Great! Less competition for me. Let’s keep it as a secret how awesome this job is for a girl.” But, then, I start to be a little bit afraid of bad karma. What if I get punished for being so selfish? So, here it is! This is my motivation to tell the truth. And who should listen to my advice? The dads. This posting is for you, the dads of daughters.

Guys, I know that each of you wants to win the title of “Best Dad.” I know that you are already dressing up in tutus, drinking tea from mini cups, and wearing glittery crowns. But let’s go beyond defense and adaptation. Let’s have the attitude of “I will crush the competition, by raising a daughter who beats the boys at their own game and does it while wearing a pink outfit!” Go for a great offense, even when there is no hope for an easy win!

Here are my top ten reasons why your girl(s) should work in software, from a veteran who has claimed many victories and gotten some scars as well.

1. It is fun

If you don’t work in this field, you may ask yourself “How can you have fun doing something that looks so boring, staring at a screen all day long?” Well, does your girl like any logical games, like Sudoku, Lego, chess, UNO, or backgammon? If the answer is yes, then, bingo! The same activity that happens when one plays a game, which is thinking hard about how to solve a problem, is also part of computer programming. In that intense and silent solitude, the excitement starts to increase more and more, and when you finally find the solution, you experience an intense bout of happiness. The brain gets a jolt!

It took me several (read "many") failed attempts before I got it. I didn’t develop an instant love for it, but when it did, I was in awe. Do not despair if the first encounters with programming are not successful. A picky eater may need twenty tries before enjoying a new food. But when they finally get it...they are hooked.  

2. It brings home the bacon

Software developer is in the list of top ten best paid jobs for women. (Another top job in this list is CEO, but let’s face it, nobody starts on this job right from graduation. The list may as well include U.S. president or astronaut.)

With a job in software, your daughter can finance many of her hobbies with ease. If she likes to dance, excellent—she can take tango lessons nights and weekends, and afford buying tickets to ballet, opera, shows, until she gets zonked out by them. If she likes psychology, even better—she can immerse herself in understanding the elusive mind of the geek, and then explain it to all of us. Talking about geeks...

3. It’s not for geeks only

I am not a geek. I'm not proud of it, but what can I do? I don’t have the luck to be naturally attracted to technical things. My boys surpassed me years ago, and I call them to help me all the time. 

Despite this...I am the living proof that one can become a great software engineer without being a geek. I worked in many software companies for a long time, and I got appreciated and promoted. When I left them, they always invited me to come back if I should ever change my mind.

Even more amazingly, good software companies actually treasure someone who is not geeky. Super cool! It’s all about diversity of opinions, and finding complementary qualities that gel a team. For example, bringing laughter to meetings stimulates the creative group thinking. It’s really fun to see yourself elevated to the status of being special, because of being normal (and non-geeky).
 

4. Companies want to hire girls

Software companies have discovered how great girls are, and they want them. This is not a recent phenomenon—it's been going on for a couple of decades. I always felt I had a slight advantage over my husband, also a software engineer, when we were interviewing for the same job type. Since this is a field still dominated by males, a female stands out.

In the last few years, things have improved dramatically. Women like Sheryl Sandberg, the famous Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, started a veritable revolution. We have seen a plethora of data demonstrating that hiring women makes business sense. Apparently, hiring software women makes a company more money. Nice! Software corporations are so convinced about it that they started to spend money to finance recruiting, retaining, and promoting women. Girls in software are in demand! Not bad, I’d say!

5. Boys help the girls

This one is a “glass half full versus half empty” situation. On one hand, there is evidence that women in software suffer from gender bias, get fewer promotions, and make less money. On the other hand, this happens in many professions, even in those dominated by women. So, it seems that no matter which job a girl picks, there will always be some sort of uphill battle. Why not pick a job where, even when women are paid less than a man, they can still join the ranks of top earners (remember Reason #2 above)?

Anyway, let’s start with the view that men still dominate the world. There is also a positive: in my experience men, willingly help women. When I got stuck, at one point or another, they jumped in and helped me. When I needed a job change, they offered me the chance. When I needed sympathetic support, they listened. Many times they did things for me that I didn’t ask for.

6. It’s the easiest of all engineering disciplines

Software is about solving people's problems with the help of a computer language. Languages are something that humans (and especially girls) are wired to learn with relative ease. I find it much harder to fix the engine of a car than to write code.

I spent my college years learning how to become an electrical engineer and I can tell you, it was difficult, because I was not born with a technical brain. I was able to learn everything in the books, because everything sounded very logical, but I couldn’t overcome the fact that I lacked the real-world problem-solving intuition that my profession required.

Software is easy because it is abstract, and it is not tainted by the imperfections of real life. There is no overheating due to friction between atoms, no dirt that clogs pipes, and no vibrations that lead to energy loss. In this profession, nature doesn’t laugh behind one's back.

7. It’s a good springboard for other professions

There are many around me, women and men, who have switched to other disciplines: project manager, program manager, product manager, architect, executive, even teaching.

With the skills one acquires, you can open your own company. If you are smart and lucky, you could give birth to the next Facebook or Microsoft. Many software giants started with one person, programming something in a garage. (I know, I’m curious, too—why not use some other room in the house? Maybe it’s the male brain that gets attracted to cars and garages. I don’t know...)

Software intersects with so many domains that you have a virtual universal entry pass to any human activity. Does your girl like fancy clothes? She can develop the software for an online boutique and get the company discounts. Does she like detective stories? She can become a security expert, to catch hackers and prevent fraud. Name any human activity, there is software that is needed for it, and your girl can go for it.

8. Programming is universal across all countries

Not only does this profession allow you to work in any domain of activity, but you can also move around the globe. Unlike doctors, lawyers, teachers, or engineers, there is no need to pass additional exams when moving from one country to another. I've worked in three countries. The programming languages, tools, and skills I had in one place got recognized everywhere, right away.

I admit that you may ask, who in their right mind, born in the United States, would want to leave and go anywhere else? After all, everybody in the world wants to move here. Plus, there can be real complications in obtaining working visas.

All I can say is this, the world is changing and it’s becoming more open. At some point, going to some exotic place, working there for a few years, then coming back, may be easy and fun. Why not have a job that enables that?

9. Programming offers flexible work hours

Most, if not all, software companies allow their employees to vary their arrival and/or departure times. One can take a quick mid-day errand and occasionally even work from home.

This flexibility is huge! Will your kid need to wait for a special delivery, or for the plumber? Will she need to drive the kids to school in the morning? Will she need to spend a day in solitude, at home, to concentrate on finishing a work project without interruptions? That's no problem in software.

Tell me, how many other jobs, such as teaching or nursing, will allow her to do that?

10. It’s a good workout for the brain

Nobody knows yet for sure, why women are disproportionately affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD). But, among the different recommendations to prevent the onset of this terrible disease, there is an important one: continuous learning. Women are advised to learn something new on a regular basis, to create new brain pathways.

Software changes all the time, new languages, new methodologies, new processes, new domains...It requires you to bend, twist, and rewire your neurons to adapt to something new all the time. Even if your daughter gets carpal tunnel syndrome from too much typing, she will benefit a little—her brain will benefit when she switches the hand she uses for moving the mouse.


Dads of daughters, I feel I did my duty to tell you how good this job is for your girl(s). If you don’t take my advice, no problem for me. I did my part to avoid bad karma. The rest is in your hands!

Genetics - Part 2

A week ago, my younger boy reminded me about genetics again, because I discovered that he was a collector, just like his paternal grandmother. I had to spend more than twenty minutes pleading with him to return the little boxes, miniature picture frames, fairy teeth, and other objects that he had been moving for weeks into his closet.

That explained also why I had not been allowed to come to his room, where he kept receiving me with a cold “What are you doing here?” He hadn’t wanted me to discover the hiding place where these objects were disappearing.

To convince him to relinquish same of the objects, I tried to invoke aesthetic principles. “Look!" I said. "The metal frame and the shiny ball go together, but the wooden boxes should stay close to the wood vases.” He was unconvinced. In this tug-of-war, I had to be the one to give up first, which made me think, this stubbornness of his—where did he get it?

The next morning, however, after I got out of bed, I saw that he had returned some of the objects, and that he kept in his room only those that matched a proper nine-year-old boy's collection.

I love genetics!

Genetics - Part 1

The first time my younger son, now nine, made me think about this concept was soon after he was born. He was so young that the best way to describe his age was in hours, not days or weeks.

The nurses administered him a battery of tests, and one was for his blood type. My boy was identified as blood type B. The problem was that I was type O and my husband was type A. This adorable baby, that I was crazy about, didn’t match us.

(By InvictaHOG - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1088507)

“It must be a mistake,” I said. “Please redo the tests.”
It was heartbreaking to see him being pricked again in the heel, to squeeze another drop of blood. His little foot was so tiny! Poor baby! He cried in desperation, but it had to be done, right?

The second result came back identical to the first. I doubted that the lab had made a mistake again, so what could be the explanation?

The nurses and the doctor were continuing their routine like nothing unusual was going on. Maybe they thought it was not their business to suggest that perhaps I was an unfaithful spouse. My husband seemed indifferent, too. I was the only one who started to panic. What if they accidentally had swapped the babies?

“When they took him to the nursery, did you follow him all the way?” I asked my husband. “Did you look at him all the time? Was there any moment that he was not in your sight?”
“What?! Of course I did. I followed him everywhere.”
“Are you sure he is ours?”
“No doubt.”

The beautiful baby in my arms was so precious and cute that he made me cry from time to time. (Yeah, maybe my hormones were also a bit out of whack.) I didn’t want to give this baby back, even if he wasn't mine.

I wanted, in case of a mix-up, to go back home with two babies, the one I had started to nurse, to kiss, to hold, and the other one, whom I needed to find. My husband repeated several more times that he had followed him around everywhere, while I was recuperating. I had to give up and say to myself, "Genetics is bogus!"

The next day, the mystery was solved. We learned that my husband's blood type was AB, not A, as he had thought for many decades. I regained my faith in the fact that parents and children share many visible and invisible components of their bodies. The doctor added, “Of course he is yours. He has the darkest hair of all the babies in the whole hospital. I can tell you are his parents from the way he looks.”

Go here for Genetics - Part 2