At the start of the L train in the upper-class Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, there are 10 city-funded Wi-Fi hubs within two blocks. When the train hits Brooklyn, two miles east, there are another six Wi-Fi hubs being installed in the hip East Williamsburg area. But the numbers start to fall as the train dives deeper into Brooklyn, where poverty is rampant. By the time it hits the neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville, there are none.
Out here, almost a third of homes don’t have internet access — the gateway to a community’s broader participation in STEM industries and the jobs they offer. High schools, meanwhile, are under-equipped with the basic infrastructure needed for internet access and technology education. Music, dance and the arts, in contrast, are well established in the community.
This disconnect — in the midst of a national trend to move funding from the humanities to STEM — is what led Yamilée Toussaint, a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT, to start STEM From Dance, a program for high school girls that merges the local culture of dance and music with a future in learning complex science and technology concepts.
“Students who would be a natural fit for, say, a career as a coder don’t necessarily know that until they are introduced to it,” Toussaint says. “Through dance, we’re attracting them to a different world that they wouldn’t otherwise opt-in themselves.”
Toussaint, a tiny woman with large hair and a soft voice, created the program five years ago. Normally it spans a full semester, but this year she increased the number of girls she can reach with a summer intensive curriculum focused on circuitry.
During the course of one week, participants practice a dance routine that they pair with lessons on building and coding circuits.
“It was hard at first,” says Chantel Harrison, a 17-year-old participant from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what it was about, honestly.”
Harrison and a couple dozen other girls are taught to wire battery-powered light circuits. They sew them into their dance costumes to create splashy light effects synced to a song’s beat. For many of them, this is their first introduction to computer science and coding.
And that is a stark reality check. In New York City, where technology often seems boundless — and where there have been huge strides to build up “Silicon Alley,” New York City’s own version of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley — kids educated in the city’s outer borough’s face significant barriers to a future working in the tech industry.
“If we cannot allow our children to have first-class computer equipment in a first-class city, they’re not going to be prepared to be employed at a first-rate corporation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tells NationSwell. “We cannot have a digital divide in our borough and in our city.”
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have pushed for high-speed internet access and STEM course integration into the city’s high school curriculum by 2025. But in Brooklyn, a study published in December 2016 by the Brooklyn Borough President’s office found there is progress to be made: Internet access is subpar (the average rating is 3 out of 5) in the district’s schools; there are only enough tablets and laptops for 7 and 20 percent of the borough’s student population, respectively; and 70 percent of schools don’t have an established computer science curriculum.
“The mayor has a very strong goal, but the question is, are we set up to meet this goal based on current investments in schools?” says Stefan Ringel, a spokesperson for Adams. He adds that reaching the 2025 goal will require more investments in infrastructure upgrades as well as in the curriculum.
“There is a lot of talk around getting these students active in STEM education, but I’d say for our program, if we have 12 girls sign up, maybe one has actually been exposed to coding,” says Toussaint, as she watches a group of six teenagers practice a dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
“We’re not trying to make engineers or professional dancers within a week,” says Arielle Snagg, an instructor with STEM From Dance who also has a degree in neuroscience. “But we are hoping to give them an idea on how they can use technology within this art.”
Snagg, originally from Bushwick — another impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood — says she understands the plight of students who live in these parts of New York. Of those who work (and only about half the population does), just 5 percent do so within the tech and science fields. And getting more women into technology can help a labor force that is desperate for diversity, especially when it comes to women of color.
After a week in the camp, Harrison, who will be a senior at Achievement First Brooklyn High School in the fall, says she gained a new appreciation for the integration of dance and science. “And I’ve gotten better in math — I’ve even learned to love it.”
Next spring, Toussaint will see her first group of students graduate from high school. And though she hopes that many of them pursue technology in college, more than anything she wants them to enter any career with confidence.
“The point is to let [these girls] know that they can do anything, and they don’t have to do one thing,” she says. “They just have to open up their minds a bit.”
Tag: women in tech
These Tech Companies Don’t Have a Lot of Female Employees. Now, They’re Doing Something About It
Since the 1990s, female representation in tech occupations has declined, according to the United States Census Bureau. Which is why some of the industry’s biggest names — Facebook, Pinterest and Box — have kicked off a pilot program to mentor women in tech.
WEST, or Women Entering and Staying in Tech, will tap women from the aforementioned companies to serve as one-on-one mentors for females — whether they’re currently interns starting their professional career or are in midlevel positions and are looking to grow or expand their employment opportunities, according to their website. The program will kickoff in early 2015 and is open to San Francisco Bay area women. It is not yet clear how many applicants WEST plans to accept.
“Mentorship can be incredibly influential in a woman’s career, and we’re excited to be tackling this challenge together,” Facebook says in a statement. “We believe that by working together and providing more direct support, advocacy, and space for community development, we can create an impactful, scalable, one-on-one mentorship program to help women build and grow meaningful careers in tech.”
Several companies, including Facebook and Pinterest, came under fire earlier this year after data released revealed many of the companies had very few women in the workplace. In fact, Facebook admitted that only 31 percent of its employes are female while Pinterest revealed that 40 percent of its workforce is female. Boil that statistic down to technical employees and a mere 15 percent of Facebook’s tech team are women and 21 percent of Pinterest’s tech are female.
That’s a far cry from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s message to empower women, but fortunately, her company along with a few others in the Silicon Valley are taking the first steps to correcting the problem.
This Valley Girl is Investing in Female Entrepreneurs
When most of us hear the term “valley girl,” we probably think about a ditzy girl with a pronounced accent. But that’s certainly not the case when it comes to Jesse Draper.
The daughter of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, Jesse Draper is the host of “The Valley Girl Show,” a show that highlights Silicon Valley giants — and most importantly, unknown female tech execs. Originating six years ago as a web series in Draper’s parents’ garage, the show progressed to being shown in taxis and restaurants and soon, will have a regular spot on the Fox cable channel. The show is categorized by Draper’s antics, and she often refers to herself as the “Ellen DeGeneres of Tech.”
After the first season, Draper realized that out of the 28 executives and founders she featured on her show, only three of them were women. So, Draper set out on a mission to change that. She soon found out that there isn’t necessarily a gap in a discrepancy in the ratio of female to male execs, but rather that women are less likely to take the spotlight. Many women still feel insecure and unconfident when it comes to their positions or desires to enter the tech field.
To help with this problem, Draper founded Valley Girl Ventures, which is an investment fund for female entrepreneurs. Draper saw that investment funds, as well as other successful women, are hesitant to take a risk on female-run businesses, so she took it upon herself.
So far, 10 start-ups have received help from Draper’s fund, including an athletic clothing company called Carbon38, a wearable tech company called Melon and the consignment furniture e-commerce company MoveLoot.
In addition to investing in women, Draper also hosts networking events across the country for them.
“I will always give any woman 30 minutes of my time,” Draper tells Fast Company. “There are female investors out there who are tired of seeing female-focused tech companies. But I’m like, ‘Bring it on.'”
With the success of Draper and other female execs, it seems to be a worthy investment.
MORE: Tips for Women to Succeed in Tech Careers
Dads, Let Your Daughters See You Wash the Dishes
Who would’ve guessed that men doing housework could help determine your child’s success?
Alyssa Croft, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology, conducted a study whose results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. The findings? Girls who see their fathers pitching in on house chores — i.e. washing the dishes — are more likely to aspire to non-traditional careers like scientists or business leaders.
The researchers interviewed parents asking about their beliefs in gender roles and how they divided chores around the house. They also spoke with daughters about gender roles and what careers they could see themselves having in the future.
Croft found that the mothers’ and fathers’ ideas about gender roles did influence their daughters’ beliefs, but that a stronger predictor of what the girls wanted to be as adults was the division of domestic labor at home.
The daughters responded according to the dads’ actions, not their words. Girls with fathers who didn’t help with household chores were more likely to want traditional female careers such as stay-at-home-moms, teachers, nurses, or librarians. Those who saw their fathers helping clean, cook, and watch the kids dreamed of a broader set of jobs that were often higher-paying than those in woman-dominated fields.
“It’s very important for fathers to not only talk the talk about gender roles, but also to walk the walk, because their daughters seem to be watching.” Croft says in a YouTube video explaining the study.
“Despite our best efforts to try to create workplace equality, women remain severely under-represented in leadership and management positions,” Croft told the Association for Psychological Science. “This study is important because it suggests that achieving gender equality at home may be one way to inspire young women to set their sights on careers from which they have traditionally been excluded.”
So moms, let the dads clear the table tonight. Your daughter will thank you for it in the future.
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This Woman Proves You Don’t Have to Be A Hoodie-Wearing Male to Make It in Today’s Tech World
When Angela Benton, CEO of Black Web Media, looked around Silicon Valley, she didn’t see many faces like her own. Statistics support her observation: A survey of 150 Silicon Valley companies by the law firm Fenwick & West found that almost half of them had no female executives.
Benton would look around at the tech companies she was working for and think, “Wow, I am the only African American and the only woman in my department. It just can’t be only me!” she told Myeisha Essex of the Chicago Defender. Seeing the lack of diversity drove this 32-year-old African-American coder and entrepreneur to start Black Web 2.0 and the NewMe Accelerator.
Through Black Web 2.0, a website Benton launched along with Markus Robinson in 2007, she keeps others informed about African-Americans involved in technology and new media companies, with the goal of making people interested in these fields feel less alone. NewMe, an accelerator founded in 2011, helps women and minority entrepreneurs find the mentorship and capital needed to start new businesses. So far, NewMe has helped raise $12.9 million for the start-ups it works with.
“There are great entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily look like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world,” Benton told Essex. “I don’t think the [tech world] is behind necessarily, I think they are working on patterns. So if everyone who is successful looks like Mark Zuckerberg, they are going to continue to fund and support more things that are like that. What a lot of people think, especially when they think about entrepreneurship, it’s very risky. When you start to talk about investors and capital, people are investing in things that are most likely to succeed. So when they are doing that they are taking notes from other things that have been successful. So it’s really like this self-perpetuating problem, at least until we really break through.”
MORE: These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With An Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
This Technologist Retweeted Only Women for a Year and It Broadened His Horizons
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash has made a name for himself through such projects as Expert Labs, a non-profit that aimed to help “ordinary citizens who aren’t lobbyists or insiders or politicians get their voices heard by policy makers simply by using social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” according to its website. Through blogging about technology and being an early Twitter user, Dash has gained almost 500,000 Twitter followers, which got him to thinking about how he could use his influence to help others be heard.
Dash is currently the CEO of ThinkUp, “which is all about being more thoughtful about the way we use our social networks,” he writes in an essay on Medium. An analytics tool showed him that 75% of his Twitter followers are men, and that 80% of the tweets he retweeted were written by men. He feels “a growing sense of social responsibility about what messages I choose to share and amplify, and whose voices and identities I strive to bring to a broader audience.”
Considering how underrepresented women are in the field of technology, Dash resolved to only retweet tweets by women in 2013, and it opened his eyes. “One thing that has happened,” he writes, “is that I’ve been in far more conversations with women, and especially with women of color, on Twitter in the past year. That’s led to me following more women, and has caused a radical shift in how I perceive my time on Twitter, even though its actual substance isn’t that different.” In general, Dash found women on Twitter to be more thankful and less focused on certain pervasive memes or tech stories than men. Dash said he only slipped up once, retweeting a message by Prince. Now he’s inviting others to try only retweeting women, especially those in fields dominated by men.
MORE: Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?
This Woman Is Inspiring the Next Generation of Female Engineers
When Mini Balachandran immigrated to the U.S. from India as a young woman, she struggled to learn English. But math and science were languages she always understood. Her father, a mechanical engineer, had taught her how to fix broken items around the house, which sparked her interest in engineering. Now Balachandran is the Production Lead for Naval Air Systems Command Manufacturing and Quality Division in Maryland, and in charge of media outreach for a program called STEM-ing that encourages girls to pursue science and engineering careers. The acronym stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, Inspiring the Next Generation, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. A group of 13 female scientists and engineers volunteer their time to teach a series of workshops for local girls and visit schools. This year’s event will bring in 140 girls in sixth through eighth grades who can choose to take classes on everything from DNA and veterinary medicine to the science of ship wrecks.
MORE: This Nonprofit Is Teaching Immigrants Much More Than Just Language
One Simple Change Can Help Fix Gender Disparity in Science
In science, bias can ruin an experiment. And it may also be behind the academic field’s gender disparity problem. Women earn roughly half of the graduate degrees in science and engineering in America, but only 20 percent of full professors in the sciences are women. It turns out that academic conferences, which can be key to advancing a scientist’s career, might be playing a big role. Researcher Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found that simply adding a woman to the planning committees for scientific conferences increased the number of women invited to speak by 72 percent compared to how many were invited when the organizers were all men. The presence of a woman on the planning committee also significantly reduced the instances of all-male conference sessions. Casadevall, chair of the planning committee for the American Society of Microbiology, told Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience, “My hope is that when people become sensitive to this, they will design convening teams that have gender diversity up front. If that is the case, we should see a significant increase [in female speakers] this year.”
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Tips for Women to Succeed in Tech Careers
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported last week that tech companies are currently hiring more women than men, with 60% of the jobs in tech created last year going to women. But the ratio of men to women in tech careers is still weighted toward the guys—women comprise less than one-third of the tech workforce, and men hold most of the engineering jobs at these companies. Sage North America’s Gabrielle Boko recently offered a few tips on CNN Money to help women succeed in the tech world. She recommends that women in tech fight for the ideas that are important to them, continue to expand their networks, especially through women-in-tech groups, and choose the companies they work for carefully. For example, women in tech should decide if there’s anyone in the upper management at a prospective employer whom they’d welcome as a mentor.