Perry

Hewitt

Tag: women

  • Acting on the critical need for women in the climate crisis

    Acting on the critical need for women in the climate crisis

    Solar Sister holding business tote bag

    What once seemed to many like a problem for the next generation has arrived with urgency, everywhere: the climate crisis is here. Virtually all corporations from banks to CPG are pledging to take action; many of them are participating in Climate Week NYC right now during the UN General Assembly. On an individual level, we’re starting to see tech workers moving to organizations with a clear focus on climate.

    In the nonprofit sector, organizations are trying to understand, define, and tackle the problem.  Probable Futures is creating interactive maps to  visualize the different scenarios and drive action at the highest level. Many more organizations are working on the ground, raising awareness or engaging those most affected by the crisis to inform mitigation and solutions.

    Women are a powerful and underutilized resource in this effort. A recent report on women’s leadership from The Rockefeller Foundation [PDF] notes the explicit opportunity to engage more women, pointing out that women are uniquely positioned to contribute to climate solutions. “Gendered divisions of labor mean that women are already on the frontlines of resource management in their communities.  Women’s meaningful participation in local-level adaptation can translate into greater economic empowerment and decision-making power, and contribute to more climate-resilient communities.”

    All of those reasons and more are why I joined Solar Sister as a board member last month. Having spent the last few years diving deeper into social impact, I’ve learned a great deal about the power of engaging local communities in crafting and driving effective data-driven solutions. Time spent in marketing in the private sector and on the board of Junior Achievement reinforce my belief that solutions that also foster entrepreneurship and economic empowerment are more likely to engage and endure. The next few months will be a learning journey  here in the US and in Kenya and Tanzania; I look forward to seeing firsthand what over 7,000 clean energy women entrepreneurs are accomplishing, and what those successes mean for the role of women in climate more broadly.

  • Leaning too far back: Women in stock photography

    Leaning too far back: Women in stock photography

    A few weeks back, LinkedIn sent me a recommended influencer post about perceptions of employee underachievement. The topic didn’t grab me, but the photo sure did.

    woman deskStock photos are generally risible, with staged pictures of men in suits earnestly shaking hands and flawlessly diverse executive teams ruminating in boardrooms. But something about this image I found particularly disquieting. The woman is in the classic stock art sterile office of unbranded computers, paperless desks, and empty binders. But something about her leaning far back in a sleeveless top, with her feet in six inch stilettos made me pause and wonder, “Does anyone in your office look like that?” LinkedIn is a career networking site, not an office supply catalog — somehow I expected the bar for depicting women to be a little higher.

    Turns out I’m not alone in worrying about this. LeanIn and Getty have announced that they are going to take on the portrayal of women in stock photos. There will be a special collection that represents women and families in “more empowering ways” which I hope means more reflective of real women in real workplaces.

    As Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty remarked, “Imagery has become the communication medium of this generation, and that really means how people are portrayed visually is going to have more influence on how people are seen and perceived than anything else.” As a more visual language of communication dominates the web, the images we choose to include in articles and blog posts make a lasting impression. This initiative may provide us with the means to tell a more contemporary story of women in the workplace.

  • Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    1. For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation.
    2. In an entirely related vote of confidence for the visual web, Pinterest has raised another $225 million. Pinterest is developing a global strategy, with more than a dozen country managers slated to be hired this year.
    3. LinkedIn is going long on the mobile use case, rolling out a new iPad app and the compelling LinkedIn intro email feature. LinkedIn intro aims to provide color and context to your mobile email by surfacing relevant LinkedIn info about the sender.
    4. Facebook is home to the accidental news consumer — most users come for other reasons, but many end up seeing the news. An important finding is that younger people who are far less intentional about going to news outlets are consuming news via the social network.
    5. Wikipedia remains an invaluable news source — but how is it developing and replenishing its stable of editors? Unlike the rest of the web, which has become more global and female content creators, Wikipedia’s skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. Does this limited pool ensure Wikipedia’s decline?

    Weekend fun: Eight million people have already watched this toddler in his Halloween costume, but in case you’d like some inspiration for your own …

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • How to solicit smart comments

    How to solicit smart comments

    Articles about the complex issues affecting women in the workplace are lightning rods for impassioned conversation. This New York Times article on gender equity at Harvard Business School was bound to elicit strong opinions, just like the original 2003 Opt Out Revolution piece and its 2013 sequel (spoiler alert: damned if you do, damned if you don’t). [tweetable hashtags=”#content”]How can editors ensure thoughtful conversation and minimize ad hominem, all-caps outrage?[/tweetable]

    Midway through the HBS article, the Times article introduces a full-width block with three specific questions to respond to:

    inline questions

    It’s an Oprah’s book club type of approach, with an entire section of questions for readers to consider. Rather than a mass call for comments, it’s a prompt for directed discussion. The mid-way through placement is smart, giving readers questions to consider as they (presumably) finish the piece. Mid-stream blocks with calls to action can be surprisingly successful. Analytics pros will be taking a hard look at the comments originating with a click here versus those starting from the text block at the bottom.

    There’s a nice segmentation of the comments at the bottom, where you can read the comments not only by question but by author: all, business school alumni, recent graduates, men, and women. Again, the questions remain highly visible at left and up top.

    questions bottom page

    Previously, I took a look at the rising use of annotation — here’s a good example of an annotated piece on opting-out at Medium. These are all valiant swings at a pernicious, unsolved problem: how to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd while keeping comments from devolving into an angry lowest common denominator? The article on the HBS gender equity experiment will no doubt put this approach to the test.

  • Friday 5 — 07.12.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
    2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
    3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
    4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
    5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.

  • 7 tips for solo travel for women

    Seville 2013Back from a needed break in Seville — where the rains finally stopped to provide a hint of Spanish spring.

    In an era when many women are striving to Lean In professionally, I’m surprised how many still express trepidation at the idea of traveling alone. There’s a lot of sensible online advice for logistics, like useful safety tips (and bad things can certainly happen), but far less about how to enjoy it. Here are a few ideas for making the most of solo travel, whether for business or pleasure:

    1. Find your favorite travel services/apps, and become a pro-user. Kayak for deals; TripIt for social itinerary management; OpenTable or Yelp or Foursquare tips for meals and entertainment; Waze for wayfinding; Kindle for reading. There’s no one right service: find one that meets your requirements and master the app so you know how access what you need on the road.
    2. Plan ahead, but if you’re busy, keep it simple. My protip (a precursor to subreddit Explain Like I’m Five) has been to take out kids’ travel books on the area before going. If I have time for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon before a trip to Serbia, fine, but most of the time a short and quick read of greatest hits will suffice.
    3. Use social media to meet up with friends or friends of friends — or just get up-to-the-minute advice. Depending upon the kindness of strangers is easier than ever in the digital age, and far more empowering now that you can offer tangible tips back through online services. Whether you’re looking for recommendations for local theater tickets or the absolute best cup of coffee, I’m pleasantly surprised how generous people are with their ideas and recommendations. Use them, and reciprocate.
    4. Choose accommodations wisely. I’ve stayed low-end for startups and nonprofits and on the higher end for long-awaited vacations, but a safe, walkable location close to a city center delivers more value than any other amenity. Figure out the features (a gym? wifi? non-creepy bar?) that are important to you, and focus more on those than the starred reviews.
    5. Look up and speak up. Many of us, myself first and foremost, suffer from dopamine-driven mobile device habits. When traveling, put yours down and look around. At a conference, make an effort to meet the people you tweet with, and don’t worry if there as many misses as hits. Crowdsourced recommendations are terrific, but sometimes you do as well asking the person next to you where the best ice cream is (in Seville, the pointer to Heladeria Alfalfa was a hit).
    6. Learn to eat alone comfortably. Talking through a meal on a mobile isn’t the same as a dinner companion for you (or for your fellow diners). Learn to read, write, or just relax over a meal. Avoid room service — there’s nothing more grim than eating dinner in a hotel room. Tip appropriately for the local norm and the service you receive.
    7. Make a personal connection, and ask for what you need. Making a personal connection as you check into a hotel (front desk clerks have astonishing discretion for upgrades) can yield terrific results. For ideas, try an online community like flyertalk that’s populated by road warriors who are the Olympic gold medallists of the upgrade. Whether you’re speaking with a concierge or maître d’ or gym attendant, learn how to politely but clearly ask for what you would like. It’s still common to be offered the room next to the ice machine or the table by the kitchen; it’s surprising how much of an improved result a polite request can deliver.

    Traveling on your own can happens for a variety of reasons — a free day tacked on to a conference, or a planned trip to a destination of your dreams. Enjoy!

  • How to visualize interconnections

    MOMA has a terrific visualization as part of a show on Inventing Abstraction that opened back in December 2012. Visualization projects that map interconnections become complex quickly in a number of ways:

    • Content for each subject: How much should you display? This seems like the right amount, although there’s something hilarious about seeing Picasso’s interests reduced to an all-caps summary: GUITARS, MODELS, CUBISM, SUMMERS IN CATALONIA
    • Content that informs the connections: What’s the data source for these? Who relates to whom? How closely? How do you display relative strength of relationships, if at all?
    • Overall user experience: How will users know what to do? Where to start? Is the story that is emerging the one you started out telling?
    • Movement: What’s too sensitive? What’s not sensitive enough?
    • Technology: How can this work everywhere you need it to? This is mostly a solved technical problem, but not trivial in a world of proliferating devices. Will this ever be projected? What’s the level of accessibility required?
    • Flexibility: Depending on the life of your product, how do you handle new data about relationships? What’s the governance process for change post launch?

    Information aesthetics also points to a great three-minute movie made about the mapping process which gets to the complexity under the hood here.

    Reviews of the show overall can be found in The New Yorker and The New York Times, but only the latter of these mentions what struck me immediately in the visualization — the unusually large number of women represented as creators and not only subjects of an artistic movement.

  • Who gets to define geek culture?

    …But I am suggesting that the mean-spiritedness of geek culture—a mean-spiritedness that is often, but by no means always, directed at women—is not an accident. A culture that values knowledge and access above all things is going to be a culture dedicated to hierarchy and to power—to defining who is in and who is out. Such defining involves, and is meant to involve, a good deal of antagonism, score-settling, back-biting, and cruelty. There’s not much point in defining yourself as the knower if you cannot define others as those who do not know.

    —  Noah Berlatsky explains in The Atlantic why Fake Geek Girls’ Paranoia is About Male Insecurity, Not Female Duplicity

    There’s a lot of discussion lately about the idiot nerd girl meme (see original meme and a great subversion here). Some of this is routine insider/outsider tension — who’s in the know and fluent in the jargon, and who’s just posing — and some of it’s still the gender wars in full effect.

     

  • Are effective school behaviors harming women in the workplace?

    Department of Labor poster: America will be as strong as her womenDo Women Need to Realize that Work Isn’t School? Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr point out in HBR that behaviors that enable young women to excel in school may serve them less well in the workplace. Johnson and Mohr argue, and I agree, that all employees and particularly women need to become more comfortable with behaviors like questioning authority, embracing improvisation, and engaging in self-promotion. (N.B. Approach the last of these far more carefully than your male peers.)

    I’d add another important item to their list — learn how to disagree, and how to get over it. Engaging in conflict in the workplace and managing it toward resolution is part of the job, particularly in the fluid modern workplace where the need for constant adaptation can cause friction.

    While school doesn’t always prepare us for that conflict, athletics may. Anecdotally, I’ve observed that many women who can tolerate workplace conflict well have participated in team sports. We know athletics correlate with career success; a 2002 study found that 82% of women in executive-level jobs had played organized sports in middle, high or post-secondary school. Discipline and focus are two obvious benefits, but I’d argue that team sports in particular offer participants experience in managing conflict and achieving resolution.

    Image credit: U.S. National Archives: Department of Labor poster 1941-1945 

  • Creating a network for women entrepreneurs

    …women-owned firms employ just 6% of the U.S. workforce and contribute just 4% of all business revenues. Women might be making overall progress in the rate at which they are launching new ventures, but are failing to launch and build high-growth ventures.

    — Jennifer McFadden, who proposes radically transparent networks as one possible solution to the high-growth venture gap