{"id":878,"date":"2014-08-23T08:29:47","date_gmt":"2014-08-23T15:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=878"},"modified":"2014-08-23T08:29:47","modified_gmt":"2014-08-23T15:29:47","slug":"where-are-the-women-in-the-high-tech-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2014\/08\/23\/where-are-the-women-in-the-high-tech-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Where are the women in the high-tech industry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vivek Wadhwa crowd-funded the publication of his new book,\u00a0Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology<\/em> <\/a>(cowritten with Farai Chedey). He also “crowd-created” it with the help of more than 500 women who contributed research and writing. In this podcast with knowledge@wharton<\/a>,\u00a0Wadhwa explains the genesis of this intriguing approach to authorship and publication. He also assesses the current situation of women in the high-tech industry and how it might be improved. Here he explains how the project started:<\/span><\/p>\n

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I came to Silicon Valley to research its immigrant networks: Why had Silicon Valley been so successful in fostering immigrant entrepreneurship? Why is it one group \u2014 in particular, Indians \u2014 had been so successful? I was really fascinated with Silicon Valley, and I imagined, I believed and I said it was the world\u2019s greatest meritocracy \u2014 until I came over here. I used to do a lot of writing for [tech blog] TechCrunch, and we happened to be at a big TechCrunch event, one of their major conferences, and my wife said, \u201cVivek, do you notice something strange over here?\u201d I said, \u201cYeah, we\u2019re sitting next to Mark Zuckerberg.\u201d It was amazing to be in the middle of all of this innovation and the amazing things that happened over here. She said, \u201cVivek, no, look around. What don\u2019t you see?\u201d That’s when the light went off in my head … there weren’t any women there, and it was a shock to realize that half of the population is being left out of the innovation economy. …<\/em><\/p>\n

What I learned was that there was really no difference between women and men; they had the same strengths, the same weaknesses, the same motivation. I systemically went in, opened up my research papers in the past. I went through my own data sets, and I realized that I was so ignorant that I had never recorded the gender of the people I was interviewing, so I had to [go back and] look at it again, and I was surprised that there was literally no difference. The question was, if there\u2019s no difference, then why is it that women are left out? Why don\u2019t we see women in tech conferences? Why is it that there are no women on the boards of Silicon Valley companies? Why are the executive teams all male, when there\u2019s really, literally, no difference between women and men?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Wadhwa crowd-funded the publication of his new book,\u00a0Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology (cowritten with Farai Chedey). He also “crowd-created” it with the help of more than 500 women who contributed research and writing. In this podcast with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-gender"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}