FACEBOOK and LinkedIn have partnered to bring mentoring and support programs to colleges to encourage more women to study computer science and engineering.
This will eventually lead women to fill technical positions in their companies, ones that have long been dominated by men, company executives say, as the Associated Press reported.
“A lot of our consumers, at least half, sometimes more, are women. We build a product that gives people a voice. We know we can’t build a product for the world unless our teams reflect the diversity of the people who use the product,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told the news agency.
At Facebook, 31 percent of employees overall and 15 percent of its tech employees are women, according to diversity figures the social media company released last year. At LinkedIn, women account for 39 percent of its employees and 17 percent of its workers in tech.
Of undergraduates enrolled in computer science, women comprise 17 percent.
“Think about it,” Telle Whitney, president and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute, a partner in the initiative, told Associated Press. “If everybody who creates a product looks the same, you know the results won’t be nearly as interesting. We want for the sake of our future to have women involved in all the projects that will change our lives.”
LinkedIn CEO Jeffrey Weiner told the Associated Press the company needs gender equity to better serve its users.
“To limit the perspective of the people building our product and services, if that’s too narrow, it’s going to lead to suboptimal outcomes,” Weiner said.
Sandberg and Weiner, did not reveal how much money they would be investing into the initiative, but announced their partnership Friday, Feb. 6, which calls for the formation of peer support groups under Lean In Circles, a mentoring process Sandberg started about two years ago through revenue from her best-selling book, “Lean In.”
The groups are composed of 10 to 12 women and men who convene regularly to discuss their goals and support each other as they work toward achieve them. Since Sandberg penned the idea in her book, these groups have spread across 97 countries and 350 college campuses.
Through the Lean In Foundation website, Circles Hub, groups can register and interact via cyberspace and access subject matter and leadership resources, according to USA Today. There are now more than 21,500 circles through this organization.
The partnership with LinkedIn will enable employers to connect with women in computer science and engineering.
Females say peer groups are helpful, since there aren’t many of them in technical fields.
In 2012, Denise Gosnell, who was enrolled at the University of Tennessee’s doctorate program in computer science, where 20 percent of students are women, formed a study group with her female classmates.
“It was a network of 3,000 women who were in my exact same shoes,” she told USA Today. “I thought, ‘Where have you all been.’”
At Stanford University, computer science student Lea Coligado, 21, told the Associated Press she and her fellow female classmates could use support groups.
“There’s so few of us, so we definitely stick together,” she said. “I think there’s a stereotype. It’s understated and people don’t want to say it out loud, but it’s there – the idea that women are just not very good at computer science – and some use that to justify why our numbers are so low. It’s flabbergasting.”
(With reports from Associated Press and USA Today)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Midweek February 11-13, 2015 Sec. B pg.1)
