A new Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) report suggests that technically oriented women may face gender discrimination in their jobs at high-tech firms in part because of mismanaged projects. The report says that tech firms rely on a “hero mindset” to save coding projects that are poorly organized, and employees with family responsibilities–often women–are sacrificed as a result. The report is based on a discussion that took place between 59 senior business and technical managers from major technology companies in a closed forum last fall. The report says it is common to find a kind of “good old boys network” in the high-tech world, where managers tend to hire “people who are like them.” Another new ABI study found that women hold about four percent of senior-level technical positions and an estimated 25 percent of all technology jobs. However, at the higher levels, 36.9 percent of women end up in a manager job compared to 19 percent of men. ABI suggests that all women candidates should at least get an interview, and that a software tool could be created to weed out any unconscious bias against hiring or promoting technical women.
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The Spanish Software and Services Initiative Program’s Vulcano Project is a collaborative effort between higher education institutions, technology transfer centers, and industrial partners to develop open source software with the reliability and quality of proprietary programs. Vulcano was modeled after other European efforts to develop open source software by adopting similar methodologies, processes, business models, and the latest technologies. The Vulcano project is based on three main pillars. The first is a project to create a collaborative environment based on the latest technologies. The second pillar is a pilot program to demonstrate how open source software can help develop new projects. The third is the deployment of a nationwide competence center, which will help businesses and local organizations learn how to use open source software, including information on licenses, collaborative development, and development processes.
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The first official public draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s K-12 standards has been released by the National Governors Association’s Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The standards, which seek to provide a clear framework to prepare U.S. children for college and the workforce, included computer science as a senior-level high school course for students who meet the “readiness level” by 11th grade. “Given the critical role of computing for our global information society in preparing students with the knowledge and skills they need for the 21st century, this inclusion in the draft Common Core Standards is a huge boost for the field and its future,” says ACM CEO John White, who notes that one of the biggest challenges facing computer science education has been finding a place for it in a high school curriculum. “We are heartened by the inclusion of computer science in this draft,” says White, and encourages “the advisory groups working on these standards to retain that reference in the final version, as well as add a description of what rigorous senior year computer science encompasses.”
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