EARLIER this week, Google’s Doodle featured one of Hollywood’s glamorous screen legends, Hedy Lamarr, who at the time was often called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Films.” More astonishing than her beauty and her film credentials were her contributions to science and technology.
Inspired by how a piano works, Lamarr (who was born in Austria as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) co-developed technology that prevented German submarines from intercepting Allied radio signals during World War II. Called the “Secret Communication System,” this patented technology, according to Google Doodle Jennifer Hom, “laid the groundwork for widely used technologies like Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi that we rely upon daily.”
Unfortunately, prevailing prejudices prevented Lamarr/Kiesler from receiving due recognition from the scientific community for her contributions. She wasn’t able to join the National Inventors Council as she had wanted to, and even in her old age she was associated with Hollywood and was offered scripts for roles that she turned down anyway.
Many other female scientists, engineers and inventors have suffered a similar fate as Lamarr/Kiesler’s, and 101 years after the famed actress’ and inventor’s birth, huge leaps and advances in technology have failed to address the fact that technology is still largely a man’s world.
Gender gaps in the 21st century
Aside from the “Gender Pay Gap,” which is a hot topic now in corporate and tech America, a February 2015 report released in the technology web site Dice.com suggests that there is also what is called the “Position Gap”—in which men often occupy more senior roles than women in tech, which also accounts for the pay difference. “The obvious question is then,” Dice.com asks, “why more of these positions are not being filled by females.”
“At this time, it is unclear why this is the case, although we suspect that a number of societal and lifestyle factors generally come into play,” Dice.com says.
While the Philippines fares well in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index—ranking first in Asia and ninth worldwide in gender equality in 2014, above even more developed countries, such as
Germany (12th), Canada (19th), the United States (20th) and Singapore (59th)—the gender divide is still felt in the tech sector.
Tina Amper, a Silicon Valley “alumna” and founder of the annual tech start-up conference, Geeks on a Beach, estimates that female-led tech start-ups comprise only “20 percent to 30 percent” of the whole tech start-up industry in the Philippines. She is quick to disclaim, however, that this is based on anecdotal evidence alone and is inconclusive.
Looking at Geeks on a Beach’s lineup of speakers, however, it does seem like the tech scene is still dominated by men. This year’s roster includes only nine women out of 58 speakers over two days.
Another Silicon Valley alumna, Stef Sy, a Stanford-educated data scientist who founded the data consultancy companies Thinking Machines and Silicon Valley Insight, shares a similar observation. She recounts how tech meetups in the Philippines, such as those for programmers and developers, still tend to be male-dominated and “awkward” at best for female techies. This is what prompted her and other women coders to be active in the PyLadies community, a group for women users
of the open-source programming language, Python. PyLadies Manila now has almost 100 members and continues to grow.
Facing gender bias
Both Amper and Sy also speak of a “gender bias” still existing in the tech world, although Sy says that “there seems to be a bit more balance here than in Silicon Valley.”
According to Amper, “Being a founder is hard enough as it is, so I give kudos to anyone who wants to start or run a business…[but] I think the additional challenge of being a female founder comes into play in certain situations—a female founder with a family may have additional challenges, such as work-family-
self balance.”
Sy shares a similar sentiment. “There seems to be a glorification of the working mom and of the notion that ‘you can do it all,’” she says. “But the reality is that the prime years for starting a company are the same prime years for having a baby.”
In order to create a more empowering environment, Sy says that workplace policies should be progressive enough to support working parents—both women and men—so that men aren’t chastised for being hands-on parents and women are able to get the support that they need at work and at home.
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In the next installment of this feature, we’ll share specific recommendations for getting more women on board the tech sector—whether they are tech newbies or aspiring entrepreneurs. For a macro look at closing gender gaps in the Philippines and the Asia Pacific, an interesting back-read is Boots Geotina-Garcia’s October 15, 2015 piece here on “Women Stepping Up.”
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Niña Terol (@ninaterol) heads corporate affairs for the largest multinational integrated marketing communications firm in the Philippines, is a founding trustee of Business and Professional Women (BPW) Makati, and has been widely published in local and international publications. She is also a tech enthusiast and hopes to be more active in the local tech scene.