PassW0rd – 13th September 2017

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello, I’m Jane Wyatt and this is Password Woman. We’re calling this edition Queens of Tech to salute the many, many women and men and companies who are trying to make technology a female-friendly, family-friendly field. Go Science! That’s the Guinness World Record-beating cheer organized by science cheerleaders in the United States. They’re real physicists, microbiologists, systems engineers, and so on, and they’re also real cheerleaders—super fit dancers with shiny pom-poms and glossy hair. Darlene Chevalier invented them. She’s professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and a former Philadelphia 76ers basketball cheerleader. There are more than 300 current and former NFL, NBA, and college cheerleaders pursuing STEM careers in the USA. STEM means science, technology, engineering, and maths. But now comes the backlash. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” wrote James Damore in an explosive memo that got him fired from his job at Google. That’s just one line from 10 pages. It’s not a rant, but a closely argued explanation of why he believes men and women are biologically different, and therefore high-stress, highly paid tech jobs are for men. Could it be true? In the next hour, we’ll be talking to women who are rescuing role models from historical obscurity, inspiring the next generation and imagining the future is female. They’ve got balls. Crystal balls.

Speaker C: Robots will become part of our team, so we won’t just be human beings sitting around a meeting room, we’ll also have our co-workers who’ll be Miss or Mr. Robot sitting there with us. And robots are there to embrace change, but also we need people to know how they work. Because it’s humans who are going to actually develop those robots in the future.

Speaker D: I called it Lactose Intolerant, a scenario where breastfeeding is uncommon and consumerism is completely rejected. And in this one, I integrated some of those modern technologies that we futurists like to talk about, such as, say, 3D printing. What if people could 3D print their foods, including their baby milk, or whatever infants would need to eat in their own home, in which case men could actually be involved in making the milk, let’s say, that would feed their child. It could be something very personalized. It could have some qualities that cater exactly to the health or the biological makeup of that child.

Speaker E: Well, I wish I could predict the future. I wish I had known, but I mean, I guess I always loved maths at school, and then I had to choose between doing maths or computing at uni, and I just thought Well, computing’s got maths in it, so there’s maths there already. And I just think computing technology is the future. You know, I set up the British Computer Society Women’s Group, the first one, in 1998, so it’s nearly 20 years ago now. I mean, I set it up because I was doing a PhD, and I just hardly ever saw any women when I was kind of going about to conferences or whatever. And I kind of wanted to connect to all the women that were there online, because we didn’t meet each other in person. And just setting up that group for women in technology in those days, I kind of got a lot of bullshit, basically, from people saying, you know, why do you ‘You need a women’s group, you’re ghettoising yourself, you know, blah blah blah.’ Well, exactly, exactly. So I just thought, well, you know, why would anyone be upset about me connecting together some women to chat about technology? To me, that’s like, it’s not a confrontation or anything. But yeah, some people see that it is.

Speaker B: 3D-printed synthetic breast milk, morning meetings with our colleagues the robots, and top technologists who also happen to be women. Mums, grans, sisters and cousins and aunts? These scenarios sound a bit far-fetched. Given the state of women in technology and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, a different future seems equally likely. Scientists at Oxford University predict that by 2025, 47% of Britain’s jobs will be lost to automation. The remaining jobs will be high-tech, high-paid, and highly likely to be occupied by men. In the UK, the proportion of females in science, technology, engineering, and maths-based employment was 21% in 2016, according to the industry body WISE. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, the men returning from World War II bumped out of work the women technologists who had been cracking codes, feeding the people through the Land Army, and running the munitions factories. Those women were mostly sent back to home-based roles with new-look fashions and fancy fitted kitchens. Will women lose out too in the 21st century robot wars of digitalisation? Alexandra Whittington at the University of Houston, Texas, is a futurist specialising in women and families and the author of a research study about the technology of infant feeding.

Speaker D: Well, the thing about futurists is that we don’t really predict one certain future. What we do is we come up with scenarios. So I offered a couple of different possible futures, in fact 4, on that article. I actually did a presentation on it as well. And so there were 2 main variables that I was looking at. And this might be culturally specific, but I was looking at what’s called the mommy wars in the United States. Have you ever heard that term? The mommy wars. It’s sort of a, it’s a pop culture terminology, but that is how we sort of encapsulate this idea that mothers can be pitted against each other in terms of like breastfeeding or bottle feeding, stay-at-home mom versus working mom. Ooh, the mommy wars, you know, bottle versus breast, work versus home, married versus single, you know, whatever the, it’s a version of the culture wars, right? Conservative versus more modern values, let’s say. So I looked at that as one variable. And then the other variable was the role of the household in producing or consuming, because when I looked around at the literature about families, it’s primarily about how much money families spend, you know, how they function as a consuming aspect of society. You know, having a family is really just a series of buying things, at least in America. We don’t have a very good social safety net for families. So everything is on our own dime. You know, we buy all of the necessities for our family. So what I was looking at is a continuum where on one end the household consumes and on the other end the household produces. A long time ago, households used to make everything they needed. They didn’t buy things such as formula, for example. So when I put those variables together, I just sort of thought about what are the different futures when you crisscross these impacts. And I came up with a few, like breastfeeding is sort of a status symbol. Breastfeeding becomes like a status symbol where only wealthy parents breastfeed and the masses are sort of left to whatever quality formula might be available. Another one was, I called it lactose intolerant, a scenario where breastfeeding is uncommon and consumerism is completely rejected. And in this one, I integrated some of those modern technologies that we futurists like to talk about, such as say 3D printing. What if people could 3D print their foods, including their baby milk or whatever infants would need to eat in their own home? So you’re sort of going back to the household produces model, but it’s modernized by a formula feeding norm, which in which case men could actually be involved in making the milk, let’s say, that would feed their child. It could be something very personalized. It could have some qualities that cater exactly to the health or the biological makeup of that child. This is just sort of how futurists think. We come up with some parameters and we try to come up with what futures result from the cross-impacts of those different variables and those different conditions.

Speaker B: And in her other research, Alexandra Whittington has identified a new monster of the digital age: an all-pervasive system of measuring everything we do and choose. She calls it Big Mother.

Speaker D: That is a term that is used to refer to technology that has sort of this, I don’t know, caretaking aspect to it. And smart technology. I’m talking about your phone, your maybe digital assistant, maybe your Siri or Cortana or whoever it is that you might work with. The idea is that our technology is sort of changing to a caretaking, observant, slash, kind of surveillance role, and the Big Mother comes from the idea that our devices and all of our technology is collecting all this information about us and then telling us what’s best for us based on that information. For example, the Fitbit-type trend, right? Fitbit is very popular. It’s very popular even with children, I’ve noticed. And I’ve seen, you know, 10-year-old kids are comparing their Fitbit, you know, counts and stuff. So that idea that these devices are telling us what’s good for us, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, it seems very benign and I don’t think it’s intentionally a surveillance strategy to get people to wear Fitbits, but it’s an interesting dynamic where the things that we buy and use are collecting information about us. They’re learning about us and they’re helping us make good decisions ideally, but at the same time there’s a sort of big brother or big mother aspect to that and it’s in our best interest, right? Designed for our best interest. However, it’s possible that without the right checks and balances that kind of technology could run amok, let’s say.

Speaker B: But surely running amok is the last thing that can happen with automated controls monitoring every breath we take? Actually, the real Big Mother is probably the latest gadget from Finnish cybersecurity company F-Secure. In their new survey of UK parents, 59% of respondents said they worry that their children are spending too much time online or on social media. 37% say they don’t know what content their children are accessing, and a similarly high percentage, 36%, don’t know who their children are communicating with online. F-Secure’s new software is called Family Rules. Naturally enough, the product marketing manager Paula Al-Soufi, mother of two, recommends it.

Speaker F: Just this week I was at the parents’ evening of my daughter, and she’s in the third grade here, so a 9-year-old. And the number one concern of the parents is that the children are now at home and their older brothers or sisters are there and they are spending way too much time online and playing games. And it’s really hard for them themselves to stop that or make these limits for themselves. And the unwanted content side was the number two topic, that these kids are seeing content that they shouldn’t at this age. And the parents were really feeling a bit puzzled and helpless on what they could do about this and how, how this could be changed, or how they would feel more at ease when their kids are at home.

Speaker B: So how does your new product work and help families to enforce the rules?

Speaker F: What the idea behind is that our goal was really to make the family rules clear and understandable for both the child and the parents. I mean, we really want to feel that for the parents to feel that establishing rules online is simple thing to do. And the family rules help families stay safe online and enabling parents setting limits on screen time, filtering this unwanted content per age group, and locate their kids’ devices remotely so they can really guide their children online from anywhere. For example, you could fix the settings from your work when your child is at home as well. Kids will always find a way around overly strict boundaries, and the key is really for parents and children to work together so the child is an active participant in the decision-making on where limits should be set and understand why limits are needed. And this is something that we also guide in our software when you are installing it and taking the steps that we really encourage also the parents to do it together with the child and talk about it and do it as a joint decision for the whole family on setting these family rules together.

Speaker B: And how is it actually experienced if a child stays up late playing on a smartphone under the bedclothes? What will happen?

Speaker F: I mean, if you set a time limit for your child, for example, for my daughter, we set up a 30-minute time limit per day. When that 30 minutes is up, you simply cannot access any of your apps. So if she starts to push one of her gaming apps, then it will just say, give you a notification and say, hey, your time limit is up for today. ‘You will have some more time tomorrow,’ or ‘You can ask your parents for more time.’ That’s a notification she will get when she will try to use it when it’s her time to go to bed or the time limit is up.

Speaker B: So you expect this Family Rules product to be a platform for negotiation in the family?

Speaker F: Yes, I’ve tried it out, and my daughter was first. Of course, she started negotiating about the time. What would be appropriate for the day. And we started off when she was saying 1 hour would be a good time for her to play, and then I was going, hmm, maybe half an hour would be better. So then I was explaining also why it’s not good for her to spend too much time, and you get tired and unconcentrated and so on, and you do your homework, and then you have more time for your friends as well. And then she was seeing the side also that, hey, then I think that half an hour is a good time to limit the gaming for the day. It’s this kind of, even the word parental control means that the parents control their children, and this is kind of how we feel, it’s like an old way of thinking about it. I mean, this controlling your kids online is over. I mean, if even this time ever existed, I mean, the idea of trying to lock and control the kids away from the dangers of the web. We really want the parents to be part of, the kids to be part of the process and really thinking about these healthy boundaries and really do the parenting that you would otherwise do also in the physical world when your kids are going outside and having other limits. So really also in the online world having these same kind of boundaries and talk about that together with the kids and saying why it might not be a good idea to spend too much time playing games, or also talk about the dangers that you can have online, that they can learn this early on and together, so it feels more of a safe experience when you are using online, and you might come across something later on in your life that you don’t get scared about what comes on your way then.

Speaker B: There are obvious risks like grooming by sexual predators or accessing violent or pornographic websites, but I remember when my own children were young receiving in the post £42 worth of hair products, which I hadn’t ordered. So maybe the family budget also needs rules enforcement.

Speaker F: Yes, I mean, there are of course many, many things that can go wrong or surprises that you will have from your kids online. And depending, I mean, if they use the family tablet and you have already logged in your information, that it’s, they can easily buy things and all of that. Let’s say the payment information is already there, that they can do this kind of things or just order and put in your information. I mean, there will be always, I think, ways kids can go around it, but things that you can do to prevent most of these, I think that this would be very important to concentrate on what you can do to minimize, so to say, the things that could go wrong.

Speaker B: There’s a creepy feeling that I get When I think about a teenager playing a game online, say, and because mother’s installed the Family Rules software, his game could suddenly be cut off in the middle, and that’s not going to feel very good.

Speaker F: Yeah, well, there are some notifications that the child will get that, hey, you have still, let’s say, 15 minutes time. It will send you a notification, so it will not happen like just in the middle of the most important phase in your game, for example. So if it’s known to the child that, hey, for example, a teenager might have more time per day, you will know, okay, I have this much time and then I start my gaming phase and then I will know that, okay, let’s say I’ll have an hour time or how much I was allocated, then you will get this notification. So hey, you have 50 minutes left and so on. So it will warn you a little bit so it doesn’t come in the middle, middle of some, some situation there.

Speaker B: But young people don’t only go online to chat or play games. They might need to research an essay that they’re writing or a project. How do you square their academic needs with the family rules about games and chatting?

Speaker F: I mean, depending on what kind of content you are looking for, I mean, it should work for, let’s say, this kind of normal content that you’re looking for, some biology topic or some historical topic that you’re looking for information. I mean, that should all work and you would be able to access that kind of information. And for all sorts of illegal content or abusive content, that’s where the blocking should step in then. So for if Of course, you are doing a school paper on some very specific topic, then you could of course for that topic switch on or off the parental controls of that content. If it was some really specific area, let’s say for an older child, then of course you can change the settings and let the child then access that content.

Speaker B: That’s Paula Al-Soufi on the line from Finland. She worries sometimes that her son and daughter are spending too much time online, not on school projects, but gaming, chatting, or both. However, it seems that girls who choose tech-related subjects really are doing their homework online. Academically, at least in Britain, they’ve outperformed the boys in their GCSEs and A-level classes this year in computing and the other STEM subjects, as Password reporter Charlotte Roundtree found out from our next Queen of Tech.

Speaker C: My name is Karine Barsam. I am the Schools Programme Manager at the Tech Partnership. Partnership. The Tech Partnership is a network of employers collaborating to create the skills for the digital economy.

Speaker H: So even for those children and adults that don’t have any intention of going into STEM careers, why do you think digital literacy is important for everyone in every career and in everyday life?

Speaker C: Well, the world of work is changing and the future is all about everything to do with digital careers and digital skills. That’s why it’s really important for young people people to have those skills and develop them for the future. It also enables them to look at their agility, also looks at analytical skills as well. The industry itself is growing so much that we’re not going to have enough people working in the industry in the future, so what we want to do is encourage as many young people as possible to think about digital as a career option.

Speaker H: Speaking of careers and how we have to become more digital to move into them, People are naturally worried about artificial intelligence. How do you think automation like this could change careers?

Speaker C: There’s an interesting perception on this in that robots will become part of our team, so we won’t just be human beings sitting around a meeting room. We’ll also have our co-workers who’ll be Miss or Mr. Robot sitting there with us. And robots are there to embrace change, but also we need people to know how they work. Because it’s humans who are going to actually develop those robots in the future. I can understand the challenges ahead, but I do think that we need to embrace those challenges and give people those skills that they’re going to need in the future to work with their fellow robot as part of their team.

Speaker H: So what do you think is keeping young women and girls from STEM fields in the first place?

Speaker C: I think first of all there aren’t that many role models within the industry to, to encourage girls to to go into STEM, and that’s been going on for many years. I mean, if we look at the stats at the moment, only 16% of people who work in tech are women, and we need to do more to encourage girls from a very early age to think about digital as an option. I mean, we found that, you know, during this year, the GCSE results have been quite interesting too. This year’s GCSE and A-level results show that Girls are actually very good at IT-related courses. Although fewer girls than boys take these courses, their results actually outperform boys. So with GCSE Computing, girls outperform boys by 6%, and in ICT A Level, 14.2% females secured an A* or an A compared to 8% of boys. We do need to do a lot more to encourage girls at an earlier stage about the different roles available. And that’s what we do through our Tech Future Girls program, where we have ambassadors who can speak to girls about various careers. But also we have out-of-school clubs as well, which encourages girls to think about digital in a very creative way.

Speaker H: So girls do begin avoiding STEM subjects very early and start refusing them as subjects around 15. I was wondering why you thought the divergence started to happen at sort ages?

Speaker C: Well, partly there’s the curriculum. It doesn’t always encourage girls to think about this as an option. Girls like to work creatively, work collaboratively. I mean, boys do as well, but that’s what our research has shown as well, that they want to think about how computing or technology can be used for the good of people in society. And the curriculum needs to kind of lend itself to that. It needs to be a bit more creative in terms in terms of how it can be used in everyday life, but also in the future as well. And it needs to be much more related to the world of work, because at the moment the curriculum is focused on coding, and, you know, not everybody needs to be a coder in the future. And if you think about the vast array of different roles within the industry, we don’t need to all be coders. We can also have people doing really creative things, such as advertising, advertising, working on digital creation, being very much into animation. So there’s a whole plethora of different roles and stereotypes as well. You know, people think sitting behind a computer doing computing skills is all about programming and coding, but it’s not. There’s much more creative side to it as well.

Speaker H: Well, Tech Future Classroom is offering free online resources to Key Stage 3 and 4. I was wondering how you thought teachers could help improve themselves to educate students in STEM, particularly women and girls.

Speaker C: Well, through our programmes, we have a lot of how-to guides available for teachers. They’ve got lesson plans, they can actually look at schemes of work, they can actually look at the programme and how it applies to the curriculum, and they can also be upskilling themselves, not just about the actual technicalities of digital creation, but also they can find out more about the roles within the industry as well.

Speaker H: You spoke about making Tech Future Girls creative. Apparently that’s a big part of the reason that girls don’t go into technology, because they don’t see it as creative. I was wondering, what does Tech Future do to change that opinion?

Speaker C: The content that we have is, is quite creative, so we look at things that are very much about digital skills such as coding, cybersecurity, but we’re also looking at topics such as tech and fitness and wearable tech and how you can create that and how you can be really creative in terms of thinking about the user, how they’re going to use a piece of technology in their everyday lives, or how it’s going to benefit them as well. And that’s what we try to bring about in our programme. So it’s not about just sitting behind a computer, it’s also about working on your team leading skills, your team skills, or working in groups as well, planning projects, being as creative as possible because it can be very creative. Our employers students also give us insight about what they’re looking for in the future as well, so it’s very relevant to employers as well as obviously to students too.

Speaker H: Tech Future Girls, the after-school club, why do you think it’s important that it’s a female-focused club?

Speaker C: The challenge has always been that fewer girls go into tech, and the idea was that sometimes girls prefer to work with other groups of girls rather than having boys there. That’s one option, or one reason why we’ve had Tech Future Girls, and also the idea is to really encourage girls to say, you know what, we know that girls aren’t always encouraged to go into tech, but this is a really great opportunity. However, schools or people who decide to actually open up clubs, obviously they can invite boys along as well, but the idea is to really encourage more girls to think about tech as an option, and that’s why we make it a bit more exclusive to girls.

Speaker B: You’re listening to Password Woman: Queens of Tech. Here on Resonance FM. And after this, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. So thanks to Tech Future, girls can join an after-school club or learn from the resources they’re offering free online. For older women, maybe decades after school, another of our role models has a project, Tech Mums. Dr. Sue Black OBE left school and home at 16 She married at 20, and by 25 she was a lone parent living in a women’s refuge with 3 young children. But she went to night school and worked her way up to becoming Head of Computer Science at the University of Westminster. Now Dr. Black, she went to a conference at Bletchley Park, the code-cracking centre where teams of women helped to decrypt the enemy signals and win the Second World War. Appalled by the state of the buildings, she mounted a campaign to rescue the spy centre and turn it into a museum and education centre. Her efforts were rewarded last summer when she went to Buckingham Palace to receive her OBE from the Queen. She told Password’s Melissa Wills what motivates her.

Speaker E: Well, look, I think just seeing the, the difference that it can make to people if they understand things about themselves and about technology and realise that they can do so many things with technology, especially, you know, all the different things that we’ve got these days. Connecting to each other in all different sorts of ways. I love social media. I’m a massive, probably addict, of social media. If you follow my Twitter account, you’ll probably see that I’m tweeting in the middle of the night sometimes.

Speaker G: Whatever comes to mind. Exactly.

Speaker E: I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, just check Twitter.” It’s like, “What am I doing?” I just love the way that technology can change people’s lives. I really see that with tech mums. You know, like some of our mums, for example, have got jobs because they’ve come on the TechMums programme, or, you know, have started, kind of gone back into education, or improved their business, and there’s just loads of technology skills which, of course, we weren’t taught at school, definitely my generation. We didn’t have computing when I was at school.

Speaker I: IT got taken away. Really? Yeah, GCSE did not need that one. Right.

Speaker E: So, none of us really have been taught, kind of like, a broad range of technology skills at all, I don’t think. So there’s all this stuff out there that we can use to do all different sorts of things, but most of us don’t know. So I’m all about helping people to see that they can do all of these things. It’s not that difficult. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker I: And I know you started off by learning maths. Was that a conscious decision? Did you know that maths and technology would be so needed right now in today’s society?

Speaker E: Well, I wish I could predict the future. I wish I had known. But I mean, I guess I always loved maths at school, and then I had to choose between doing maths or computing at uni, and I just thought, well, computing’s got maths in it, so there’s maths there already. And I just think computing technology is the future. So, you know, I just kind of wanted to be part of that future and learn all about it. And that was 1989. So, yeah, things have kind of really taken off since then. Exactly.

Speaker I: And I love how you’re encouraging more women to get into the industry as well and to learn technical skills. It is very important. I mean, in your work, in your line of work, have you seen the industry changing?

Speaker E: In what way? In terms of women?

Speaker I: Yeah, women entering the industry. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker E: So, you know, I set up the BCS Women, the British Computer Society Women’s Group, the first one in 1998, so it’s nearly 20 years ago now. I mean, I set it up because I was doing a PhD and I just hardly ever saw any women when I was kind of going about to conferences or whatever, and I kind of wanted to connect to all the women that were there online because we didn’t meet each other in person. So, just setting up that group for women in technology in those days, I kind of got a lot of bullshit basically from people saying, you know, why do you need a women’s group? You’re ghettoising yourself, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, exactly, exactly. So, I just thought, well, you know, why would anyone be upset about me connecting together some women to chat about technology? To me, that’s like, it’s not a confrontation or anything, but yeah, some people see that it is. So I think attitudes are changing now. I mean, we still get people, you know, we see stuff online with people getting trolled and whatever. Yeah, exactly. So, so that stuff still happens, but I think just kind of, I think attitudes are changing. And of course we’re not there yet at all. There’s such a long way to go, but I think things are moving forward. So kind of that makes me optimistic.

Speaker I: What’s the best advice you could give from, you know, generations like myself, you know, people who’ve just graduated, haven’t necessarily got not, you know, a STEM subject degree but would like to get into the tech industry?

Speaker E: There’s so much online now. There’s so many courses online that you can find. So I think, you know, you don’t have to have— I mean, it’s great to have a degree in computing, but you don’t have to at all. And, you know, if you’re really interested and, you know, you find the course that’s right for you, then you can educate yourself in all different sorts of aspects of technology. And technology is massive now, you know, it’s not like one small thing. It’s just everywhere, and you know, there’s all sorts of areas you can go into. You don’t have to be a programmer, you know, you can do all sorts of design stuff around technology. There’s stuff like big data, you know, I mean, there’s just so many jobs and opportunities now that just kind of like work out what you’re interested in and then do some courses. There’s a massive skill shortage, you know, so we just need loads of people to work in tech.

Speaker I: That’s what I was thinking of.

Speaker E: Have you heard of General Assembly? Yeah.

Speaker I: Yeah, I mean, I did want to do a course there, but it just cost quite a bit.

Speaker E: Yeah, they’re really expensive. If you’ve got lots of money, go to General Assembly. But there’s loads of courses that you can do on— there’s loads of different sites that have got courses that are much cheaper than General Assembly. But yeah, I mean, if you’ve got loads of money, then that’s the easiest way to do it, to be in the classroom. But you know, there’s, there’s just all sorts out there. So, you know, just kind of like hunt around on the internet. I really, really want to empower women and mums around technology. Not just because I want to empower them, but because I want to empower everyone in the world. There’s so many opportunities with just really, really basic technology skills that we could just change millions of people’s lives across the planet if they had that education. You know, like, our TechMums course is only 10 hours long. It’s not a really, really long course. So, and like, with just those basic skills and kind of like a bit of app design, a bit of web design, you can work out where your strengths are, and then you can find out more about any of those kind of key skills. And, you know, it really can change your life. We’ve had moms that have said that it, it changed their life, and I just think I just want to change as many people’s lives as possible in a positive way and help them to have a sort of better and more fulfilling life. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker I: I mean, that really touched me when, you know, you spoke about your background and how you, you know, went to your shelter.

Speaker E: Thank you, thank you. And that’s what was really funny is I’m still the same person as that person that lived in a refuge with with 3 little kids. And, you know, like when I was a single parent, kind of with not very much money, so many people treated me like shit. Like they really, really did. And, uh, all sorts of people. And, you know, that doesn’t happen so much now, but I’m still the same person. So it is very strange how people think that if you’re a mum and you’ve got small children, that somehow you’re a bad person or I don’t know. It’s, it’s just crazy. I don’t know why people think things like that, but it’s really odd.

Speaker I: Yeah, I mean, it’s a part of, you know, living in a society dominated by men, really. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker E: Well, I mean, the thing is, I think our society is basically misogynist, so it’s not just about men and women. It’s about— we’ve kind of got this kind of like old-school culture which isn’t appropriate anymore, and we all need to kind of work together to, to kind of work out how to make it better for all of us.

Speaker I: Yeah, yeah, 100%. And we were touching back on the whole of social media. Yeah, how did you use social media, you know, to make it make a difference?

Speaker E: Well, it made a massive difference. So, you know, when I started the campaign, I’d signed up for Twitter but didn’t really know what it was, so I hadn’t used it. And so my first instinct was trying to raise awareness of Bletchley Park was to go to like traditional media, so like the news and like newspapers and like TV. I did that to to start with, but then I realized that once you’ve done that once, you can’t really— how are you going to continue that? Because it’s not news anymore if it’s been on the news. You know, it’s called the news. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was just like, well, what am I— what else can I do? I didn’t really know. And, you know, I don’t have a background in marketing or PR, like a computer science academic, and I was head of department then. I just had no clue really what to do. So I was trying to, like, apart from just talking to people when I met them in person at events and stuff, I didn’t really know what to do. And then I was at a conference at the end of 2008 where a guy called Wotly Dude was on stage talking, and he said, “Who here is on Twitter?” So I put my hand up, and I said to the guy sitting next to me, “It’s rubbish, isn’t it?” And he said, “No, it’s really good. You know, like, you know, you should use it.” And so we kind of— I chatted to the people next to me who were on Twitter as well. They were saying, “No, it’s really cool,” you know. And I didn’t have it on my phone then, so it was kind of like old school. I only had it on my desktop. So The guy sitting next to me said, who’s @madprof on Twitter, said, “You’ve got to get it on your phone and blah, blah, blah.” So he sort of gave me like a mini sort of masterclass in Twitter. And I started using it then. And just like that day, I just thought, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” Because what I realized was, so we were sitting together to start with in this conference session, but in the afternoon we weren’t sitting together, but I could see their tweets. So I could see what was happening in their conference sessions as well as mine. And that just started me thinking, Wow, I can see what’s happening in different places while I’m not actually there. Also, I’m connected to all these people and I can see what they’re seeing. I started using it more and more. Then I realized even really simple things like— I was trying to campaign for Bletchley Park. If you put Bletchley Park into the search box in Twitter, I can find everyone in the world that’s talking about Bletchley Park. If you want to create a community, well, there you go. It’s such an easy way to do it. Then I could start conversations with them on Twitter. Twitter, get them all excited about Bletchley Park and the fact that we needed to save it, and then ask them to ask their friends and ask them to ask them, and just kind of, we just carried on doing that over 3 years really, and sort of got people like Stephen Fry involved, which of course makes a massive impact because he’s so well known, he’s got so many followers. So, you know, so Twitter just made a massive difference to the campaign. It’s all in my book, Saving Bletchley Park.

Speaker B: Those wartime codebreakers from Bletchley Park are largely unsung. But let’s face it, Alan Turing, who gets all the credit, could not have broken the Nazis’ Enigma code on his own. At the same time, another female technologist had a brilliant idea for stopping the German U-boats using frequency-hopping spread spectrum to disrupt their radio signals. She did become world famous and very wealthy, but not for her scientific invention. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood film star, and when she offered her research to the United United States Navy, they said thanks but no thanks and suggested she should use her acting talents instead to raise money for the war effort. It was a nasty rejection for Lamarr, who, as Hedwig Mandel, the wife of Nazi scientist Friedrich Mandel, had sat in on his technical discussions because he was too jealous to let her out of his sight. When she escaped to the USA and became Hedy Lamarr, she teamed up with pianola musician George Antille. He helped her to develop her groundbreaking concept. A pianola is a mechanical piano programmed with cardboard strips with holes punched in them, punch cards, that correspond to the notes. And it was punch cards that inspired the first Queen of Tech, Ada Lovelace, back in 19th century England. She traveled around and found the cards were used in weaving to create patterns. And with those patterns in mind, when she went to work with Charles Babbage on his Difference Engine, she invented the first computer program. As the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, she was brought up by her mother, who insisted her education should be mainly mathematics-based. Byron abandoned them when Ada was a baby, and another of his admirers, Lady Caroline Lamb, described him as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But despite, or perhaps because of, her strict scientific upbringing, the Countess of Lovelace also had her wild side and loved parties, fashionable clothes, and a cocktail made of brandy and laudanum. It’s a strong mix that’s now recreated every year since she was rescued from the dusty annals of computer science at the Ada Lovelace Festival in Berlin. Organiser Amelie von Kürzen: First of all, the Ada Lovelace Festival is not just for women.

Speaker J: We have men on stage as well as male attendees. However, we did see there is a gap between male and female tech representatives generally, which is why 3 years ago the Ada Lovelace Festival came to life. We wanted to give the ladies a voice and create a community and to help close the gender gap. The special thing about the ADA Lovelace Festival is that we have people from all stages within the career who are all around the festival. They can exchange, they can talk about how they got to where they are or what their plans are. You’re able to connect and you can be inspired by someone you meet during the lunch break just as much as you could be inspired by the keynote speaker, for example. And let’s be honest, having fun is a nice extra. We believe each of our speakers brings something special and unique towards the festival. However, I can name a couple of big names, including Gesche Joost, who is the digital champion of Germany, Maxine Williams, the head of diversity of Facebook, Andra Kay, who works in robotics, and Magdalena Rogl, who is head of digital channels at Microsoft.

Speaker B: And the Ada Lovelace Festival takes place on the 19th and 20th of October. As well as a festival, there’s also an annual day to remember Ada’s achievements on the second Tuesday of October, so this year it’s on the 10th. That night in London, there’s a technology cabaret with Dr. Praminda Caleb-Soley of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Another diary date for aspiring tech queens is Ladies Who Code Day. If you’re a regular Password listener, you’ll remember the Ladies Who Code from an earlier show here on Resonance FM. But they’re not in London anymore. They’ve relocated to Germany, and they’re now called Ladies Who Code EU. Their sisters and cousins in the States are holding a special day in towns and cities across America, but anyone anywhere can join in online at ladieslearningcodeday.com. On the 23rd of September. Still, as several of our Queens of Tech have already noted, coding isn’t everything. For a wider range of career options for women and men, the WISE Awards are coming up on the 9th of November in London. And as founder Helen Woolaston’s been explaining to Charlotte Rowntree, they don’t only give out prizes to women, some are for men too. And they offer workplace surveys to show employers how well they’re doing at integrating women into traditionally male jobs. Oxford-educated Helen Woolaston herself has a background in the National Health Service, the YWCA, and the Equal Opportunities Commission. She believes women face cultural stereotypes from an early age.

Speaker G: Well, essentially it’s about perceptions. People still think computing and engineering in particular of the STEM subjects for boys and they’re jobs for men rather than for girls and women. So if you like, it’s a psychological barrier where we know from evidence that girls at a very early age rule out— they rule out STEM subjects, particularly the physical sciences and technology, because they have a perception that the type of person who work in those fields and who study those subjects are not like them. So typically they’ll think that if you ask them to draw a picture or imagine what somebody who works in technology or engineering looks like, they’ll draw a man. And probably they’ll think of somebody who’s a little bit of a loner, you know, maybe a bit geeky, not, not very socially— a bit socially inept. And, and most teenage girls or young girls at every age, even younger than teenage girls, it’s not how they identify themselves. So there’s a bit of a gap or a barrier, and they just decide, well, science and technology aren’t for me because I’m not like that. Exactly.

Speaker H: So, WISE is a network for individual membership for free and paid membership for companies. What does WISE membership mean for women and for larger businesses?

Speaker G: Well, for women, if you imagine those women who do go into computing or engineering or construction, all these fields that are still quite male-dominated, it can be quite daunting. So they might be the only one, they might be the only girl in an A-level physics class, for example, or the only one doing computer science on their university course, or the only one in their team or on their site when they go into the world of work. And that can be a bit daunting. So what WISE membership does, and why it’s free to individuals, is it connects them to other women where they can just share, that they get a bit of peer support and encouragement. They meet other girls who are like them, who love physics or I love engineering, love computing, and they stop feeling that they are the only one. And that can be really powerful and helpful, gives, builds their resilience. So that’s the benefit for women. And then for the companies, it’s a couple of things I would say. By joining WISE, that’s a public demonstration of their commitment to wanting more women in these fields. So it helps raise their profile with the women they’re trying to attract. And then WISE membership gives them access to practical help to help them recruit more women into those roles and to help them with measures they can take to make the workplace a more friendly place for women to work, more welcoming, so that the women are happy once they join them and more likely to stay, more likely to do their best work, thrive, rise up through the ranks of the organization, which then in turn, when there are more women in senior roles, that obviously helps them to recruit more women at the junior end because they can see a career path for them.

Speaker H: WISE also offers training in schools and colleges. We know that because the avoidance of STEM starts as early as GCSE when people are picking their subjects, what do you think is keeping young women from these subjects in schools?

Speaker G: Well, again, there’s a mixture of things. Sometimes they’re told, or they, they have the perception, and they can be told by their parents or their teachers sometimes that these subjects are hard. And so they get the idea that if they want to have good grades, then they’d be more likely to get those good grades if they choose art subjects rather than subjects like physics or computing, which isn’t the case because actually those girls that do those subjects year after year outperform the boys. So it’s not that girls can’t do them, but there is a perception amongst girls that they’re hard. And so that’s one thing that we need to change. The second thing is that many girls find those subjects boring. In the way they’re taught. So we want to work with the teachers to make them more exciting and more relevant to girls. So maths is an example. We tend to find— it’s not universally true— but girls are more interested in the point of the subject, how it will help them in their lives or to find a job. So relating the subject, the teaching of the subjects like maths and physics and engineering and computing, to something the girls care about and are interested in makes it more relevant to them, and they’ll find the subject more interesting, they’ll enjoy it more, might do projects of things they’re interested in. So for example, if they’re interested in climate change, looking at the maths and physics around predicting climate change or around measures to reduce our carbon footprint, they might find that more interesting way of getting into the subject because they can see the point of what they’re being taught, they get interested in it, it rather than maths or physics or engineering for its own sake.

Speaker H: So something that really interested me about WISE is that it offers for sale a culture analysis tool, which is a questionnaire that businesses can send out to their employees. Can you tell us some of the results that showcase the way STEM sectors do have these unconscious biases against women?

Speaker G: Yes, I can give you a few examples. Obviously I’m not going to name the companies, but they’d be quite typical. And often it’s It’s the telling, because we ask some, some of the questions are multiple choice, and so you can just, we can just do some number crunching of the results. And the surveys that go out to everybody in the company, men and women, and people on the shop floor, if you like, or the front line, as well as the managers and the supervisors. And you can cut it by different site, by grade, by gender, and so on. So you get some really rich results, and it’s like a gauge of the temperature, what the issues are. How different people in the organization are feeling about where they work. And a lot of big companies do these kind of employee surveys on a regular basis anyway, but what the WISE cultural analysis tool— the questions are very much geared to what we know are typical issues facing women in a male-dominated sector like science, technology, and engineering. And some of the examples might be very practical things. This, of come up from some companies, like in one instance in an engineering environment, the women were hugely concerned about the state of the toilets, which sounds a ridiculous thing, but it was a real issue and the company could do something about it. So because there weren’t many women in the workplace, nobody had really addressed the issue of having turned, you know, decent toilet facilities for the women. Or it could be practical things like the size of the safety boots, safety equipment in, in an engineering manufacturing manufacturing environments where there aren’t many women, and the women are typically just expected to make do with the men’s equipment, which often doesn’t fit them very well. So those practical issues can come out from those surveys, which might not come out in a standard employee survey. Or sometimes it’s more— and this is more generic, it’s not just in those manufacturing or engineering sites, it could also be in technology— it can be the kind of benign bias which isn’t meant in a negative way, but it can have negative consequences. So one example I remember somebody telling me is she’d— was there was a project where there was something going on over a weekend and she wanted to stay and see it through, and her manager said, “Oh, haven’t you got small children? Don’t you want to be with them?” So he meant it kindly, but she thought, well, he wouldn’t have asked a man that question. So it kind of made her feel it’s sort of singling her out. Or a very common thing is when women are in a male-dominated team, somebody will be making a joke or using colorful language, should we say, and they say, oh, excuse, you know, I’m sorry, um, and spare your blushes, or sorry Kirsty, or sorry Susan, you know, don’t mean to offend you. And it kind of singles them out and they go red, and they’d rather just— they actually don’t mind, but making an issue of it makes them feel singled out and awkward, and they’d rather just not be treated differently, really. So there’s sometimes there’s subtle things like that, sometimes they’re practical things, sometimes they’re more blatant, like, you know, comments like women saying they’ve heard— and men might report it as well— they’ve heard people say when a woman’s got a job, or she only got that job because of what she looks like, because they all fancied her, or the reverse, she’ll never get promoted because of what she looks like. So those kind of very sexist, blatant comments sometimes come out through these surveys., and then it’s an opportunity for the company. It’s like holding a mirror up to what even the top management of that company maybe genuinely want to have an open and inclusive culture and not realise some of the practices and language and behaviour that’s going on. So it holds a mirror up to that, it surfaces those things, and then they can deal with it and say what kind of language and behaviour is acceptable and what’s not acceptable.

Speaker H: Well, speaking of the ways that people can improve. I do— obviously, a lot of people are aiming for feminist companies, but it is not feminist, female inclusive STEM companies. But one of WISE’s projects is consultation. So, how would you consult companies and organisers to better their female hiring or their treatment of women?

Speaker G: Well, sometimes what we might do is we’d ask them what they’ve done and how it’s made a difference and talk to them, share some examples of other that have done things that have proved to make— to prove to be effective. So, for example, just sticking with recruitment, one of the companies we work with, Hitachi Rail, they found that they have a big apprenticeship program, were disappointed by the low numbers of women applying for the apprenticeship program. So they started to run female-only open days, and that made a massive difference very quickly to the number of women coming through, just having that opportunity to come along as a group of women to find out about the company in an environment with other women made the difference. In other ways, another example, much more simple, was simply changing the job title of a role and putting the word customer in it. This was an example from Northumbrian Water. Again, it was a technician role, but by adding the word customer into the technician role, a customer service technician I think it was, the role was exactly the same— but the people element in the job title attracted more women to apply.

Speaker H: So, one of WISE’s projects is the event coming up in November called the WISE Awards, where you’re highlighting companies and individuals that have really made an impact. What does it take to be a WISE Award winner?

Speaker G: What does it take is having a standout, inspiring story is one thing, and the second thing is being able to communicate well and put some— being prepared to put some time in to make a difference to the campaign by sharing their story with others.

Speaker H: The WISE Awards also has a Man Award, which I found really interesting, that focuses on men as agents of change. So what can men do in companies and as individuals to help bridge the issues between gender and STEM, whether they be as bosses or just employees that don’t have quite as much control?

Speaker G: Well, they can all do whatever their role is, is to to talk to their colleagues. They can challenge inappropriate comments or behaviour when they hear it. And actually, that really helps the women because it’s not the women all the time that have to call out the behaviour. Men can have a real impact by challenging that behaviour, and that supports their female colleagues. They can also help if they’ve got children or other caring responsibilities, take time off, ask for flexibility themselves. Because that stops making it a women’s issue if everybody, you know, men and women, start to take time off to, you know, go and pick up kids from school, take kids to school, or be at home if the child’s sick, that kind of thing. So it isn’t— the burden doesn’t fall so much on women, and that will help other men being able— feeling they’re able to do that, and the balance is shared more equally between men and women for those caring responsibilities. So, and then for those who are in a more leadership roles, management and leadership roles, they could help women who want to, who are ambitious and who show talent. They could sponsor them, open doors for them. One of my companies described that as being an internal headhunter for women. So they give them access to projects, they take them along with them to meetings, they— so that they, those women, get— expand their own networks, get noticed more within the organization, and therefore, you know, they’ll get more opportunities for promotion. Our winner of the Rising Star Award last year is actually from the digital sector. She was Amy Hart, and what inspired her about the recruitment literature was it said something on the lines of, would you like to make a difference to people’s lives? And that’s what sparked her interest. And in fact, what she’s been working on is the functionality for people using HMRC for pensions and for tax and for their tax returns, and she’s improved the functionality for over half a million customers, but because of those systems she’s working on through her digital apprenticeships. So she’s really proud of that. Another technology one who’s just been announced as a finalist in this year’s Tech Startup Award is, um, a GP actually. So she’s done medicine, but she’s gone into a tech medical-related business by founding a company called See the Signs, see the letter C, and that uses artificial intelligence to help other GPs make an early diagnosis of cancer because there’s so many different types of cancer and the symptoms are often a bit vague. So using artificial intelligence actually enables the GPs to pick up things that they couldn’t possibly hold all that information in their heads. So that’s a really inspirational project, and she’s one of the doctors who’s founded that is one of our three finalists in the Tech Startup Award for 2017.

Speaker B: You’re listening to Password Woman: Queens of Tech here on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. She will surely love the three science artists who are getting their installations ready as we speak for a new show at London’s Oxo Tower. Mandy Harousse of Central at Martin’s School of Art uses the heartbeats of visitors to the exhibition to create music and images which are constantly changing. Lesley-Ann Daley also sonifies the heartbeat, and you can watch her on Vimeo turning food into music.

Speaker C: That’s a boiled egg.

Speaker B: And here comes the steak. Meanwhile, Jasmine Papitis is using her education as a physicist to make materials morph into art. Jasmine, Lesley-Ann, and Mandy are exhibiting at London’s Oxo Tower on the South Bank from the 24th of September. You can find Dr. Sue Black on Twitter, and the TechMums have their own online course at techmums.com. So even if, like me, you don’t know your Arduino from your elbow, there are some affordable and enjoyable ways to get with the program and make sure that the 2020s don’t send the female half of the world back to the kitchen as in the 1950s. This edition of Password is repeated on Monday and we’ll be back here on Resonance FM on Wednesday the 11th of October. Password Woman: Queens of Tech was made by me, Jane Wyatt, with Charlotte Rowntree, Melissa Wills, and Blue Buffery, and technical help and inspiration from Peter Warren. It’s a Future Intelligence production for Resonance FM, and you can find out more about technology and society at our website futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening, and goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.