BOULDER — Lucy Sanders’ memorable moment No. 1: traveling to New Jersey with her husband to accept the Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest honor bestowed on about a half-dozen company scientists and engineers each year.
As the third woman to receive the award since its inception in 1982,
she remembered watching the wives of other award winners clapping excitedly as a woman stepped up to accept the award.
Her No. 2 memorable moment? Opening an envelope a few weeks later to see photos from the event.
She wasn’t in a single shot — they were all of her husband because the photographer thought he won the award.
“They were some of the best photos of my husband,” Sanders laughs with a heartwarming chuckle. “That was 1997. That was so funny!”
Today, she’s co-founder and CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and it’s a good thing she has a sense of humor. Do you know how many women work in IT jobs in the U.S.?
Sanders does.
She employs data and social scientists to review research and data to figure out why women in computer jobs have dwindled to one in five — and puts it all online for the public to peruse.
Eleven years after co-founding NCWIT, Sanders and her team have established the Academic Alliance and K-12 Alliance, a framework to guide girls into technology via a network of nonprofits, educators and government groups. Since joining, alliance members have seen a 62 percent increase in female undergrads majoring in computing.
But a tough spot has been getting tech companies not just to hire women but to put them into inventor and leadership positions.
“We know that women make up less than 5 percent of the leadership roles (at tech companies), and we know that they have twice the quit rate as men in private-sector jobs. And we pretty much know they are not inventing because we know the patent rates,” Sanders said, pointing to dismal numbers showing just 2 percent of IT patents awarded to female-only teams in the past 30 years.
NCWIT isn’t just about getting women into tech jobs. It’s about getting women to share their perspective and knowledge. It’s about making sure women are not avoiding those leadership jobs or shirking from innovation because of something called unconscious bias.
“There’s a big conversation going on now with what we call ‘fixing women.’ You hear things like ‘If women were just more confident.’ Or ‘If women were only better risk takers.’ We don’t subscribe to that. And we don’t subscribe to men being the biased, evil ones because research shows that all of us have this bias about who does technology,” Sanders said. “The ultimate goal, of course, is to make sure women and men are innovating equally in technology.”
Sanders’ fans
If you meet Sanders on the street, you may not realize she’s the leader of one of the most influential technology organizations in the nation. Google, Microsoft, Intel — all are NCWIT partners. Apple became a lifetime partner after investing $10 million in the organization.
“She’s so passionate about our mission, and she’s very charismatic in talking about it and framing the issues in ways that she can appeal to so many different stakeholders,” said Wendy DuBow, an NCWIT senior research scientist. “When I talk to her, I feel like she’s looking out for my career, like a mentor, which I appreciate.”
Among her many fans is Brad Feld, the prolific venture capitalist in Boulder who also sits on NCWIT’s board.
“Lucy comes at all problems with the brain of an engineer and the soul of a philosopher,” Feld said. “I remember a moment several years ago when she turned to me and said, ‘Women are not broken, and men are not the problem.’ I smiled, and she smiled, as we both knew what that meant. It’s turned into an important tagline to explain what unconscious bias is.”
Sanders was a teenager in the mid-1960s. Her role model was her older sister, who got her degree in computer science at Louisiana Tech in 1971.
“She went to work and got what seemed like a good salary. It was $12,000 a year,” she laughed, still amused by her rationale. (The U.S. Department of Commerce recorded the median household income at $9,030 that year).
Sanders chose Louisiana State University, where she, too, got her degree in computer science. Then she and her future husband headed to grad school at the University of Colorado. (He’s now an emeritus faculty member in CU’s computer science department.)
While getting her master’s in computer science, Bell Labs hired her in 1977 for its part-time student program. At the time, there were only a few female engineers — none in management, recalls Ken Fong, who was Sanders’ first supervisor at the company.
“She was usually a pleasure to work with,” Fong said. “Sometimes, however, she would push an issue to the point of annoying people; usually, though, she turned out to be right.”
That tenacity and technical expertise served Sanders well when she and colleague Kathy Glass led the team that used a new simplified and faster chip for corporate phone systems. The team created the hardware and software around this newly invented RISC chip, allowing companies to handle significantly more phone calls with a single server. And it earned Sanders the Bell Labs Fellow honor.
Sanders went on to become chief technology officer for the Lucent Call Center Technology.
With six patents, she retired in 2001. But that didn’t last. She was soon working on a proposal that led to a $3.25 million National Science Foundation grant to figure out why women were leaving the computer industry, especially when the workforce was expected to grow at double the rate for jobs overall.
Created in 2004, NCWIT gave itself a 20-year deadline.
“The real end goal is not the sustainability of NCWIT. We’re done as an organization when every organization that should care about diversity and inclusion in computing does care,” Sanders said. “They are the ones who are going to sustain it.”
Unaware of views
Unconscious bias is that eerie realization that you make decisions based on views you’re not aware you have. Google said it’s the reason why 10 percent of early YouTube videos were upside down — developers built tools for right-handed users without consideration for lefties.
It’s also one way to explain what happened in 2012, when Yale researchers created a résumé and sent it to academic scientists for a lab manager job. Some copies had a female name, others a male name. Males were deemed “more competent and hirable,” while the few females who made the cut were offered lower salaries than male applicants — even though the same credentials were used.
This sort of bias was explored in 1998 by scientists from Harvard and universities in Washington and Virginia. They created Project Implicit, a series of tests meant to educate people about their own hidden bias and how to combat it. The tests are not just about gender, but race, weight, sexuality, religion and other hot topics.
Sanders took the gender-science test.
Her answers came fast, such as associating husband with male. Engineering with science. Music with liberal arts. But on the subject of mixing gender and disciplines, her responses weren’t as quick, which is what the test looks at.
“I turned out to have moderate — not severe, thankfully — but a moderate social bias of (categorizing) men and science and women and liberal arts,” she said.
Sanders is not unusual. Most test takers have some bias. While the test itself says it “might not be perfectly accurate,” it’s meant to get participants thinking about social bias.
“It’s not sensible to sit back and think that, ‘Oh, it’s just because the women aren’t as analytical as men.’ Wait a minute! They got out of MIT with the same degrees. They graduated from Carnegie Mellon. They got the same grades!” she said. “Would we put up with all food being cooked by female chefs or all music being written by all male composers? No, of course not. We would say, ‘Whoa, we’re missing out on some crazy creativity.’
“So why don’t we say that about technology?”
“A no-brainer for us”
Last year, Apple, Facebook, Google and a handful of tech companies shared how many women worked for them — and how many were in tech roles. White men outnumbered everyone else.
Boulder-based SendGrid, which had worked with NCWIT since the company’s inception in 2009, was the only Colorado company to share its stats: 22 percent of its employees were female, with 9 percent of its tech staff women. Eighty-three percent were white.
“When I saw that people were releasing their numbers, I just knew it was a no-brainer for us. It just seemed natural,” said Josh Ashton, SendGrid’s senior director of people operations.
But, he added, “It was kind of disappointing for me too.”
SendGrid did it to hold itself accountable. Seeing the research that mixed-gender teams performed financially better — with a 35 percent higher return on investment in a study by Catalyst, among other reports — should entice any company to consider diversifying.
“The most important thing to me about releasing our diversity figures was not that it was a check-mark thing. It was about what we were doing and our strategy and being held accountable,” Ashton said. “Our partnership with (NCWIT) has become a catalyst to launch a more formal diversity strategy.”
Since SendGrid’s announcement last fall, Boulder accelerator Techstars pledged to double female applicants and mentors; Denver’s Galvanize added scholarships to train more women for data science and engineering jobs.
After 11 years, Sanders’ time is running out. As a personal trainer to these companies, Sanders is hopeful the organization will retire on schedule.
“We are starting to see CEOs out there,” Sanders said. “The good news about the public space is that once a CEO says ‘I’m accountable,’ things start to happen super fast.”
Tamara Chuang: 303-954-1209, tchuang@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Gadgetress
