My Contribution - a short comedy about a tech job interview

A few years ago I wrote "My Contribution," a short play about a tech job interview. It was given a staged reading at the 2017 Playwrights' Center of San Francisco's Playoff. I believe that it is not yet dated, although I hoped it would be by now.

The play reflects some ideas I had back when I wrote a series of posts on what I called, for lack of a better name, the Morris Number.  They begin here.

I also entered My Contribution in a play contest.  They were seeking slightly longer plays so I added some monologue rants for the main character to present after the play ended.  One rant is about landlines and one is about TWGLCMs (pronounced twiggle-kim), an acronym I had explained here. In the rant, however, I added a Y: TWGLYCM (twiggly-kim).  Why?  Read the play.

Google's Diversity Numbers and the Women CS majors of the Class of 1994 (Morris Number 09)

Google has decided to publish its diversity numbers -- the very numbers it successfully prevented CNN Money from obtaining not so long ago. I am glad the company had a change of heart.

I doubt, though, that anyone at Google has thought about its Morris Number - the number of men above the fifth highest ranking woman - or about the diversity breakdowns of its compensation deciles. But somebody should.

Google's now-revealed EEO-1 report shows that the Morris Number cannot be less than 33. That's because the top management category has 36 people and only 3 of them are female. How many men besides those 33 are above the fifth highest woman? In part 10 of this series I will address Google's Morris Number range and how it compares to the ranges for the five companies for which CNN Money did have data. Right now, however, I want to discuss something else published by Google about gender and computer science.

A web search for "google diversity" led me not only to Google's EEO numbers but also to a Google Diversity page entitled "Inspiring the next generation of tech innovators." I clicked on the tab "For women" and saw the heading "CS: Education, Research & Advocacy: Some of our longer-term investments." What jumped off the screen at me there was this quote:

But today, women make up just 18% of CS degrees, down from 37% 20 years ago.

The next sentences explain that the company had commissioned a study so that it can "craft strategies that will change awareness and perception of CS education ..." Excellent. But did anyone at Google familiar with that study consider that CS would be more attractive to future female students if the glamorous and prosperous employers of Silicon Valley would show some interest in the female students studying CS right now? More young women might be convinced to pursue a bachelors in computer science if more jobs were offered NOW to the females who already have that degree. Their numbers may be low but they are not zero. Which brings me back to those percentages from 2014 and 1994.

According to Google's quote and my arithmetic, twenty years ago 3 out of 8 (37%) computer science majors were women. Where are they now? Sure, those ladies are over 40, but so are Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they are still able to lead productive lives in the tech world despite their advanced age.

Google's history page indicates that its first employee was hired in 1998: a male CS major from the Harvard College class of 1994. Like that lucky young man, the women CS majors graduating in 1994 had been out of college for four years. Were any of them hired by Google in its first year of operation? Or in the next five years? How many female CS majors from the college class of 1994 have ever been hired by Google? (Marissa Mayer is a little younger; Sheryl Sandberg is a little older and her major was economics.) Are there any female CS majors from the class of 1994 at Google now? What about women CS majors in any graduation year up to 2000? Google has hired thousands of CS majors in the last 16 years. Compared to their male counterparts, what were the chances for women to land those jobs?

Google is now spending a good deal of money to improve its image, and I trust also its reality, with regard to gender discrimination. Why not try to find some of the women who were in that 37% and offer them jobs? Might that not benefit Google in all the ways companies say that a diverse workforce is good for business? Thinking outside the box is considered a necessity at places like Google. Those women would have the advantage of having lived outside the Google box in terms of their job experience and probably outside the Silicon Valley box, too, because Google's hiring practices -- characterized by homosocial reproduction, as the sociologists would say -- are typical for the region. A critical mass of new hires who are female and over 40 would undoubtedly be disruptive of the culture, and "disruptive" is considered a good thing in business these days. Those women would also
     - enrich Google's pipeline of internal female candidates for management positions, and
     - serve as mentors, role models and colleagues for younger women.
Win-win-win-win-win.

(Additional thoughts on how the tech industry could improve its EEO numbers sooner rather than later will be in part 11 of this series.)

***

A couple of months ago Michelle Quinn of the San Jose Mercury News wrote an excellent article entitled "Silicon Valley's Other Women Problem". She reported that:

Recently, 24 firms, including Google, Yahoo and eBay, submitted their internal data to the Anita Borg Institute for an assessment of how well they were doing recruiting, retaining and advancing female technologists.

I wonder if the Anita Borg Institute will recommend that Google change its answer to the question "Where are they now?" from "Who cares? Not us!" to "Right here with us and we are lucky to have them!"

Meanwhile, Google could continue being a leader in gender diversity transparency by publishing its Morris Numbers and the diversity breakdown of its compensation deciles. If Google does it, so might other tech companies who have largely avoided hiring women CS majors from the class of 1994 or any class before or since. It is easy and simple to calculate the numbers if you can do the math, and surely Google, Yahoo and eBay have a few people around who can do the math. Imagine if companies would compete over their Morris Numbers. Imagine if college career offices would not let companies participate in on-campus recruiting unless they published their numbers. Maybe Google and those who followed its lead would find after a few years that

- when the Morris Number in every department is less than 10, and
- when all the compensation deciles have similar diversity statistics, instead of white men being over-represented at the top and everyone else being over-represented at the bottom,

the companies enjoy higher profits and better customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty. Imagine.

Postscript:

1994: I wrote this post believing that Google's "37% 20 years ago" was accurate. I wanted a corroborating link for myself, though, so I did a search.

What I found is that "20" should be "30." For example, a blog post by Robert L Mitchell from April 2013 says that the "high water mark" for women in CS was 1986 not 1994. Mitchell associates the number "37%" with the academic year 1984/5. He gives the source of his data: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), "Degrees and Other Formal Awards Conferred" but the linked page does not in fact have a breakdown by sex. A compilation by the Association of Women in Science of many statistics about women in science includes another table from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), one that has the M/F breakdown for computer science and information technology degrees, but only through 2004-5. If the highest female percentages in Computer Science were in the mid 1980s, how low had they fallen by "20 years ago"? By my calculation, the percentages for the years 1992-3, 1993-4 and 1994-5 were around 28%. That is still a good deal more than the 18% that Google quotes for today.

I decided to stick with 1994 in my discussion here. Convincing Google to hire a few dozen 40-something women with CS degrees will be difficult; 50-somethings would, I fear, be impossible in the TECMY culture.

June 1, 2014; updated 20140603 and 0605

Women in Silicon Valley: A Prediction from 2000 (Morris Number 08)

The Future for Women in Silicon Valley
in the 21st Century
as Predicted in October 2000

When I was doing some research about female CEOs for the Morris Number Series, I happened upon an article by Particia Sellers in the October 16, 2000 issue of Fortune entitled "The 50 Most Powerful Women In Business: Secrets of the Fastest-Rising Stars.". Sellers wrote:

Cisco CEO John Chambers has an opinion:

"When I first came out to the Valley in 1991," he recalls, "an Asian-American group talked to me about their glass ceiling. My view then was that while nothing is perfect, these people are talented--and they'll move up."

He continues,

"Today more than 29% of Silicon Valley CEOs are Asian-born--from a rounding error a decade ago. It's primarily because the talent is there, waiting to be tapped. You'll see the same thing happen with women."

In 2014, we have yet to see "the same thing happen with women." I do not know what fraction of the Silicon Valley population was "Asian-born" (Chambers' phrase) or ethnically Asian in 2000, but I am fairly sure that the females were and are about 50%. Woman CEOs? Not 50%. Not even 29%. And even including the near-CEOs -- the COOs (Sandberg at Facebook) and Presidents (James at Intel) -- we may just be seeing the Indira Phenomenon rather than that female talent "there, waiting to be tapped" is being tapped instead of left waiting. Which is why we need to publicize - and companies need to start addressing - Morris Numbers and Morris Deciles.
For woman today, the problem is less that the ceiling is glass (whether or not that was the problem for Asian-Americans in 1991) and more that the doors are padlocked and the key is a Y chromosome.

Interestingly, Chambers had not been asked "Will there be more women employees in Silicon Valley in the future?" He was in fact responding to this question:

Do the guys who rule corporate America (yes, it is still guys in 88% of the senior jobs) know how to handle powerful women?

The way to handle powerful women that is most preferred by the powerful guys who rule Silicon Valley is a variation on an old grade school joke: If we don't give them an inch, they'll never be able to think they are rulers.

Read Sellers' whole article. It is very good and, because it was written more than 13 years ago, very sad.

The Weighted Morris Number (Morris Number 06)

THE MORRIS NUMBER, WITH WEIGHTS

When I calculated the range of ordinary Morris Numbers (OMNs) for the five tech companies discussed in Julianne Pepitone's CNN Money article, I thought about adding weights. Weights help to discriminate (npi) between companies with the same OMN but a different ordering of females and males. Weights are a way to take account of the gender pattern above the fifth highest ranking woman.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Two companies have an ordinary Morris Number (OMN) of 5: there are 5 men above the 5th highest ranking women. In one company the top 10 positions alternate between M and F. In the other company the top five positions are held by men, the next five by women.

To distinguish between such situations, we can use weights. Counting down from the top, the more men above each successive woman, the higher (worse) the metric will be.

ADDING WEIGHTS

The Weighted Morris Number (WMN) is calculated by using different weighting factors for the number of men whose position at the company is higher than one or more of the top five woman. The weights go down as you go down the hierarchy. The number of men higher than the top woman is multiplied by the biggest factor. Let us set it at 15. If the CEO is a woman, the contribution to the Morris Number for Female #1 is 0. If the top woman is 6th in the company, the contribution is 75 (5 x 15).

The set of multipliers might be:
     15 for the number of men above Female #1
     10 for the number of men between Female #1 and Female #2
       6 for the number of men between Female #2 and Female #3
       3 for the number of men between Female #3 and Female #4
       1 for the number of men between Female #4 and Female #5
The size of the steps between weights are 5-4-3-2.

ALTERNATING MEN AND WOMEN AT THE TOP

If men and women alternate in the top 10 positions, the ordinary Morris Number is either 4, if a woman is at the top, or 5, if a man is at the top. The difference between the OMNs for those two situations is 1. The difference between the two WMNs is more dramatic. With a man in the number 1 position, the weighted Morris Number is
     1 x 15
     1 x 10
     1 x   6
     1 x   3
     1 x   1
for a total of 35. If a woman is in the top position, the weighted Morris Number is 20.

The bonus for a female CEO might make the weighted Morris Number a less desirable metric: it could encourage companies to rely on the Indira Phenomenon rather than ending discrimination.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

Company 1: There are 50 men before you reach any women. The next 5 positions are held by women. The OMN is 50.

Company 2: The CEO is a woman. Then there are 5 men between her and F2, 35 men between F2 and the next two women, F3 and F4, then 10 more men between F4 and F5. The OMN is 50.

In Company 1, the top 5 females are below the executive tier. (I say that because it is rare for an organization to have more than 50 people with substantial executive clout.) Company 2 has a female CEO and another female also within the top 10. So far so good, but the Indira Phenomenon may dominate after F2.

Now consider the WMNs for these two companies: Company 1:
     750 = 50 men above F1 x 15
         0 = No men between F1 and F5
     ------------------------------------------------
     750 = WMN

Company 2:
          0 = 15 x  0 men above F1
       50 = 10 x  5 men between F1 and F2
     210 =  6 x 35 men between F2 and F3
         0 =  3 x  0 men between F3 and F4
        10 = 1 x 10 men between F4 and F5
     ------------------------------------------------
     270 = WMN

Company 2's WMN is about a third of Company 1's. Imagine if that fact were publicized at job fairs and university career offices and in a tweet that went viral. Company 2 would attract more and better women job seekers and more and better women customers. It would be able to achieve a level of excellence that company 1 could only envy until its top management finally realized that quality women should replace mediocre men.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140331,0403

Morris Number Ranges for Some Tech Companies (Morris Number 05)

CALCULATING MORRIS NUMBERS FOR TECH COMPANIES

Employment data is not easy to come by. But almost exactly a year ago, Julianne Pepitone published an article in CNN Money entitled "Black, female, and a Silicon Valley 'trade secret'" and subtitled "Silicon Valley Boys' Club" in which she sought to answer the question "How diverse is Silicon Valley?" Pepitone had managed to obtain employment data from five tech companies willing to permit such information to be public: Cisco, Dell, eBay, Ingram Micro and Intel. I discussed the article, and its excellent interactive tables, here.

Pepitone had sought information from twenty tech companies. Only three, Dell, Ingram Micro and Intel, cooperated; Intel alone has a policy of making such data public. After a FOIA request was filed seeking employment information that government contractors have to give the government, information about two more companies, Cisco and eBay, was obtained. Final tally: 20 companies, 5 with data, 15 not. Ten of those fifteen, including Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, had no government contracts so the FOIA request did not touch them. The other five -- Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft -- successfully petitioned to prevent disclosure on the grounds that it would cause "competitve harm," hence the 'trade secret' joke in the title of the article. Would a company with an excellent record of diversity want to make sure nobody saw the numbers? Hmmm. If you know of further developments in the quest for this kind of information, please let me know.

Pepitone's tables present the numbers of employees in six categories. She explains that these are averages over 5 years. [See "Methodology" below the interactive tables and click "Read More."] Those categories are related to a set of ten codes from an EEO-1 form that all companies with more than 100 employees must file with the EEOC. Those ten codes are aggregates from the 300 occupations the US census uses. See http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/jobclassguide.cfm.

The EEOC, however, is prohibited by statute (subsection e of 42 USC 2000e-8) from divulging EEO-1 information, which is why the CNN Money investigators first asked the companies directly, and then used a FOIA request addressed to the Department of Labor. Unlike the EEOC, the Department of Labor is not subject to a gag rule but the contractors do have the right to petition to keep secret any trade secrets.

Pepitone reorganizes the data to focus more on upper level employees. She breaks out the subcategories of the EEO-1's top code (1.1: executive/senior officers and 1.2: First/Midlevel Officials and Managers), identifying the first as "Officers and Managers" and the second as "Midlevel Officer or Manager." She also collapses the lower five EEO-1 codes into a single "Admin/Other" category.

Total employees for each company are not displayed, so I have calculated them here.

Company Category	Cisco	Dell	eBay	Ingram Micro	Intel
Officer/Manager	225	125	55	236	41
Mid-level	6,496	3,374	1,804	574	5,027
Professional	24,100	11,237	3,977	846	28,306
Technical	59	3,370	58	119	10,970
Sales	2,850	5,895	163	714	577
Administrative/Other	902	4,820	2,700	2,123	2,000
Total	34,632	28,821	8,757	4,612	46,921

Apparently the five companies give different interpretations to the EEO codes. For example, Intel, which I calculate has almost 47,000 employees, has only 41 "Officers and Managers," less than 0.1% of the workforce. By contrast, Ingram Micro has 236 "Officers and Managers", almost 6 times as many as Intel, out of a workforce of 4600, one-tenth the size of Intel's. That means Ingram Micro's Officers and Managers are 5% of its workforce. Is Ingram Micro that top-heavy and is Intel that lean? Or what?

The CNN Money interactive tables let you view the total number of people the company designated in each category, as well as how many are men or women, or your choice of any combination of gender -- all, men or women -- and ethnicity -- all, Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, or Other.

Because all five companies have at least five women in the top category, it is possible to calculate a range of Morris Numbers. We cannot determine the precise value without more information about people's actual positions. (See Part 03 of this series for a discussion of different ways to rank employees using objective data.) Sometimes the companies' webpages help, at least for the very top of the top. I analyze some of this information below.

A suspicious mind might suspect that companies use as broad a definition as they can for the top category in order to have as few zeroes in the non-white-male boxes as possible. The range for the Morris Number [LOW, HIGH] for each company does not prove or disprove that theory. The greater the overall number of employees in the top category, however, the higher (worse) the upper limit on the Morris Number range.

MORRIS NUMBER RANGES FOR THE FIVE TECH COMPANIES

If we do not know the precise rankings of the women in a company's top management, we can at least calculate the range. The best (lowest) Morris Number is obtained by assuming the first five woman are clustered at the top, above all the men, the highest (worst) Morris Number by assuming that the fifth and all lesser-ranked women in that category are clustered at the bottom. (The ordinary Morris Number is the same whether the first woman is in that bottom cluster, too, or is the CEO. I propose the weighted Morris Number to take into account the actual positions of the four women you pass on the way to finding the fifth highest ranking woman.

Let's take an example, first with numbers, then without, to understand how this works.
        Total people in the category Officer and Managers is 105.
        Number of women in that category is 5
        Number of men = 105-5 = 100

If we assume the least sexist (genderist?) case, the 5 women are all at the top, the 100 men come below them, and the Morris Number is 0. In the worst case, the 5th woman is ranked below the 100 men and the Morris Number is 100. We can write the range as [0,100].

We can derive a formula, too. If T = total and W = women, then the worst number is T-W. If there are 5 or more women in the category, the best number is 0. If there are less than 5, then the next category has to be included to get the Morris Number.

Now let's consider Pepitone's data.

MORRIS NUMBER RANGES FOR FIVE TECH COMPANIES

The Officers and Managers row of the interactive tables shows that
Cisco: Women are 44 of the 225. Morris Number Range: 0 to 181
Dell: Women are 27 out of 125. Morris Number Range: 0 to 98
eBay: Women are 10 out of 55. Morris Number Range: 0 to 45
Ingram Micro: Women are 47 of the 236. Morris Number Range: 0 to 189
Intel: Women are 6 out of 41. Morris Number Range: 0 to 35.

Conclusion: Intel looks the best. Ingram Micro looks the worst, with Cisco a close second.

WHAT CISCO, INGRAM MICRO AND INTEL
MAKE PUBLIC ABOUT THEIR EXECUTIVES

CISCO: The senior management (according to http://newsroom.cisco.com/exec-bios, last viewed 3/14/14), has only 71 people, compared to the 225 that CNN Money reported was on Cisco's EEO-1. The top level is called the Executive Leadership Team. The 15 members, 11 men and 4 women, are listed alphabetically by last name. The women's titles are SVP and Chief Marketing Officer; Chief Technology and Strategy Officer; CIO and SVP; and SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer. We need only look for one more woman to calculate the Morris Number. Of the 56 people in the next level, the Senior Leadership Team, 6 are women, 50 are men. (The fact that there are more women proportionally in the top level (4/15 = 27%) than in the second level (6/56 = 11% )reminds me of the Indira Phenomenon.) If one of the six women in Senior Leadership is above all the males in the category, the (lowest) Morris Number is 11. If all the men are above F#5, the (highest) Morris Number is 61. Range for Morris Number: [11,61].

INGRAM MICRO: The webpage listing Ingram Micro's senior management (corp.ingrammicro.com/About-Us/Executive-Leadership.aspx, last visited 3/17/14) has only 20 people, compared to 236 on the company's EEO-1 filing as shown on the CNN Money table. Of those 20, apparently listed in rank order, there are 2 females and 18 males. F1 is 11th, F2 is 14th. That means F3, F4 and F5 are below the 20 Executive Leaders. If they are directly below, the Morris Number is lowest: 18. If not, they must be somewhere among the remaining 216 (236-20, consisting of 189-18=171 men and 47-2=45 women). If F3, F4 and F5 are at the bottom with the rest of the women and below the 171 men, the worst Morris Number is 189. Range for Morris Number: [18, 189].

INTEL: The webpage identifying senior management (http://www.intel.com/newsroom/assets/bio/CorpOfficers.htm , last viewed 3/14/14) has the same number of employees, 41, as Intel had reported to the EEOC. The Chairman of the Board, a non-employee, brings the page's total to 42. Within each title -- Executive Vice President, Senior VP, Corporate VP -- people are listed alphabetically by last name so no ranking is revealed. The President, listed after the CEO so overall ranked #2, is female. There is also a female EVP (1 of 4), a female SVP (1 of 6) and six female Corporate VPs (6 of 29). F#5 is thus among the Corporate VPs, but we do not know her rank within that group. If she is top-ranked, Intel has the lowest Morris Number: 9. If she is below all the male Corporate VPs, Intel has the highest Morris Number: 32. Range for Morris Number: [9,32].

Conclusion: Intel still looks best, Cisco looks better, Ingram Micro looks about the same.

FACEBOOK AND YAHOO

I also looked on the web for information about the younger tech companies with high profile women, Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg) and Yahoo (Marissa Mayer). The result was: they like to keep secrets. The Indira Phenomenon may be present at both companies.

Facebook lists only 4 executives on its main company information page, Sandberg and 3 men. The Board of Directors has the same ratio: 2 women and 6 men. A 2012 article in the Business Insider has a photo of 18 people from Facebook who had visited Walmart, 13 men and 5 women. Author Owen Thomas points out that the picture includes some "junior [Facebook] staffers who work closely with Walmart" which seems to include at least one of the women, a customer marketing manager involved with the Facebook-Walmart relationship. The other four women are COO Sandberg, her executive assistant, a (the?) director of design, and the VP for Human Resources (so often the only high level job for someone outside the homosocial reproduction group). If these are the four highest ranking women at Facebook, who and how far down is F5? Is Facebook better than Intel or Cisco?

Yahoo's Proxy Statement filed in 2013 has a table showing the ten most highly compensated current or former executives. Two are women, one with the highest compensation on the list, CEO Marissa Mayer, and one with the lowest. Other than the Proxy Statement, I was unable to find anything from Yahoo with any executive leadership biographies or other information from which to calculate a Morris Number range.

True of false? 1. The younger the tech company, the more secretive about diversity data. 2. The younger the tech company, the worse the Morris Number. (Two more PhD ideas there.)

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140330,0403

The Morris Number and Determining Rank (Morris Number 03; PhD Ideas 05)

 COUNTING HOW MANY MEN YOU PASS
ON THE WAY TO FEMALE #5:
WHEN THE ORG CHART IS NOT ENOUGH

To calculate the Morris Number of an organization, count the men above the fifth highest ranking female ("F5").  Sounds simple. But if several people have the same title as F5, and some of them are male, how many of those men should be counted?

One approach would be to assume that F5 is average:  half the men with the same title are above her, half below.  If F5 is not the only woman at that rank, we could guess that she is above the same percentage of men as she is above women. See this example. Or we might calculate the best and worst Morris Numbers, assuming that the woman is at the top or bottom of the rank, respectively.  That range may be useful for comparison to other companies or to the same company at a different time.

But maybe we can do better.  People with the same title, say, Senior Vice President, may not in fact have the same rank and they may not have the same power within the organization.   Assessments of relative power are likely to be subjective, but objective information may be available.  If the company website lists the management team, we may be able to guess who is above whom when the listing is not alphabetical.  (See the example here based on the Girl Scouts' public information.) If the job holders are high enough up in their organization, the company's Executive Leadership webpages or SEC filings may provide some answers as discussed here.

Other employees within the organization, or researchers granted limited access to employment data including title and gender (but no names, please), could use these proxies of true rank, alone or in combination:
       1st choice: compensation package, if available,
       2nd choice: median compensation of direct reports
       3rd choice: budget
       4th choice: seniority
       5th choice: number of direct and indirect reports. 
to calculate the Morris Number. Perhaps someone has already analyzed how accurately each of those predicts a manager's power within an organization.  If not, it seems like a good subject for some PhD research.

I choose direct/indirect reports last because a supervisor of lower-paid workers, compared to one who supervises higher-paid workers such as professionals (engineers, lawyers or accountants), may have
       - more people to supervise, and
       - the same or even a higher budget, but
       - less power or influence.
Seniority might indicate power within the organization, or it might be a sign of dead wood left in place because of strong social or family connections.  How many people you supervise may be less of a clue to your power than your own salary is.  The median salary of the people you supervise may be an even better clue.  Another PhD Idea there.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0403

The Morris Number - A Few Questions and Answers (Morris Number 02)

Here are answers to some questions that came up during early discussions of the Morris Number.

"IN A PERFECT WORLD"

Q. How do you define "in a perfect world"?

A. In a perfect world, we can assume that
        1.  men and women receive equal treatment in education and employment,
        2.  the pool of people qualified for top-ranking jobs is half men, half women, and
         3.  women and men are equally likely to hold the top position in any organization.


Q. Why would the average Morris Number in a perfect world be 4.5 rather than a whole number?

A. I state the average Morris Number as 4.5 rather than a whole number to highlight how the number changes depending on Assumption 3. Assume that men and women alternate. If the top person is a woman, the fifth highest ranking woman is at position 9 and the Morris Number is 4. If the top person is a man, then the fifth highest woman is at position 10 and the Morris Number is 5. The average of many companies in the perfect world would be 4.5.


Q. What if the applicant pool is not 50-50?

A. If the applicant pool for top-ranking positions has more men than women, then we would expect the average Morris Number for a group of perfectly non-discriminatory entities to be more than 5. But there is no reason for the applicant pool to be other than 50-50 because in a perfect world there is no sex discrimination: men and women have equal educational and employment opportunities.

The Morris Number was created as a way to measure
        (a) the imperfections of the world, or some subset of it, with regard to gender neutrality, and
        (b) the progress toward perfection as the years go by.

WHY 5: WHY FIFTH HIGHEST RANKING?

Q. Why look for the fifth highest woman, not the third, say, or the tenth?

A. I hope that the choice of five follows the Goldilocks principle: neither too few nor too many but just right. Using two or three might be affected by the Indira Phenomenon: there might be as many as three women at the power table in some organiations, but the rest of the women would be in the bottom ranks. A number like eight or ten might be a problem in smaller organizations. A metric based on five will, I hope, give useful information about almost all employers.

Q. What about employers with less than five women employees?

A. Employers with less than five women employees and more than ten total employees have a Morris Number of infinity. (Below ten total, we can skip that employer until there are a few more hires.)

WHERE ARE THE BEST (LOWEST) MORRIS NUMBERS

Q. Where do I expect to find lower Morris Numbers?

A. Not in Silicon Valley, I'm afraid. Some of the reasons for my low expectations for tech companies are here.

I recently came across the phrase 'homosocial reproduction.' It fits Silicon Valley to a T, or rather it fits Silicon Valley's HR practices to an HR.

My guess is that the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are to be found in companies whose products in the bad old days would have been featured on the women's pages of newspapers: cosmetics, fashion, food, things for children. For a century or more, women started their own companies in those industries. 
         Coco Chanel opened her first shop in 1910.
         Madame C J Walker began her own hair products business in Indiana in 1910.
         In 1945 Ruth Handler co-founded Mattel, a picture-frame company that became a maker of doll-house furniture a year later and then a toy company (and, yes, introduced Handler's invention, the Barbie doll, in 1959).
        Estee Lauder founded the company that bears her name in 1946.
   In the "women's pages" industries, as compared to "man's world" industries (finance, heavy industry, agribusiness) and regardless of the gender of the founder, women were hired more often and more readily, and that, in turn, improved the odds that a woman could rise to a higher position.

In 2013 there were 23 companies in the Fortune 500 that had female CEOs. See below. By my count, six of those companies are in women's pages industries (four in food, one in cosmetics and one in fashion). Five are in tech (software, hardware or both). In 2010, there were 15 companies in the Fortune 500 with female CEOs; by my count, four were in women's pages industries and two in tech. In 2000, the Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs numbered two, three or four, depending on when the count was made, and five different women were involved. Three of them headed companies that make products heavily marketed to women: Mattel (toys: Jill Barad), Avon (cosmetics: Andrea Jung) and Walmart (retail: Jeanne Jackson). The other two were Carly Fiorina at HP and Marion O. Sandler at Golden West Financial.

Second, among the "man's world" companies, the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are more likely to be in older, rust-belt industries rather than 21st century ones.  The older companies, after all, have spent the last half century with the threat of affirmative action lawsuits forcing them to discriminate a little less and a little less openly. Those companies also hire from top business and law schools, and those schools have graduated plenty of women by now. Tech companies may hire fewer lawyers and B-school grads. I have heard that the tech world excuses its failure to hire women on the grounds that women don't get degrees in computer science. Assuming they are correct that women haven't pursued computer science in large enough numbers to make a dent in the Boys' Club culture of Silicon Valley, I can think of some solutions that the biggest employers - Google, Apple, Facebook - could easily afford that would make a dramatic difference pretty quickly. Just ask.

BLAMING WOMEN? NO.

In the post that led to my developing the Morris Number I wrote:

We all know about Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman at HP, and Marissa Mayer formerly at Google now at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. What happens, though, if you look in those companies for the next highest ranking female? How many men do you pass on the way down?

Q. Do you mean that women who get to the top do not help other women?

A. No. That was not my point. The only reason I referred to those famous ladies is to illustrate that a female in the top position does not prove that the company is an equal opportunity employer.

Women do not have to hire and promote *only* women. And the fact is that any new leader has only limited opportunity to create new positions or to replace incumbents. It takes time to create an optimal management team. Sometimes, too, filling positions with outside candidates may not be an option for corporate-cultural reasons. If the company has not promoted women into positions within a few levels of the top, then the internal candidates will all be male.

The 23 Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs, see http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/09/women-ceos-fortune-500, last updated December 10, 2013, would be interesting to study with regard to the blame question. See number 13 of my PhD ideas. We do not know those companies' Morris Numbers but we can come up with a Morris-style Number that tells us something about the Fortune 500. If we consider the CEOs of the Fortune 500 as part of a single organization and give them their companies' Fortune 500 rankings, the Morris Number is 38: you pass 38 men on the way to finding the fifth highest company with a woman CEO, 43rd ranked Pepsico's CEO Indra K. Nooyi.

Maybe some women who get to the top are as blind as the men around them to the excellence of women. Maybe not. But until those female CEOs have had their titles for several years, and until the top women are at companies that in the past have consistently promoted women into upper management, the presence or absence of women in other important positions does not prove much about whether women help women.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0401; typos fixed 20150223

New Demographic Category: TECMY (Acronyms - 03)

This morning (4/26/13) I attended a session of the FutureLaw conference at Stanford. The conference overall has 26 speakers.  Exactly one of them is female, and she is a third year law student at Stanford.  I can think of several non-student women who would have been excellent choices for FutureLaw speakers, and it's not even my field.

For whom is the Future of Law female-free?

The irony is that four days ago I was a panelist at the Microsoft Diversity in IP Law Summit, also at Stanford. 

1.  "Women and Minorities in IP Law" and TECMYs

In connection with preparing for the Diversity Summit, I thought about that word "Minorities."  I remembered that when I was at Bell Labs in the early 1980s, I heard that Asians were not considered minorities by the Labs when it reported numbers to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  Whether this was true or rumor, it made sense. Bell would not have increased diversity by hiring more Asians:  the fraction of Asians at Bell at all levels was higher than it was in the general population.

It seemed to me that a more productive discussion of diversity in IP Law would be possible if there were a shorthand ethnic category for WHITE or ASIAN.  Maybe it could be called

TEC

Clients for IP law in the Bay Area seem to me to be almost all:  TEC (white or Asian), Male, and Young  -- under 35, say, or maybe by now it's 40. (Sergey Brin, for example, will be 40 this summer.)   I propose calling this subgroup TECMY, pronounced TEK-mee.

TECMY is not the same as that patent law phrase, "having a technical background."  A female with a PhD in Physics (like me, for example), a 60-year old male white electrical engineer,  a male Latino geneticist or a male African-American computer scientist, are all examples of non-TECMYs.


2.  TECMYs and Client Comfort

When I was in law school in the 1970s, partners from fancy law firms would freely say that they didn't hire women because they'd lose clients:  clients like to talk to people who "look like them."

Nowadays (a mere 40-odd years later), the good news for women and minorities with law degrees is that the people who hire fancy law firms -- mostly corporate executives and corporate inside counsel -- are no longer exclusively white males.  But in Silicon Valley, in tech companies, they are pretty much all TECMYs. 

This affects the non-TECMYs both in hiring and in opportunities for advancement.  It also affects decisions whether to stay in IP law beyond that entry-level job or  to change careers.  The effects are due only partly to what the non-TECMY attorneys think or experience themselves.  It is also due to their employers' belief that the clients "are comfortable" only with mirror-image lawyers.


3.  Looking for Excellence

We all know about Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman at HP, and Marissa Mayer formerly at Google now at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. What happens, though, if you look in those companies for the next highest ranking female? How many men do you pass on the way down?  The situation for non-TEC minorities is worse, and much worse for female non-TECs.

I asked the wonderful Stanford Law School research librarians for help, and George Vizvary found me Julianne Pepitone's CNN Money article from March 18, 2013, and its fascinating interactive graphics.  The article is entitled "How Diverse is Silicon Valley?" and the lead image is a map with a dot for Silicon Valley and in big letters the words "Boys' Club."  Pepitone didn't get the idea from me:  it springs to the casual observer.

Too often I have heard from women lawyers that, if they walk into a meeting with a male non-lawyer, the male lawyers in the room talk exclusively to the non-lawyer.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that so many start-ups start up with a group of buddies of college age and even less mature.  They may know, vaguely, that companies are not supposed to discriminate, but if they think about it at all, they think that the law applies to banks and car manufacturers -- stodgy places with closed-minded people -- not to them.  They are hiring for BRAINS, for ability to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, for CREATIVITY.  The fact that every hire looks just the like the previous one is not because they discriminate for any reason of prejudice or other evil, it's just that they find that the people with the right stuff all come from one demographic subgroup:  TECMY.

Maybe, to recall Larry Summers infamous remarks, maybe in certain fields TECMYs on average have more ability than non-TECMYs on average.  (The blogger mathbabe has an excellent post about the Larry Summers' comment, if you need reminding.)  My answer to the Larry Summers' kind of thinking has always been "So what?" Let's assume for the sake of argument that the statement about the averages is true.   It is also utterly irrelevant.  Neither Harvard nor any tech start-up nor any IP law firm nor IP legal department is trying to hire "average.'" They are all looking for excellence.

If you look for excellence only within a demographic subset, you are going to miss out. 
 
The tech community of Silicon Valley, by overwhelmingly favoring TECMY people for its employees, executives and lawyers -- and, today, speakers for conferences in FutureLaw -- is missing out.

It is time for change.

Forty years ago I did not expect that forty years later I would be writing something like this.  Let's hope it doesn't take another forty years before I can say, "Times have changed."

4/26/13

The Oscars Meet Oscar the Grouch - Part 2; Great news about Bigelow, but.

Yes, it's wonderful that Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director.  But.  She worked with a male writer, an all male group of producers and a virtually all male cast. I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, I confess. Maybe the person listed seventh and last on the advertisement cast list, Evangeline Lilly, has a great part - even better than the first 6 put together - but I doubt it.  The roles of the only other female names on the expanded cast list on IMDB are Mortuary Affairs Officer, Nabil's Wife and Soldier (uncredited).  Those don't sound like opportunities for memorable performances, but I could be wrong.
        Women are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Are they totally unimportant and marginalized?   Does the army prohibit women from being in special forces units that deal with IEDs?  Nope: or anyway, not according to this February 2010 report about Christine Ferguson  Hein, a woman in an IED unit who received an award for bravery http://sullivanjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=855&Itemid=38.  Hein explains that the army has to include at least one woman in each unit because Muslim women can't be searched or talked to by men.  If women do serve in IED units, what made Mark Boal leave them out? Maybe it was the same thinking that affected the National Geographic in a possibly apocryphal story I once heard:  The magazine doctored a photograph of a group of kids who'd climbed to the top of a mountain in order to remove the girl.  The reason:  if they showed that a girl could do it, then boys wouldn't think it was a great achievement.
        So, yes it's nice that a woman finally won an Oscar for directing.  But the movie she directed is hardly a testament to the openness of the industry to female participation.

[last rev 9/12/11 - rjm]