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I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving and Chanukah — and that your overall holiday season is joyous! We are enjoying working with our clients now using Contextual Design 2020 our new and improved techniques which incorporate the implications of The Cool Project including new interviewing techniques, models and design thinking processes. We hope to have another webinar soon to share the latest in our changed processes. Watch for it!
I also wanted to let you know that I’ll be working out of Palo Alto, CA in January through March getting out of the cold and working with clients on the west coast. Now is a great time to set up a time for me to visit you or give a talk if you are in the area.
And I’ll be teaching a course at Stanford on something dear to my heart — women in engineering. Stanford is actively working to increase the number of female CS majors. Silicon Valley and the high tech industry at large are aggressively recruiting engineers. But there’s a well-publicized disconnect — women who enter engineering are not staying in the profession. Why do women stay or leave our industry? There are theories, stories, and some research — but none of them are driven by a data-driven understanding.
I expect to be exploring this topic along with my academic partners and we hope some folks from industry. And I want to engage the next generation in thinking about this problem so I’ll be offering a course to critically look at the lives and challenges of women in technology. Students will read seminal works on men and women in the workplace and explore their own feelings and values. We will also be conducting field interviews of women in the industry under my guidance. Students will work in groups to interpret and organize field data to reveal psychosocial, cultural, and organizational themes that affect women’s choices. Their findings will be shared with selected groups at Stanford.
So if you know anyone there let them know about the course:
CS 78: Understanding Women’s Experience in High-Tech Companies
Click here for more information.
And of course if your company is interested in understanding what we hope to get out of a deep dive study on women’s experience in engineering companies – contact me!
Best to all,
-K |
