Models for Innovation Bring Women to the Table

By Anita Borg

CRA Board member Anita Borg founded the Institute for Women and Technology in December 1997 with the support of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Since then it has become established as an independent non-profit corporation, added Sun Microsystems to its list of corporate partners, and moved forward with its programs. The Institute's mission is to increase the impact of women on technology and to increase the positive impact of technology on the world's women. Eventually, as an R&D center, it will work with industry, academia, government, and communities around the world to involve women in defining and implementing future technology, and to develop technologies that incorporate women's genius, interests, situations, and needs. The Institute will be both a lab and a networked collection of projects that develop processes and products. We are not seeking to build a new "female computer science" or to create a niche subset of the field, but to expand and enrich the way we all think about what we do and for whom we do it. Our work is based on the fact that most organizations that have an impact on information technology remain culturally narrow and predominantly male, and often embody the attitude that elite technologists are the only people who have ideas for great new technologies.

Five Project Areas

Exploration and Innovation Events bring together technology experts, business people, potential users, community members, students, and social scientists. As a group, they explore and identify needs and new perspectives, and produce design outlines for key innovative and useful technologies. The first events are small workshops for women that generate ideas grounded in the social, political, economic, and personal contexts of the participants.

Development Projects are based to a large degree on workshop output. Virtual development centers maintain the momentum created during workshops by providing longer-term connections among workshop participants. In-person and Internet-based collaboration will develop concrete proposals, design solutions, and prototypes. These provide a foundation for development projects in industry and advanced research projects in academia. Consortia with the Institute and industrial partners will take high-potential ideas to market.

Studies, Research, and Information Collection Projects explore both technical and social science issues related to women and technology and will disseminate collected information widely.

Outreach Projects include support for educational efforts reaching into the schools and to the general public, as well as broad-based connections in Internet technology communities. The Institute currently host the 2,500-member Systers community, providing a connection with technical women in the computing field in twenty-five countries at over 100 companies and 100 universities.

Conferences include the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, for which the Institute is now the new home. The conference drew international participation in 1994 and 1997, and was started with significant help from CRA. It is the only technical conference highlighting women's ongoing contributions to the computing field. GHC2000 will be held September 14-16, 2000 in Hyannis, MA on Cape Cod.

Exploration and Innovation

The initial exploration and innovation events are small workshops in which women explore needs and perspectives and identify candidate technologies for development. Often the majority of workshop participants will be non-technical. It may be easier to see "outside the box" if one is not "in the box." While each workshop's participants come from the same geographical area, we will maximize diversity in many other dimensions. Eventually we intend to move beyond all-female workshops. Unlike traditional focus groups, workshops are based on the premise that every person comes to the event as an expert, regardless of her background. The value that each person brings to the workshop is her own experience and perspective. Status hierarchies are avoided by deferring introductions until late in the workshop.

The Institute will develop model workshops covering a variety of topics and distribute materials encouraging their widespread replication. Institute staff will assemble, analyze, and report on the overall results.

Technical Ideas from Real Life

The first workshop series this winter included events at the University of Washington, Xerox PARC, and Santa Clara University. The topic for the series, Technology in Support of Families, was developed in reaction to projects in academia and industry about "technology for the home" that include little or no female participation. The Institute's workshops focus on technology that is useful to the people who inhabit a home and more broadly, whole families.

The workshop results exceeded our expectations. We were delighted by the range of ideas generated and the extraordinary way that these women, particularly the non-technical women, were able to think "outside the boxes" that the rest of us sit in. In a short nine hours, we progressed from a wide-ranging discussion of the future of families to a small number of fleshed-out, concrete ideas that the attendees agreed should be pursued. The ideas were both wonderful and rich. Even when they were not new, they were grounded in real experience and reflected potential markets, and usually required considerable research work to bring them to affordable reality.

A full report on the results of the series will be available on our webpage in the late spring. Here are a few ideas in brief:

The Wall: a real time wall-sized view into another room or another place, allowing distant family members to virtually connect their living spaces.

Universal Flea Market: a system to help address the wastefulness in our society; connecting people who have things that they no longer need or are not currently using with people who have a need or desire for them.

Family Scheduling and Coordination: a central family scheduler integrated with mobile personal devices; integrates everything from kid's class schedules to car maintenance timetables to mammogram reminders with a simple voice interface.

Integrated Family Medical System: monitors individual physical state and drug doses, and accesses medical history and emergency information.

Integrated Home Inventory System: sensor/scanner-based inventory with voice interfaces and security, as well as selective, automated resupply. Additional ideas included a 3-D learning environment; an electronic book for students; a reconfigurable house; smart plumbing to indicate leaks, freezes, and clogs; smart laundry equipment that reads clothing labels.

What's Next?

We are designing other workshops as well as mechanisms to flesh out the most promising ideas. We are seeking more corporate and foundation partnerships that may result in concrete development projects at the Institute or in partnerships or consortia.

Workshop topics for the coming year include:

• eeping Track of Women's Lives. This workshop will look at the full range of technologies for managing one's time, and will specifically explore the future of the personal digital assistant.
• CIOs Perspectives on Enterprise Computing. Female CIOs will determine what changes and innovations they want to see in future systems.
• Politics and Technology. Together with the Kennedy School at Harvard, we are planning events that bring female politicians and candidates together with technologists to combine and share their expertise and develop visions and policies for the future.

  In Conclusion

  The ideas generated in our initial workshops represent technologies that could have a positive impact on women's lives. The workshops also impact on the participants. Exit surveys indicate that the non-technical participants see technology differently - in particular, as something in which they might participate more actively than they had ever imagined. The technologists saw a new way of connecting the work they do to real human needs. Both were encouraging outcomes. The possibility of change in the long-term is still to be determined, and will depend on both our own follow-up activities and on the willingness of the broad computing community to consider new ways to think "outside the box."

  Anita Borg is the President of the Institute for Women and Technology and a member of the research staff in the Office of the Chief Technologist at Xerox PARC. She can be reached at aborg@parc.xerox.com or see www.parc.xerox.com/iwt.org.