Gender, strategy and shades of grey

A week post-TNC and my life is wall-to-wall deadlines between now and end July. I suspect most updates to this blog will be done in airports or on quiet Saturday mornings like this, while I wait for my chickpeas to cook for the neighbourhood potluck and wonder if cultural sensitivities mean I should label it "Vorsicht, Scharf!" because of the amount of harissa I will use.

One panel item I was looking forward to at TNC was The Future of NRENs. This was in the sense of intrigued to see what way it would go as the choice of panelists had interesting subconscious implications for those of us who have been around for 10-15 years in the community. Out of the panel, only one member, a co-chair who seemed to be a last minute addition and who barely contributed, was female. Most have been key people for the previous 20 years. With the exception of regular panelist, most have earned a nice retirement well before the next 20 is up. Nonetheless, some of the panelists managed to creditably make the case that age and gender are in a way, a state of mind. I'll save the issues around age for another post as the age part is a big red herring really and concentrate on gender, in which there were two points made:

1. NRENs should act in a less masculine way.
2. There should be more women working at NRENs.

Let's look at point 2 first. When I sit down at project management team meetings, I see that over 50% of the technical/service activity parts are managed and run by women, including the biggest and most central parts. There is a similar proportion in the (human) networking and administration parts.  I work with more women now than I have done since any job except a college-stopgap waitressing stint. When it comes to the actual meetings it would be fair to say our contributions are dominant in discussion and *especially* in discussion which has a whole-project or whole-community implication. When I go to operator meetings, for the last decade women have been in key places all over Europe as operations leads, especially in southern Europe which does not traditionally have the greatest reputation for equality.   Yet when challenged on the gender makeup of the community, it did not occur to *any* of the panelists to cite either case. Is the picture ideal? No. But it is better than they thought it was because they very simply did not appear to think. [Digression - in the last decade one of these meeting groups visited an unnamed eastern european NREN. At the meal, a senior manager in said NREN commented something about all the pretty women and how they should get some too - cue massive eye rolling].

A second experiment was to see how many people in the audience were female AND under 40 AND in some kind of management role. This got embarrassing. Firstly, women in management roles who were in the audience didn't put or keep their hands up because they didn't see what they were doing as really management (I'll come back to this in another post as it is more about overall career development than gender) and secondly, most of the women I mentioned earlier don't get sent to this conference as they're too busy keeping things working to go somewhere for a week to talk. Overall though, getting more women into NRENs will be a tough challenge. NRENs are an obscure subset of an obscure specialisation (networking) of an obscure and not very well pitched field (IT/physics/CS). However, it would be helpful to remember the ones you've got and not be patronising about it:)

Point 1 is in some ways the more interesting question. And a few assumptions need clearing out of the way first. You don't automatically get a less aggressive, group hug, happy community orientated caring sharing setup simply by adding more women. You don't manage to leave the politics at the door simply by being feminine in your approach. Look at a school playground - the groups of boys might merely decide to leave you bleeding; the girls will try to tear out your soul and then work out a way to make it look as if it was your fault. To be female is to embody politics really. But not a pointless, shouty kind where you repeat ad nauseam your pet theory, rather a subtle and altogether more dangerous variant. IMO, both kinds need to be left at the door.

One of the major culture shocks for me in university came from studying literary criticism. I arrived fresh from the Irish Leaving Certificate, an examination set up such that it leaves you utterly unprepared for anything but black and white interpretation and landed with a splash into more -isms than I could ever have thought the world contained, one of which was feminism. Not the 'give votes and equal rights and equal pay' parts that I was familiar with but something which said that to be female is basically to be forever oppressed at every level, including my the very language you speak. Some advocated  a separate 'female' language, free from patriarchy. To treat this as anything other than an intellectual exercise sets off every single WTF alarm my brain possesses. To me, the big wall around us all that encompasses us as humanity is and always will be more important than the smaller, somewhat dissolvable ones we build ourselves within it. A dominant feminine world would be as broken as a dominant masculine.

Another assumption - what the hell is masculine and feminine anyway? Every so often you'll come across a popular science article in a paper that says things like women are attracted to pink because they collected berries etc. When reading these, I always advise to read something else in that publication that is closer to your field, and count the number of times you want to bang your head on the desk in frustration as the writer has simplified to the point of obfuscation and then totally missed what the study was trying to show. Then, with that in mind, read the article that is *not* in your field and treat it accordingly. I'll now pretend to be a pseudo-scientist with some slackly researched stereotypical gender theory to NREN strategy.

Feminine traits we should want - community orientation, teamworking, collaboration, not being afraid to admit mistakes, wrong directions.
Masculine traits we should want - goal focus, aggressive drive, decisiveness.
The desirable feminine traits should come up front, at the definition of strategic direction, plan and project setting times. This increases the likelihood that we will identify and do the right things, and can back out if we get it wrong before it is too late. The desirable masculine traits should be as we are doing it, so that all our energies are focussed on actually achieving something and not having to have a little bikeshed debate for every single minor matter.

In synopsis - it will be perfectly ok to brag about 100G if we've made sure to know up front that 100G is the right thing for our purpose and therefore what we're really bragging about is being relevant, not being fast.

Truth, Power and Influence

The day 2 plenary at TNC opened with a light on detail, heavy on rhetoric view of future networking from a guy from Juniper. In a way it is the perfect plenary - rousing, stirring "controversial" but not really and very low on detail. While listening, I was browsing the social media and when the speaker made a comment about Apple supporting an open development framework there was an utterly predictable stream of smug outrage.

So, it is utterly true that Apple is not open. But observing usage, it seems that for quite a lot of people, that simply doesn't matter. Sitting back and snarking at someone who doesn't agree and not looking at the implications of this is not useful. Simply by being someone who would set foot at this conference, we are already sensitised to the issue of openness in a way that most people simply are not, and will never be because the impact to them is just not observable by them in time. I fear that openness is simply not persuasive for a lot of key groups.

Imagine you are in a position where you have to influence your lawyers, business strategists and CFOs. They want to do X. Conversation goes like this:

You - "But it is not open!"
Them - "So what"
You - "......."

What goes there to persuade the disbelievers and the apathetic?

Park your egos at the door

We have a job to do.

The opening plenary at TNC2011 was something I can't get enough of hearing - an actual scientist doing actual groundbreaking work that both a)expands the boundary of human knowledge and b)can stop people needlessly dying (commercial conspiracy theories notwithstanding).

Making sure people like him can do their job is *our* job.

Our industry is celebrating a rolling series of 25th birthdays. Back when NRENs started, we effectively were scientists, primarily physicists and mathematicians. Our networks and services grew out of solving particular problems. Over time, they have become useful for other needs that really would not have been predicted and increasingly our users take them in directions we have no control over. This last is GREAT.

 In the context of this history, although I have been working for NRENs since 2000ish, I'm a newbie and an anomaly. Although I deeply care about the advancement of science for humanity, I am no kind of scientist. However, I don't think I should be. The scientists can do the science, the humanities researchers can do their analysis. I however am in the unique and privileged position of being able to make sure that can happen. But only if we do it right.

Actually being physicists etc. in the early days gave us an edge - an insight into what the user really needs, because we were the user. Well, those needs have evolved in the last 2-point-mumble decades and so have the technologies and business methods needed to serve them. I believe that in order to meet them now, it will be a *disadvantage* if we don't look across discliplinary boundaries and learn the value of specialisation. It will be a long, cold death if we dare to think "we are the user, we know what the user wants". In the latter case we run the risk of misdirected service. In the former, we may compromise our ability to deliver.

So, am I proposing a Brave New Future, full of programmers, MBAs and fully industry certified specialists? Of course not - that would leave us no different to anything else. We need to find a way to translate that early edge to current reality. And that means.....scientists. We need scientists on our side so that we provide empathy, sensitivity to requirements and the ability to interpret them such that it is not just us taking our favourite technology fetish, putting a ribbon on it and calling it a service. To actually follow what are the implications of the *science* on the network and higher layer services and adapt our engineering to that.  Scientific fact will not rearrange itself for our engineering convenience.

So remember, we exist for them. Not the other way around.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of writing this during session 2A, instead of paying proper attention.

A Social Media Thingy!

Ooh, look! A blog!

What, seriously?*

Yes, seriously. A blog. Covering things core and peripheral to my working life but not necessarily the official line or my actual responsibilities. Every so often, there may be gratuitous pictures of cats.

Uh, that's nice. But who are you anyway and why is your job at all interesting?

I work for SWITCH, the Swiss NREN (National Research and Education Network) and I'm full-time Activity Leader (a bit like being a project manager, but not) in an international collaborative project called GÉANT (aka GN3, this being the 3rd iteration). This is a fascinating, rollercoaster ride of a job that really fits my social and ethical outlook on the world, gives me the chance to meet some excellent and talented people and has a diverse range of technologies and services. It also holds some very tough challenges and that is at least one of the main reasons I do it.

And you think with all this, you'll have time to blog?

This blog is starting in the downtime before the main community conference of the year, TNC. A few paragraphs here and there to trigger interest, discussion and comment from my friends and colleagues inside and outside the community is worth it.


* As I don't have an audience yet, I'm talking to myself. Do not be alarmed - this is quite common.