Maggie Berry is Managing Director of womenintechnology.co.uk, the online job portal and networking site for women in IT. Read our blog on women, technology and everything in between.
Just a quick entry to let all our readers know that we have moved our blog to our main website. The blog can be found by clicking the following link .
We will continue to share our various musings on women in IT, women achieving in the technology profession, jobs, careers, events, networking – all sorts of stuff connected to our goal which is to increase the number of women working and succeeding in the UK’s IT industry.
We hope you continue to read the blog and comment on our discussions!
Roger Thompson - Chief Research Officer, AVG
We recently blogged about the current hot topic of Facebook privacy rules and included a summary of an article we read by Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer of AVG. Last week, Facebook introduced new privacy controls following complaints about the complexity of the old controls.
We managed to get hold of Roger to discuss his piece in more detail and he kindly shared his top tips on staying safe while socialising via Facebook – all of which are still very relevant even with the new privacy controls:
Have we moved on from this?
Every so often you read something that makes you stop in your tracks, and today I had one of those moments. Times journalist Caitlin Moran started a discussion about sexism on Twitter and encouraged her followers to share their stories. Rather than a few tales from the 1950s, she was bombarded with examples of discrimination and misogyny that were quite shocking. To see the full extent of what people were saying, I did a search for @caitlinmoran to see what everyone was tweeting to her – there were so many tweets I couldn’t keep up with reading them all! And many referred to treatment in the workplace. Here is a selection – brace yourselves!
Apologies there are so many – but I couldn’t imagine anyone getting bored reading those! Really is sobering to think that these opinions still exist isn’t it?
Facebook is a part of everyday life for many of us, but in the last couple of weeks it has hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. Users of the site have expressed their dissatisfaction of the complex privacy controls. In response to this Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg commented “sometimes we move too fast – and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark”. Now we’ve heard the news that they were going to make the controls simpler, starting today.
So what are the issues here with privacy and why has it caused such a stir? In short, users can visit the privacy section of the site and opt in and out of certain things – for example allowing photos you have uploaded to only be seen by your friends or people in your network or restricting the visibility of your contact info. The list goes on and on and quite frankly it is very complex – so much so that there is actually a manual you can download which details all the different options you have!
So Facebook plans to make the issue of privacy much easier for users and one particular issue that we believe needs urgent attention is the use of Facebook’s new social plugins and we came across a shocking piece on this very issue written by Roger Thompson of AVG. The article explains how Roger was surfing the web to catch up on the day’s news when he noticed the site he was on (CNN.COM) had a live feed of his Facebook friends activity! What was odd was Roger was not logged on to either CNN nor had his Facebook account open.
So why was happening? It turns out that hundreds of website are using the social plugins that Facebook introduced at the recent F8 Developers Conference which are designed to show which of your friends are voting ‘like’ on a particular sites news stories – and if you happen to be visiting the same sites it will show your friends new feeds. But how is this happening if you are not logged into the site in question? The social plugins are using Facebook Connect which was designed to be a ‘Single Sign On’ for the web – in other words you log on to Facebook once, and when you visit other sites, it logs you on to the site using the Facebook credentials already provided!
We certainly didn’t know this and were quite amazed that this was actually happening – the message here and what Roger suggests is “If you want to stop this type of behaviour, and thus do not want to see the stories that your friends are interested in as they visit the web, simply click “Log Out” of Facebook. This is something that no one really does. Simply, closing a Facebook tab or window DOES NOT log you out of Facebook. I think the user community needs to be educated specifically on this.”
We agree with Roger and have certainly taken note – what do you think? We’d certainly like to know – let’s hope that Facebook addresses this issues soon!
I recently came across an article in HR magazine claiming that more than a third of women do not think they can meet their career goals while still paying enough attention to their personal lives. We recently blogged about the lack of women on the board of UK firms – are the two connected?
Kenexa Research claims ‘traditionally, women play a larger role in managing their family responsibilities and, therefore, they are likely to feel pressure in trying to balance both work and family demands’. Kenexa carried out a survey of over 1000 employees asking for their views on work-life balance; just over fifty per cent believed their employers supported their efforts to balance both their work life and personal life. Does being successful both in the workplace and at home depend then on the support you get from your employer? Read the rest of this entry »
Back in January we launched a competition in conjunction with the National IT Learning Centre to win a free IT training course worth £3000. Entrants simply had to explain in 100 words why they wanted to win. We had some great entries but whittled them down to a short list of eight. NITLC and womenintechnology.co.uk staff were then shown the short list and asked to vote for our favourite. Centrine from Glasgow was our lucky winner!
Her entry was: “Ever since I can remember, I’ve always loved computers. So much so that my 5 year old daughter knows how to use the basic side of computers as well. I’m proud of myself for instilling technology in her. I’m a single parent wanting so bad to progress career wise and I just genuinely wish that I was given a chance to prove myself. Winning this course will be a door opening for me in IT. It’ll give me a chance to better not only my future but my daughter’s. Thanks in advance.” [sic]
With the internet now a part of our daily lives, it’s more important than ever that we make sure all the information we’re sharing is kept safe, and keeps us safe. This applies not only to us as individuals but on a global scale!
In 2007 the Critical Information Infrastructure of Estonia came under a series of co-ordinated cyber attacks – it showed the world that someone and their computer could bring a country to a standstill. Because of these threats it’s crucial that we develop global standards and responses, and make sure developing countries are ready and able to deal with these threats as well.
The Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) is holding the Cyber Security Forum in London on 17th and 18th June to create awareness of these threats, promote international co-operation and help decision makers be more prepared to deal with the issue.
Womenintechnology is proud to be supporting the event but you could be involved too!
The event will feature a number of international speakers – from IT policy makers to technology companies – who will share their valuable experiences. You could be one of them, and raise the profile of your organisation at the same time.
For more information visit the website http://www.events.cto.int/CyberSecurity2010 or get in touch with us!
There have been a number of articles recently about the lack of women in the boardroom of UK firms – the Guardian said ‘companies have employed armies of equal opportunities officers, diversity managers and HR professionals’ to sort this problem out, yet the ‘number of women on the boards of FTSE 100 has hardly changed’. In fact figures reveal that in 2009 only 12% of FTSE 100 companies had one or more women on their board.
So why is this case? Is it because women often take time off at some stage of their career to bring up their children and when they do return they have missed their opportunity; or that in a male dominated world, women are often overlooked by men on the board who like to recruit in their own image? These may very well be reasons why some women have missed out but how are we going to turn this situation around? Read the rest of this entry »
What better way to kick off a new week than to inform all of our readers that we have been shortlisted in the category of ‘Best Job Board’ at the Recruitment Consultant Awards for 2010. We are very proud to be shortlisted, not least because the competition was among some very big names but also because we have worked very hard to build our network to over 6,000 people over the past five years so to be shortlisted really acknowledges this hard work.
We differentiate ourselves from most job boards in that we don’t just advertise jobs – we offer professional development training courses, networking events, role model profiles, industry news, research white papers. We hope that as this growing and vibrant community for women in IT that we’ll hopefully stand a good chance of success!
Fingers crossed we win the award – we’ll keep you updated!
Here is a post I wrote recently for Computer Weekly’s WITsend blog:
Are women bad networkers?
In my opinion the answer to this question is, of course, no. At womenintechnology we organise lots of networking events which are always very popular. There was a piece in the Times recently entitled ‘why are women such bad networkers?’ that, understandably, grabbed my attention! Its overall message is: women aren’t confident enough to network, men are better at it, women don’t think it’s important and are therefore to an extent ‘invisible’. There is obviously a bit more to it than that though, you can read the whole article here: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7057300.ece.
A few parts of the piece I agree with. Women are not the best at shouting about their talents and achievements in comparison to men, and that is something that we need to improve on in order to get ahead in our careers. However I don’t agree that women are bad networkers; in fact I think women are the ultimate networkers and realise how important it is today.
The article also says “in a business world still dominated by men, networking solely with other women is not much use” – but I don’t think that’s true either. It’s obviously best to network with as many people as possible but networking with women is a great way to gain support, confidence and advice from people who are, or have been, in the same position as you. What do you think?
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