2012 Ada Lovelace Day: two Italian scientists

We honor Ada Lovelace this year by celebrating Ada Lovelace Day on October 16. Here are my two picks among women engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians.

Fabiola Gianotti is a particle physicist, Spokesperson (i.e., coordinator) for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which consists of 3000 scientists from 38 countries and is considered the world’s biggest scientific experiment. On July 4, 2012, Gianotti announced that ATLAS had detected a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson predicted by the Standard Model of physics.

Fabiola Gianotti holds a Ph.D. in experimental sub-nuclear physics from the Università Statale in Milan, Italy. A trained pianist, she also holds a professional music diploma from the Milan Conservatory.

(My notes from my recent visit at CERN – in Italian – are here; this video about the LHC is in English).

Carlotta Guiducci is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she heads the Laboratory of Life Sciences Electronics.

Her laboratory team focuses on the design and application of electronic biosensors and are at the forefront of electronic engineering and bioengineering. The sensors address a wide range of applications, from nucleic acid, protein and drug detection to the measurements of bacterial metabolism. Carlotta holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bologna.

Is there a woman in science, technology, engineering or maths whose achievements you admire? Write about her and add your story to the directory at FindingAda.com.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

The extraordinarily important nugget you missed in Anne Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic piece about gender equality and careers

Talk about work-life balance: it is only today, several days after its publication, that I’ve had the time to read Anne Marie Slaughter’s cover story in the July 2012 issue of The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (which, as of today, has been recommended on Facebook approximately 178,000 times), as well as her first response to the storm of comments that flooded in as soon as readers saw it, “The ‘Having It All’ Debate Convinced Me To Stop Saying ‘Having It All’”. (Suggested alternative tags: #StumblingTowardParity,‬ #PushingForBetter,‬ #StillWorkingOnIt,‬ #GuysThisIsYourProblemToo,‬ #DemandingMoreForMoreOfUs,‬ #Feminism).

What an extraordinary woman! What a privilege to have had such role models as Hillary Clinton. And what courage in rocking a boat that many of our predecessors couldn’t rock, and many younger women – as she points out – seem to be giving up on rocking.

And here’s what’s been missing from the debate: the full implications of this paragraph in Slaughter’s essay (emphasis added).

The best hope for improving the lot of all women [...] is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

The issue is: how do we get to parity at the top in politics, in business, and in judicial ranks? Well, the standard American answer is: you vote for women and elect them, for elected posts; you promote a meritocracy in business; You change the culture in the workplace; you ask women to keep spinning their wheels, in the meantime, until they get traction.

And that’s why it doesn’t work. Many talented women decline to seek political office, or “leave before they leave” (in Sheryl Sandberg’s words) in the corporate world, because they feel that, even if they gain that extra ounce of power, the odds will be even more ruthlessly stacked against them. The rate of progress is just too slow. Or negative. Take a couple of data points:

• In 1998, Catalyst projected in their their Census of Women Board Directors that, at the then-current rate of change, it would take 66 years, until 2064, for women to reach parity with men in the ranks of Fortune 500 boards.
• In 2007, Catalyst projected that, at the then-current rate of change, it would take 73 years for women to reach parity with men in the ranks of Fortune 500 boards.

I believe that, in publishing more recent editions of the study, they’ve quit publishing any such extrapolations. For good reason, it seems.

When all else has failed, why have we kept trying the same recipes? Even Slaughter’s recommendations – no matter how lucid her analysis – see to me to fall short. Changing the culture of “face time”; redefining the arc of a successful career; rediscovering the pursuit of happiness; using technology and creativity; enlisting men – all are worthwhile efforts, and I praise her for spelling them out once again. But they’re not enough. We need to change the rules.

Let’s mandate gender parity in the candidate pool for elections. Let’s start linking campaign finance ceilings to the number of women a party gets elected: the more you achieve gender parity in the posts you win, the more funds you can raise. And let’s not forget – let’s mandate gender equality in corporate boards: how else do you think the Norwegians got to 40%? Similar measures have been passed, although at a much slower pace, to promote women’s board membership in Spain and Italy. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, after a consultation on the topic, is said to be planning to introduce a draft directive this October mandating at least a 40% board participation by each gender.

Slaughter’s essay shows the need for a bold stand, but refrains from taking it. It is time for us, in America and elsewhere, to acknowledge that we need to put in place the right rules. As in the variously-attributed quote, insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Let’s try something different: the worst that can happen is that it will be a different sort of mistake. And it’s well worth trying: if we succeed, we will have created a better world for our daughters.

Fiat 500 Abarth, or On Stereotypes in Advertising

Just hearing the Fiat Superbowl commercial on the radio as I was driving home today made me think: is this straight out of the Mad Men era? Wasn’t it a trite cliché years ago to personify a desirable car in the image of a desirable woman? And all that copy about ogling, undressing, owning? Do women not buy cars, in the world as Fiat sees it? Do women not buy small cars, for heavens’ sake?

Then I watched it on YouTube and I was further dismayed. Feel free to tell me that I have no sense of humor, but it is not clever if you make white latte foam trickle down between the woman’s breasts; it is sophomoric. There must be other ways to get a young single male target segment to take an interest in a zippy car with a shift stick. I hope. I do hope.

Next Generation Women Leaders: Paris, March 22-24, 2012

Is your sister, cousin, daughter, niece or friend a university student or young graduate with less than three years’ work experience? Then suggest that she apply to Next Generation Women Leaders, a fabulous workshop by McKinsey in Paris, March 22-24. The deadline for applications is February 17.

My friend Eva Berneke is one of the speakers at the event (see program) and I am confident it will be a great way for young women to develop their leadership profile. Because the earlier you start thinking of yourself as a leader, the earlier you actually become one.

Junot Diaz on writing, on luck and on women

I tore off a page from the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine when I was in transit in Hong Kong, because it carried an interview with Junot Diaz, the author of one of the best novels ever written about the long shadows of dictatorship, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

On writing:

When I was 26, I published one story in one magazine which was seen by one agent, and I hit the literary jackpot. [...] When I sold my first book [the short story collection Drown], in 1995, I was working at a job making photocopies and living in an unheated apartment in Brooklyn. I quit my job right there. I just walked out. [...] My novel took 11 years to write and it was hell. There are people who come under hardship and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I came under hardship and decided to make my life, and those of the people around me, harder. [...] Basically, I bit off a story that required me to become a different person to finish it. The guy who conceived of Oscar Wao is not the guy who would have been capable of finishing it.

On luck:

I look at my childhood and nothing proves to me more the utter randomness and arbitrariness of what we call success. I hear that word and in my mind I flash to every single person who was better than me and who, through a complete accident, wasn’t served what I was served. I’m here because of an incredible amount of luck. You’ve got to work hard and you have to turn everything you’ve experienced into some kind of vision, but none of that is enough. 

On women:

I would never have been a writer if I hadn’t gone to college and met feminists. The feminist project is absolutely essential to writing good literature. A large part of the planet is encouraged to view women as partial human beings. You can always tell a good writer because, whether they’re male or female, they effortfully resist that idea. 

The Illusionists: Help fund it on Kickstarter

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a young filmmaker I had started following on Twitter months ago. Her name is Elena Rossini and she lives in Paris. We talked extensively about her feature-length documentary project, The Illusionists. I’ll let her explain it in her own words:

As you may know, in late June I’ve launched an ambitious fundraising campaign for my feature-length documentary The Illusionists, which I wrote and I am co-producing and directing.

Here is the synopsis of the film:

THE ILLUSIONISTS is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world. The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising, and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.

The Illusionists’ Kickstarter page has a video teaser and a longer explanation of the project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (its themes, style, and my motivations for making the film).

There are amazing experts already lined up for the interviews, including author & filmmaker Jean Kilbourne (best known for her iconic film series “Killing Us Softly”), psychotherapist Susie Orbach (best known for her books “Fat is a Feminist Issue” and “Bodies”) and Jenn Pozner (author of “Reality Bites Back”; she was recently featured in the New Yorker and on NPR). I’m also hoping to interview Umberto Eco, Gloria Steinem, Oliviero Toscani and Maurice Levy of Publicis, amongst others. 

Thanks to the incredible generosity of friends, friends-of-friends, Twitter and Facebook followers, the fundraising campaign has already achieved some amazing milestones. 12 days in, I’ve reached 43% of the total funding goal, with over 110 backers and more than 1,100 Facebook “likes” of my Kickstarter page. In short, I’m on cloud nine. But the road ahead is still long… if I don’t reach 100% of the funding goal by August 5th, I will lose all the pledges made so far.

On Kickstarter, I am offering “regular people” pre-sales of the film and various other gifts as rewards for donations:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (the column on the right). I’m also developing a special package for sponsors whose mission is aligned with the message of the film that would offer exposure on the site, in all press material, and in the end credits of the film.

If this is something that resonates with you, go to Kickstarter.com and fund it. I just did.

Ada Lovelace, The Ur-Girl Geek

There’s a reason why Ada Lovelace, famous for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and sometimes credited with the first description of a machine algorithm, is the Ur-Girl Geek. It is because she was conscious of the power of her intellect, and not afraid to wield it.

In his recent The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick quotes from her writings: to me, it is her self-awareness, her self-confidence, that stand out today:

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality.

Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I haven’t sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do. 

No one knows what almost awful energy and power lies yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mine. I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under different circumstances…

[To Charles Babbage:] I do not think you possess half my forethought, & power of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike). – I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.

She died in 1852, at the age of 36, “a protracted, torturous death from cancer of the womb, her agony barely lessened by laudanum and cannabis.”

We celebrate the 2011 Ada Lovelace Day on October 7.

Meet Francesco Marini Clarelli, European Business Angel of the Year

There are business angels in Europe: they are less visible than the Silicon Valley super-angels, but they do invest in early-stage enterprises, they work to make the business environment more open to entrepreneurs, and they believe in the power of entrepreneurship to add dynamism to our tired economies.

On May 12 Francesco Marini Clarelli, an Italian, was honored as Business Angel of the Year by EBAN, the European Association of business angels, seed funds, and other early stage market players. As an angels’ lobby, EBAN has committed to a few notable efforts, such as producing the white paper on Women and European Early Investing and launching a range of initiatives to support women and early stage investing. Italian Angels for Growth, the network that Francesco founded a few years ago in Milan, has been selected by EBAN as a pilot organization in its effort to bring women from 5% to 20% of early stage investors in Europe by 2015.

I have known Francesco for a few years, not just in my role as a mini-angel and member of Italian Angels for Growth, but also as a family friend. He prefers to keep out of the limelight. But in wine connoisseurs’ circles, he is best known for returning to Christie’s a bottle of 1784 Château d’Yquem, which they had mistakenly shipped to Francesco, instead of the 1904 he had bought: still a fantastic vintage, but not as phenomenally rare as the 1784, which may or may not have been a legendary “Jefferson bottle“.

Congratulations, Francesco! I hear you opened the 1904 with some friends a few years ago, but I am sure your cellar offered a choice of other worthwhile bottles to celebrate the EBAN award in style.

The market always wins

For a long time, and until not so long ago, it used to be that what counted was how much you were worth on the marriage market.

Then, briefly, it was about how much you were worth on the job market.

But now, now it’s just about how much you’re worth on the meat market.

(Photos: ANSA)

War rapes: an international overview

Two years ago I wrote about one war, in Sudan, where ICC prosecutors found that rape was being massively used as a weapon by government troops against insurgents. This week, the Economist brings us a war-rapes-in-review piece that in itself is worth the yearly subscription. A few snippets from the story, which I suggest you read in full:

• In the Rwandan genocide rape was “the rule and its absence the exception”, in the words of the UN. [...] Out of Rwanda’s horror came the first legal verdict that acknowledged rape as part of a genocidal campaign.
• [...] with the Bosnian war of the 1990s came the widespread recognition that rape has been used systematically as a weapon of war and that it must be punished as an egregious crime [...] Rape was first properly recognised as a weapon of war after the conflict in Bosnia. [...] the Balkan war-crimes court broke new ground by issuing verdicts treating rape as a crime against humanity.