1. How did you decide to pursue a career in technology?
I was always a good student, and I knew that I wanted to pursue a university education. However, I did not choose technology very early. Up until my high-school years, I was seriously considering medical school and law along with engineering as potential career choices: medicine appealed to me for its social value, and I was attracted to law because I am terribly intrigued by the interplay between the logical structure of arguments and the language in which they are delivered, and the way words can illustrate facts and motivate actions!
However, as I started high school, a new highly selective department of “Computer Engineering and Informatics” was established in Greece, and, very soon, I decided that this was my future career because it was clear to me that the impact of this field to all aspects of human activity was going to be huge. At that point in time, computer engineering seemed like the most open-ended choice for my future professional life. In some sense, choosing computers allowed me to delay committing to a single field, and today I can bring my expertise and knowledge to bear in a variety of fields, working with colleagues from business, health and education.
2. Based on your own experience, what skill(s) or characteristic(s) do you think are most important for technical women to succeed?
In addition to the knowledge and skills required by their profession, I think that women in technical fields should have a bit of thick skin, to not be impacted by how different they may look in meetings, to ignore comments (sometimes intentional and sometimes accidental) about their not belonging, and to (gently) interrupt to take their turn in discussions.
3. What was the greatest challenge that you overcame in your career?
I had to change areas of research because I was hired into a software-engineering position when my area of PhD research was artificial intelligence, with software as a secondary area. When I joined my department as an Assistant Professor, I lacked substantial background in software engineering, and I had a three-month-old daughter. Sleep was at a premium, both because of the baby and because I had so much catch-up study to do. There were times when failure seemed a very likely future: failure to be an effective teacher in software-engineering subjects, or failure to actually contribute research results in my new area, or failure to raise a healthy child while trying to catch up with my profession. Then at some point, I just realized that there were valid problems in the intersection of my old area and my new area, and I decided that my old background, in addition to being a shortcoming, could also be an advantage because it gave me a unique perspective in my newly adopted area. So I decided to call my “bug” a “feature,” and I decided that I could make a go of it.
4. How do you manage work/life balance?
I have answered this question many times, and the more I think about it the more I realize that the way I plow through my day is by not keeping tabs of whether I am maintaining a balance. I find myself squeezing use out of pretty much every moment of the day: I catch up with emails as I prepare breakfast and dinner. I help my 6-year old son with his homework as I am preparing for next-day’s class. I am driving to extra-curricular activities and carry my laptop to read and edit papers. On the other hand, as a family, we take a vacation every summer, for about a month and a half, to our native Greece to spend time with our family there. This is a quite long vacation, which would not have been possible in a “normal” job, but we have always Internet access and I keep in touch with students and colleagues, on a regular, although less frequent than normal, basis. I do not think I have ever managed to keep my life and work separated for long periods. Sometimes, I realize that one might view this type of balance as my work “tainting” my life (which is the way my mother sees it:-). I prefer to see it as the opportunity to flexibly schedule my work, in small installments, around my life. In the end, with two children and a demanding job, I do not have much time for hobbies, with the exception of movies (usually on DVD) and literature. But there will be time later, I am sure. For now I get to have it all, and no more:-)
5. What advice would you give to technical women who want to consider an academic career?
Academia is an amazing, extremely privileged place! You get to be your own boss, you get to make your own research agenda guided by your own curiosity, (to some extent) you get to choose what course to teach, and you choose your team with colleagues and students! This freedom is rare in a work environment, and it is exhilarating!
On the other hand, academia is a highly competitive and frequently intimidating place: our job description can be summed up (in a oversimplified but not erroneous manner) as “producing knowledge,” and our failures (i.e., paper rejections and failed project proposals) can be very easily attributed to a lack of sufficient intellectual prowess; and this is very personal and deeply daunting interpretation. Such sense of failure can debilitate you for quite some time. So, you need to develop coping mechanisms to deal with failure and use it to propel you to new efforts instead of bringing you down.
Finally, for me the best aspect of my job as an academic is the opportunity to work with students. They are bright, ambitious, excited and hopeful! They are full of ideas, some viable, many not! This closeness to (mostly) young people, committed to learning and growth, is an antidote to the cynicism that I see plaguing many mid-career people, even successful ones. I have been immensely lucky with, and thankful for, my students and, if you are considering academia as a career I just wish you the same!
6. How do you stay current in your technical field?
I read at three levels of “detail.” First, I am a social-network aficionado, and through my Facebook and Twitter feeds I get a lot of information pointers to a variety of areas of my interest, including computer-science, business, and social science topics. I think that through these channels I keep myself current and aware, albeit at a superficial level, of new research results, technology trends, and policy initiatives. Second, I read a lot “by proxy,” by discussing with my students the papers they read for their background. I am not afraid to ask simple, naive questions, and this helps me build my knowledge in their specialized areas of work. Finally, I read in depth those papers and books that rise from the above two types of exposure as most interesting.
7. In your opinion, what (if any) are the remaining barriers faced by women in technology?
I recently saw Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk, and her point (and I am oversimplifying but not fundamentally distorting her point here) that “successful women are not likable” made a strong impression to me, and it certainly rings true. And I think that the problem is more general than “women leaders are not likable”; it is more that “women in non-female positions are not likable!” The crux of it, in my mind, is that society expects women to be in “nurturing” or “sexy” or “ethereal muse” roles and appreciates and validates them when they succeed in such roles. This view (sort of) explains why natural sciences, in general, do not suffer as much from lack of women as computer science: women mathematicians or physicists or chemists pursue an “understanding” task; computer science, a discipline close to engineering, involves the “construction” of things and is much more nitty-gritty than natural sciences; as a result computer science, like engineering, “repulses” women much more: girls do not take computing science courses in high school and do not pursue the subject in university, and women who actually enter the field drop out.
All human beings need to be fulfilled at a personal level, and work is a means to this end; when success at work causes alienation at a personal level, work ends up being counterproductive as a means of personal fulfillment. Essentially, isolation and lack of peers in the work place, in spite of the profession’s intellectual rewards, may cause this career not worth its cost. If our society ever learns to value contribution in a gender-neutral way, women will find computing careers more rewarding personally and will be less likely to drop out; and men will be able to equally contribute to parenting without fear that they will be seeing as irresponsible and failed providers. All in all, a win-win future for all of us.
Eleni Stroulia is a Professor and NSERC/iCORE (w/support from IBM) Industrial Research Chair on ‘Service Systems Management’ with the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
She holds a B.Sc. degree from the University of Patras, Greece and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research addresses industrially relevant software-engineering problems with automated methods, based on artificial-intelligence techniques. Her team developed a semi-automated method for migrating legacy interfaces to web-based front ends, by reengineering the interaction between the mainframe server and the user terminal. Working on design-evolution analysis, her team developed a suite of methods for recognizing interesting trends and events in the software evolution history and for supporting the migration of software applications to newer versions of their underlying libraries. More recently, she has been working on the development, composition, run-time monitoring and adaptation of service-oriented applications, and on examining the role of web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds in offering innovative services in a variety of areas, including business, health care and education.
She has been a strong advocate for women in computer science. Between 2005 and 2009, she was the Outreach Program Director of her department; in this capacity, she helped organize summer camps for students in Grades 6-12. During the same time, she served on the Advisory Board of WISEST (Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology), a University of Alberta organization, and helped coordinate the delivery of CS lessons at conferences organized by WISEST.
She was the general chair of ICSM 2009, the program co-chair for the Canadian AI in 2001, WCRE in 2003 and 2004, CASCON 2006 and 2011 and ICPC 2007 and has served in numerous conference program committees. She served on the NSERC Discovery Grant adjudication committee 330 (2006-2008) and on the RTI committee in 2011 and is currently on the board of the Computational Intelligence Journal.