Blouse Magazine

TECHNOLOGY
What did you work on together?
I worked on one of Peter’s projects, a very cool magazine called The Box,
all of the album and tour promotion, merchandise, advertising, assisting
with videos; we put his entire fan club online. We were some of the first
people I think to be doing online interaction, and this was in the days
before internet browsers.
The next logical step was to do all of the design work in-house, so we
formed a department with a really talented group of young designers
that took over the work for all of Peter’s and the Real World Records
artist’s album sleeves. Peter had artists coming through the studio all the
time who needed record sleeves and needed design. It was lots of fun.
You mentioned your move to the countryside to raise your girls and
focus on being a mother. Did that decision make it difficult to keep
working and keep up with the fast pace of technology?
It wasn’t just about being a woman or a mother; having a career in technology
whether you’re a woman or a man – there’s so much you need to
do to keep up, even if it’s just in your particular area of technoculture. In
the beginning, we were on the edge; we were a part of creating the revolution
in information, communication, and entertainment technologies.
Things were happening fast, and they are now moving and accelerating
all the time and the stuff that I don’t know about my field is now much,
much larger than the stuff that I do know. But it’s okay, because I don’t
think you have to know everything about everything to understand your
field and to make an impact in it.
I think it’s really important for women to work. It was important for me
that I work to set an example for my own daughters and for me to know
enough about technology to be current – in fact, creating currency – and
to teach them; I really wanted my daughters to feel comfortable with
technology and to enjoy it. I bought them drawing programs for the computer
when they were little, they played with my computer, learned how
to be technologically creative with software like Kid Pix and they loved
video games like the Sims.
It’s one of my regrets that I probably didn’t get to spend enough time
with the girls when they were little. But when you work in technology,
when you work in music, when you work in design – you are inevitably
clocking late nights. You sometimes work all through the night and I still
occasionally do that if I’ve got a deadline. You just have to keep going.
It all worked out and now both my daughters work in technology so they
appreciate what it means to have to work to those crazy deadlines.
What do your daughters do?
Like me, they’re both musical as well as artistic. Neither of them had a
head for math or science and like me they found their way into technological
fields through the arts and through writing, research and designing.
It’s worked out really well for both of them.
My elder daughter has got this fantastic job as the lead mobile designer
for Net-A-Porter, the largest online fashion retailer in the world. She’s
designing new more personal and social ways to interact with style and
fashion and editorial content; it’s kind of a dream come true job. She
knows so much more about designing for mobile than I do now and
she has learned really fast, even though I remember a couple of years
ago she called me up from London and asked, “Mom, can you walk me
through creating a wireframe?” It was her first day in a new position, and
she was learning on her feet – that is what I mean about taking risks!
She picked it up really quickly.
My younger daughter is also working with fashion at an online luxury
gifts company called the Gift Library. She’s recently graduated so she’s
still finding her way, but she’s doing a lot of social media strategy and
content, writing for all of the different platforms that you have to be
present and relevant in, for multiple audiences.
I’m just so happy to see them both building careers that have their artistic
interests bundled up into interesting new areas of technology. I think
that what they and the people they work with are doing will change the
way we learn about and buy new products that are useful and delightful.
Do you have any advice on how women can balance the demands of a
career in technology and motherhood?
The trouble with technology is that you’ve got so many choices. There
are always lots of different ways of approaching things. Those choices
create a lot of noise and distraction. I’ve had to be really judicious about
learning to make hard decisions. When I’m working, especially if it’s in a
team, I have to say “We’re going to do this and have it done by this time.
There may be other things that we could do but we’ll have to try and
figure those out in the next iteration.”
Making those hard decisions and trying not to get distracted and work all
night too often is really the challenge. I think women who have children
sometimes get really consumed and caught up with this.
From the women I have interviewed for my thesis, it’s clear that mobile
technology has really helped us balance our demands because it allows
us to be more flexible with our work schedule. But it also means that we
don’t have that wall around our professional lives. The professional and
personal merge a lot more now, and so again you have to be really quite
disciplined with yourself. It can really pull and push you in different directions.
‘Should I be working now or should I be spending more time with
my family or should I be getting to bed early because I’ve got to be up
early tomorrow?’
These decisions are difficult for everybody but I think that they’re more
difficult for women because we still seem to have to take on the majority
of the responsibilities with caring for children and the home. Despite the
fact that men are pitching in way more than they used to, when it comes
right down to it women often take the lead and do most of the work, even
if they have big, full time, professional responsibilities.
Women need to learn how to let go of this, to expect to share parenting
and caring responsibilities, and let men help them carry the load. That
will make the working world more tolerable and more equitable, and better
for women, for men, and for children too. This has to change, it is way
overdue, and it will be an improvement for everyone.
In our last interview Dessy Daskalov asked, “How are you changing the
status quo and what are you doing to change the things you don’t like
about the world?”
Well I think that’s pretty simple. The status quo has to be that there are
many more men working in technology than women. That imbalance
affects the world in fundamental ways. It affects the way that we interact
with each other through technology and most importantly the way we
communicate.
I am changing the status quo by actively getting more women involved in
technology, by being a role model, by teaching them, by including them
on my research teams, by talking to them about what they want and by
making sure that we include women not just in the design process but in
the design outcomes.
I really hope that in my lifetime we will achieve a balance, that men and
women working in technology will create more equitable technological
outcomes for both men and women, in both the developed and developing
worlds, to share and benefit from equally
blouse.com/interview | 35