This article was originally posted on Symantec's Medium publication #iamtech, which explores the experience of minorities and women in tech through engaging personal stories within and outside of Symantec.
Standing before a roomful of Symantec inventors at a recent recognition luncheon, I spotted something that made the event bittersweet.
I’d earned an invitation because I’d filed more than a dozen Invention Disclosure Forms, the first step in patent filing, since joining Symantec in 2013.
Half of the executive team, including the CEO, showed up. Congratulations poured my way. I felt great. The company was telling me, “Hey, you really did a lot.”
The CEO even called me out as being an example: “We’re so excited to have a woman inventor here!” But when I looked around the room at my fellow inventors, I spied only a few other women.
I didn’t want to be the token example of an achieving minority. I’d rather be part of a crowd of them. I sighed as I thought, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Women and other minorities have to raise our profile in the male-dominated tech industry. And one way we can do that is through patents.
Data Talks
Patents say you’re creative, confident and competitive. A patent also celebrates your intellectual achievements.
Male or female, you need a certain amount of chutzpah to file a patent in the first place. When you create a patent, you’re saying, “I have a lot of confidence in this idea; it’s worthwhile; it’s worth protecting.”
For women, patents push back against people’s biases that men are better engineers than women. I’m a scientist so I think data talks — and in volumes. Rather than telling men they should embrace diversity and be more welcoming of women, you can say, “Look, women are doing exactly as much as you guys are.” It’s quantifiable. I think that speaks. It says women create the same value as men and are worth the same money, too.
Encouraging people to invent and come up with new ideas is what Silicon Valley is all about. We want good ideas that we can turn into products and features. While the ideas do need to be genuinely new, they don’t need to be grand schemes like Google’s page-rank algorithm. They can be incremental, like improving an algorithm’s accuracy by half a percentage point or making a piece of code run 3% faster. And the ideas can come from anyone, anywhere.
Aleatha Parker-Wood is a Principal Research Engineer at Symantec. Read more of her story, "The Patent Truth About Women in Tech" on Medium here.