No tags yet.
Tariro Mzezewa
NEW YORK—Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the first names out of the mouths of ten strangers on a Midtown Manhattan intersection when prompted to name three key figures in tech. As the passers-by list tech-gurus that are known by most, something stands out: there are no women being mentioned.
Women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are increasing, but still few in comparison to their male counterparts. Despite some successful community, academic and governmental initiatives to make women in STEM a more prominent part of the national dialogue, women in these fields continue to express concern about the lack of female mentors available as a resource.
To fill this gap, two women have created a site that matches peers in the same field for mentoring purposes. The site, Glassbreakers, is the first of its kind to work with professional women in this way.
“We are stronger, louder and more impactful together instead of alone,” reads the organization’s site.
Glassbreakers is the creation of co-founders Lauren Mosenthal and Eileen Carey. It is a peer-mentoring platform for companies that want to attract female employees and keep them in their specific industry. Glassbreakers is also for individuals as it matches women in a profession with other women in the same field, so they can share advice, skills and contacts.
“Mentorship is a key solution for professional success. Everyone on Glassbreakers is a mentor,” reads the organization’s manifesto. “We all have something to offer, something to teach, and something to share. Peer mentorship creates mutually beneficial relationships. Approach every connection knowing you both have knowledge to give and receive.”
Photograph from the homepage of Glassbreakers.
In 2014, Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies released employment figures that showed majority male, white and Asian employees. Google’s report showed that only 30 percent of its employees were female. Hewlett Packard had 33 percent, Yahoo! 38 percent and LinkedIn had 39 percent.
Recognizing this problem and being aware of the difficulties women face when searching for mentors and advisers, Carey and Mosenthal decided to create Glassbreakers.
Carey, the organization’s CEO, previously worked in corporate communications in New York and Mosenthal, the CTO, helped build the software for Glassbreakers. One mission the pair has is to empower women to break the glass ceiling altogether.
Glassbreakers follows the “software as a service” business model and depends on an algorithm that Mosenthal created. Similar to a dating site, the Glassbreakers algorithm matches women by location, career aspirations, background and the skills they wish to gain or improve.
Prior to the January 20 launch, Glassbreakers had a 1500 person waitlist, but it wasn’t easy to get the service going. In an interview for Newsweek, Carey explained some of the difficulty the organization had experienced by the launch.
“Traditional mentorship, established in male-dominated industry, is between very senior and very junior people,” she said. “But the problem for women in the workforce is that there are many more mentees than mentors. Also, the tech industry is changing so fast that women even five or 10 years older may have very little of practical use to share with younger workers.”
Thus far, things are going well, with more women signing up, even though the site is in its beta-phase, focused on matching women in technology.