Women in tech could learn from Laura Huang
Prevention and promotion questions for women in tech
When I started to write about women in tech, it was for contributing to the promotion of women in tech while leveling up my writing and reporting skills. This experience that I named Greyio Heart Experiment is more about highlighting the great journey and work of tech women of talents with articles published in medium and shared in Twitter but this commitment has already helped me learn a lot of things that serve me as a man in tech. One of these things that I have learned is what Laura Huang the Harvard professor has studied and this thing was highlighted to me by late professor Clayton Christensen who in one of his past speeches talked about the importance of knowing how to deal with prevention and promotion questions for tech entrepreneurs facing discriminatory access of resources like funding but also jobs. He was highlighting the amazing research of LAura Huang that I came to remember today by reading the news about Elizabeth Holmes the CEO of Theranos.
Of course, learning to identify prevention questions and promotion questions is important. Then let’s start by trying to learn what a preventions question is and what a promotion question is?
a promotion question is a question framed for you to provide elements that show how you would do to get the gains or achieve the goal that the questioner is trying to evaluate if you are a good fit by giving answers related to how you will. Promotion questions are axed toward successes, benefits, and gains.
a prevention question instead like how it is termed tries to get you to tell how you will gonna have to handle failures and losses. These kinds of questions unlike promotion questions are centered on opportunities, losses, and failures rather than possibilities and capabilities.
it turns out that promotion questions are better at highlighting your strength than prevention questions. I think that we human beings are better at telling what makes us good than what makes us look bad. But this last assumption is mine and is not based on a proven scientific study. What is proven is that women entrepreneurs are more often asked prevention questions by venture capitalists than men entrepreneurs and the study of Laura Huang has proven that this has a real and big impact on the amount of funding that they get from these VCs. I thought that Women VCs like Sarah Kunst about whom I have written about would be interested to know about this study of Laura Huang and I also guessed that women software engineers like mbenda are also concerned because for me it is very likely that women software engineers are more often asked prevention question in hiring interviews than man software engineers. Then reading the work of laura could not only be interesting for a women software engineer but also for people like me coming born in a different cultural environment that could make us experience adversity and discrimination.
learning how to fight adversity is important then I don't know what you will gonna do with Laura Huang’s book How to Turn Adversity into Advantage but I will for sure get it and read it because it matters to me to learn this skill.
PS: writing this article about aura Huang Reminded me that I write a lot about Harvard University and its professors like Clayton Christensen and Tsedal Neeley, I just don't know why. I have no opinion about the guiltiness or not of Elizabeth Holmes this is about Laura Huang and other software engineers but I do give Elizabeth Holmes the benefit of the doubt. This is an article of the Greyio Heart Experiment.
