Women in tech still look up to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg oversees parts of Facebook that have been most embroiled in scandal but the company has faith in her.

For the last decade, the gathering of the global elite at Davos has been a safe space for Sheryl Sandberg. This year, though, fresh off a bruising 2018, the Facebook COO arrived in the Alps on the defensive, apologizing over and over again for Facebook’s privacy and ethical slip-ups. She was notably absent from the conference’s main equality and gender discussions; she was fighting a cold and her voice was a rasp.

Over the last few months, the Sheryl Sandberg brand has taken a beating, and news about Facebook’s misdeeds—and her reported role in them—is unrelenting. Questions about privacy, Russian election hacking, unsavory opposition targeting dominated the end of 2018, and the New Year began with new reports of questionable data collection practices that led Apple to ban some of Facebook’s internal apps.Through it all, pundits dissected Sandberg’s “fall from grace,” employees blamed her for the company’s woes and a stunning stock slide, and critics called for her resignation. Corporate feminism fell out of favor, #MeToo exposed the weaknesses of “leaning in” and Sandberg’s own fallibility cast her feminist empowerment side-project in a newly harsh light.

But there are signs that Sandberg’s reputation is on the mend. It helps that Facebook doesn’t seem to be suffering any: fourth-quarter results were better than expected and the stock is up. Both the company and Lean In say they’re committed to Sandberg’s leadership, and from Switzerland to San Francisco, women, particularly those working in technology, are coming out in support of the embattled COO.

“I still look up to her,” said Annie Hsieh, an engineering manager at Square Root, an Austin-based tech company. Like more than a dozen women interviewed by Bloomberg, Hsieh said she doesn’t think Sandberg acted to the highest moral and ethical standards, but she also knows how hard it is to make it to the top in the tech world. “She’s just another human and she’s not a superhero. I think some of the criticism is valid and a lot of it is unfair.”

Sandberg, for her part, started off the New Year on an image rehabilitation tour. On January 20th, she made her first public appearance in the new year at the DLD conference in Munich. “As we listen to people around the world,” she said, “they tell us that they want an internet, where people speak up, but they’re not spreading hate.”

“We know we need to do better,” she went on. “We need to stop abuse more quickly and we need to do more to protect more people’s data.”

From there, she went to Dublin and then Davos, where she atoned again and again. For her peers at the World Economic Forum, the apologies were more than enough. “There isn’t a single organization that I have the honor to work with out there that doesn’t still look to her for leadership,” said Patricia Milligan, a senior partner at Mercer, the HR consulting firm.

That includes Facebook. Sandberg directly oversees the parts of the business that have been most embroiled in scandal, such as policy and content operations, but the company says if there’s a problem, they believe in Sandberg’s ability to address it. “Under Sheryl’s leadership, we now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and security, we’ve cracked down on fake accounts and misinformation, and we’ve set a new standard for ads transparency,” the company said.

“She has done a lot for women in tech, we shouldn’t forget that,” said Gillian Tans, the CEO of Booking.com. “It takes 3 to 4 times the effort for a woman to achieve the level of success that many of us who are here have achieved. Yet it takes one misstep to fall off your pedestal.”

Back at sea level, women like Hsieh are also inclined to forgive. Many women working in tech told Bloomberg they dislike Lean In’s message of do-it-yourself women’s empowerment. Most of them denounced Sandberg’s recently reported involvement in covering up Russian interference on Facebook (if true). But most also said she’s been held to an unfair standard, and overall, they believe she’s done more good than bad.

“She has crossed a boundary,” said Nancy Wang, a Senior Manager of Product Management at Amazon Web Services. “But we have to look at someone holistically. What she has done for women in tech, that’s something you can’t take away from her.”

It helps to understand how rare Sandberg’s accomplishments are. Women make up about a quarter of the computing workforce but just 11 percent of leadership roles, according to a study by McKinsey and Company. Among those leaders, no one has the power or portfolio of responsibility that Sandberg does. At Fortune 500 companies with COO positions, only 10 percent are filled by women.

So while there are plenty of examples of powerful men logging all manner of successes and failures, Sandberg has come to stand-in for all women in technology. Her very existence has opened up streams of funding, according to Lisa Falzone, now CEO and co-founder of Athena Security. She started her first company in 2010—before Facebook went public and before Lean In—and it was hard to get venture capitalists to take her seriously. Now, she says, things have changed, and that’s a credit to Sandberg.

“You have to have more successful women that people can point to so VCs will give more women money,” said Falzone. “If they’ve never seen a woman be successful before, they’re not going to invest in women.”

Lean In’s own research suggests that “leaning in” isn’t the panacea Sandberg herself once thought. Women are asking for raises more often, but they’re not getting them. Some 40 percent of women in technical roles are often or always the only female in the room at work and, as a result, they often need to provide more evidence of their competence. They’re also likely to be mistaken for someone more junior.But Sandberg’s existence—and her success—does make a difference. Research shows that women are more harshly penalized when they make mistakes. They’re also less likely to get second chances. One reason women are rooting for her rehabilitation is self-interest: They worry if she falls, they’ll suffer too.

Ironically, the solution, according to Stefanie Johnson, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, is more Sheryl Sandbergs, not fewer. If there were more women in positions of real power, more junior workers wouldn’t feel like they had to hold on to their one hero. Then the world could experience women with a variety of leadership styles—good and bad—and judge them as complex, holistic humans—just like we do with men.

Bloomberg Opinion

Source: Hindustan Times, 8/02/2019

A View of Time & Space

Those who know (the true measure of) day and night, know the day of Brahma, which ends in a thousand yugas, and the night that (also) ends in a thousand yugas. We have a timescale in India that is extraordinary, with extraordinary vision of the infinity of time, as also the infinity of space. We were never narrow and small in thinking, that the world began in 4,000 BC. Our minds went beyond millions and millions of years and, in modern cosmology, we accept the same idea. We are on a tiny planet, earth, and we measure time watching the rotation of the earth on its own axis and the revolution around the sun. So, we have a day, night, a year, but we don’t think that it is the same thing everywhere. What you call a day and night here, might be just a second on another plane. So, we call this terrestrial time. Then we move on to celestial time. The earth goes around the sun in one year, but the sun itself is going around the galactic system. That takes 200 million years. This kind of perspective was developed by Indian sages. Our time unit is very ordinary, just one year, and our lifetime is maximum 100 years. Brahma also has 100 years, but his 100 years are different from ours. Consider his one day: the day is divided into two halves, a day and a night. In Brahma’s day, the universe begins to evolve. And for the whole day, the evolution proceeds and when Brahma’s evening comes, evolution returns to its original source. Human life is a little extraordinary but this also is ordinary when you deal with the cosmic timescale.

Source: Economic Times, 8/02/2019

Bengal has most child marriages

If you thought the Bimaru states topped in child marriages, think again. West Bengal now has the highest incidence of girls aged between 15 and 19 years being married off, far ahead of states such as Rajasthan that one traditionally associated with child brides. However, the findings of the National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), conducted in 2015-16, show a steady decline across states, barring a marginal rise in two states – Himachal Pradesh and Manipur. The national average for child marriages now is 11.9% of all girls aged 15-19. When NFHS-3 was conducted in 2005-06, Bihar topped in child marriages, with a prevalence of 47.8%; Jharkhand was second with 44.7% and Rajasthan third (40.4%). Bengal was fourth with 34%. But in the 10 years since then, some Bimaru states — Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh — managed to reduce the incidence of child marriage by over 20 percentage points. In the same period, Bengal managed only an 8.4 percentage point reduction. District-level analysis using NFHS-4 reveals that Murshidabad (39.9%) in Bengal shows the highest prevalence of child marriage, followed by Gandhinagar (39.3%) in Gujarat and Bhilwara (36.4%) in Rajasthan. Bihar has the most number of districts with high prevalence (20), followed by Bengal (14) and Jharkhand (11).

Source: Times of India, 8/02/2019

What is liquidity premium in finance?

Also known as the illiquidity premium, this refers to the additional return that an investor can earn from any investment that cannot be immediately liquidated for cash in the market. Risk-averse investors generally try to avoid investing in highly illiquid assets like real estate due to the time it takes to sell these assets. This causes successful investors in illiquid assets to earn a much higher return than other investors who prefer to invest only in highly liquid assets. By the same logic, since most investors would be willing to invest in highly liquid assets, the returns from such investments generally turn out to be lower than the returns from illiquid investments.

Source: The Hindu, 7/02/2019

At the cost of quality

The decision to provide financial rewards for publication in science journals and patents is fraught with problems

On January 30, a little more than four years after the last hike, the Ministry of Science and Technology increased the fellowship stipend for PhD students by nearly 25%. The government says the hike will be reviewed periodically. Since the increase is far less than the 80% hike that research fellows have been demanding for the last six months, they have decided to continue with their protests. The government is also planning to provide “financial and academic incentives to enhance and recognise the performance of research fellows”, for which an Inter-Ministerial Empowered Committee has been set up. Excerpts of the Committee’s recommendations, tweeted by the Department of Science and Technology on February 2, provide a glimpse of the financial rewards to be given for publication and patents. While the modalities are yet to be worked out, offering financial rewards for publication is a bad idea.

Cause for concern

Giving rewards based on papers published in journals, and determining the incentive based on whether the paper is published in an international or Indian journal, is fraught with problems. In China, for example, researchers were given about $44,000 in 2016 for a single paper published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science . The impact factor (a proxy for the relative importance of a journal) of journals was used to calculate the prize money for publication. This led to an unprecedented increase in unethical research practices and frauds committed by Chinese researchers. This could also happen in India, which already has an ignominious record in this area and has no nodal body to address scientific frauds and unethical practices.

In India, a one-time financial reward of Rs. 50,000 and Rs. 20,000 has been recommended for a paper published in an international and Indian journal, respectively. This is a “hare-brained scheme,” says P. Balaram, former director of the Indian Institute of Science and former editor of Current Science . “Whoever has come up with this is ignorant of the history of scientific publishing. They will destroy research (with this scheme).” It is worth remembering that though the University Grants Commission’s intent to introduce Academic Performance Indicators was good, APIs were largely responsible for the spike in predatory journals published from India. There is little guarantee that the reward system based on publication will not lead to further erosion in the quality of science research in India.

In addition, giving greater rewards for publication in international journals makes no sense as international journals are not uniformly superior in quality to Indian ones. While Nature, Science, Cell and The Lancet are prestigious, there are many journals which are of poor quality. Similarly, some Indian journals are better than international ones despite having a low impact factor.

“If average or below average papers are submitted to Indian journals, the overall quality of the journals will be low compared with international titles,” says Professor Balaram. By giving 60% lower stipend to students publishing in Indian journals, the government will unwittingly be widening the gap between Indian and international journals, which will be self-destructive in the long run.

Also, “Indian science suffers from deep-rooted, structural problems — fellowships get delayed and project funding is not released on time,” says Gautam Menon, a computational biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. He argues that “the government should reward good research with generous funding and fewer constraints.” With hundreds of papers being published each year, it is debatable whether the government will be able to provide incentives given that research labs have reportedly been facing a fund crunch of late.

Reward for patents

The proposal to provide students an incentive of Rs. 1,00,000 on obtaining a patent (Indian or international) is a bigger recipe for disaster. While obtaining a patent is not difficult, it costs Rs. 10,000-Rs. 30,000 to file a patent in India. Drafting the patent costs an additional Rs. 50,000 and there is also an annual renewal fee. Also, not all patents translate into products. The Science Ministry has not learnt from the mistakes of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). In late 2016, the CSIR instructed its 38 labs to stop indiscriminate filing of Indian and foreign patents. Then CSIR Director-General Girish Sahni had said that a “majority of patents are ‘biodata’ patents” and had been “filed for the sake of filing without any techno-commercial and legal evaluation”. In such a scenario, a financial incentive for patent-filing will only exacerbate the problem.

prasad.ravindranath@thehindu.co.in

Source: The Hindu, 7/02/2019

We need a leap in healthcare spending

India needs to focus on long-term investment, not only episodes of care

The Central and State governments have introduced several innovations in the healthcare sector in recent times, in line with India’s relentless pursuit of reforms. However, while the government’s goal is to increase public health spending to 2.5% of GDP, health spending is only 1.15-1.5% of GDP. To reach its target, the government should increase funding for health by 20-25% every year for the next five years or more.

While the Interim Budget is responsive to the needs of farmers and the middle class, it does not adequately respond to the needs of the health sector. The total allocation to healthcare is Rs. 61,398 crore. While this is an increase of Rs. 7,000 crore from the previous Budget, there is no net increase since the total amount is 2.2% of the Budget, the same as the previous Budget. The increase roughly equates the Rs. 6,400 crore allocated for implementation of the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY).

Per capita spending on health

According to the National Health Profile of 2018, public per capita expenditure on health increased from Rs. 621 in 2009-10 to Rs. 1,112 in 2015-16. These are the latest official numbers available, although in 2018 the amount may have risen to about Rs. 1,500. This amounts to about $20, or about $100 when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Despite the doubling of per capita expenditure on health over six years, the figure is still abysmal.

To understand why, let’s compare this with other countries. The U.S. spends $10,224 per capita on healthcare per year (2017 data). A comparison between two large democracies is telling: the U.S.’s health expenditure is 18% of GDP, while India’s is still under 1.5%. In Budget terms, of the U.S. Federal Budget of $4.4 trillion, spending on Medicare and Medicaid amount to $1.04 trillion, which is 23.5% of the Budget. Federal Budget spending per capita on health in the U.S. is therefore $3,150 ($1.04 trillion/ 330 million, the population).

In India, allocation for healthcare is merely 2.2% of the Budget. Per capita spending on health in the Budget in India is Rs. 458 (Rs. 61,398 crore/ 134 crore, which is the population). (Medicare and Medicaid come under ‘mandatory spending’ along with social security.) Adjusting for purchasing power parity, this is about $30 — one-hundredth of the U.S.

Admittedly, this runaway healthcare cost in the U.S. is not to be emulated, since comparable developed countries spend half as much per capita as the U.S. Yet, the $4,000-$5,000 per capita spending in other OECD countries is not comparable with India’s dismal per capita health expenditure. The rate of growth in U.S. expenditure has slowed in the last decade, in line with other comparable nations.

The Rs. 6,400 crore allocation to Ayushman Bharat-PMJAY in the Interim Budget will help reduce out-of-pocket expenditure on health, which is at a massive 67%. This notwithstanding, per capita Budget expenditure on health in India is among the lowest in the world. This requires immediate attention.

Health and wellness centres

Last year, it was announced that nearly 1.5 lakh health and wellness centres would be set up under Ayushman Bharat. The mandate of these centres is preventive health, screening, and community-based management of basic health problems. The mandate should include health education and holistic wellness integrating modern medicine with traditional Indian medicine. Both communicable disease containment as well as non-communicable disease programmes should be included. An estimated Rs. 250 crore has been allocated for setting up health and wellness centres under the National Urban Health Mission. Under the National Rural Health Mission, Rs. 1,350 crore has been allocated for the same. The non-communicable diseases programme of the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke has been allocated Rs. 175 crore, from Rs. 275 crore. Allocation to the National Tobacco Control Programme and Drug De-addiction Programme is only Rs. 65 crore, a decrease of Rs. 2 crore. The allocation for each of the wellness centres is less than Rs. 1 lakh per year. This is a meagre amount.

History shows that where there is long-term commitment and resource allocation, rich return on investment is possible. For instance, AIIMS, New Delhi is the premier health institute in India with a brand value because of resource allocation over decades. AIIMS Delhi alone has been allocated nearly Rs. 3,600 crore in the Interim Budget, which is a 20% increase from last year. Similar allocation over the long term is needed in priority areas.

Prevention and its link to GDP

NITI Aayog has proposed higher taxes on tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food in order to revamp the public and preventive health system. This has not found its way into the Interim Budget. A focused approach in adding tax on tobacco and alcohol, to fund non-communicable disease prevention strategies at health and wellness centres, should be considered. Cancer screening and prevention are not covered. There is no resource allocation for preventive oncology, diabetes and hypertension. Prevention of chronic kidney disease, which affects 15-17% of the population, is not appropriately addressed. The progressive nature of asymptomatic chronic kidney disease leads to enormous social and economic burden for the community at large, in terms of burgeoning dialysis and transplant costs which will only see an exponential rise in the next decade and will not be sustainable unless we reduce chronic kidney disease incidence and prevalence through screening and prevention.

Due to lack of focus in preventive oncology in India, over 70% of cancers are diagnosed in stages III or IV. The reverse is true in developed countries. Consequently, the cure rate is low, the death rate is high, and treatment of advanced cancer costs three-four times more than treatment of early cancer. The standard health insurance policies cover cancer but only part of the treatment cost. As a consequence, either out-of-pocket expenditure goes up or patients drop out of treatment.

Increase of GDP alone does not guarantee health, since there is no direct correlation between GDP and health outcomes. However, improvement in health does relate positively to GDP, since a healthy workforce contributes to productivity. We don’t mean to say that funding must be redirected from current allocations to preventive care. The 1,354 packages for various procedures in PMJAY must be linked to quality. For various diseases, allocation should be realigned for disease management over a defined time period, not merely for episodes of care. Further, the health sector must be made a priority area, like defence. Since a major innovation in universal healthcare is being rolled out, it must be matched with a quantum leap in funding. Only if we invest more for the long-term health of the nation will there be a similar rise in GDP.

Dr. T.S. Ravikumar is Director of JIPMER, Puducherry, and Dr. Georgi Abraham is Professor of Medicine at Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences

Source: The Hindu, 7/02/2019

Develop effective policies to regulate tech giants

Facebook doesn’t merely connect people. It is a growing marketplace where user information is sold to advertisers.

It was a leap year. The year of the Athens Olympics. Only four years since Y2K, George W Bush would win his second term as President in November, and there would be a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean towards the fag end of the year. But early in 2004, recovering from an almost expulsion from Harvard for having hacked their student directories to create Facemash (a sort of ‘Hot or Not’ ranking site for Harvard students) and having had Facemash unceremoniously taken down, a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was toying with code to create a way to connect all the student directories (called “face books”) of Harvard. This project was launched 15 years ago on February 4, 2004, as The Facebook. It was such a hit that within a month of going live, more than half the undergraduate students of Harvard had signed up to the service. In about three months, it had expanded to most universities in the US and Canada. By June, it had become an incorporated company, set up headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and was well on its way to becoming the social media behemoth it now is.

In the past 15 years, with their famous “move fast and break things” mantra, Facebook (having dropped the definite article from its name) has managed to go from being a place where people found old, long lost school friends in the mid-2000s, to being the harbinger of borderless digital movements, such as the one that aided the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements in the early 2010s, to now being one of the Big Four in the technology world, and one of the worst offenders in terms of privacy, surveillance, harassment, and bad psychological effects. The rise and growth of Facebook — which now owns Instagram and WhatsApp — has allowed it to become, in many ways, the largest purveyor of ways in which people share content or communicate with each other across the world.

Not only has this radically changed the way we communicate with friends, family, social acquaintances, and even colleagues, it has also created a system of amplification for the worst tendencies of human beings — be it bullying, hate speech, spreading malicious rumours (sometimes euphemistically referred to as fake news), or misogyny. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that Facebook had allowed the harvesting of personal data of up to 87 million users without their consent. It brought into focus exactly how much power companies, such as Facebook, wield. And how easy it is for someone to manipulate public opinion using social media.

The crux of the matter is that Facebook — and indeed Google and Twitter and Uber and Amazon — are not merely companies that connect people. They are centres of an advertising marketplace, in which you, the user, is the product being sold to the advertisers. Make no mistake, the goal is still to make you buy things — be they in-game purchases of boosters for your sword, a politician’s position on important political matters, or a new brand of toothpaste — but in a way that allows these companies to know a lot more about you than you may want (or choose to tell them). As he faced American lawmakers, Zuckerberg was asked how Facebook made money, and he answered, simply, “we run ads”. What he chose to not mention was that these ads are targeted to individual users based on not just what they share or say on Facebook, but by collecting data about their behaviour across the internet.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a Silicon Valley tech company was being blamed for everything, from a teenager’s suicide in the UK to ethnic violence in Myanmar, according to the UN. But that is the world that Facebook built for us as it became the world’s largest social media site; and one that we must now learn to live and survive in.

The way forward from here must, therefore, necessarily be one of regulation of technology giants through forward-thinking digital policies that will create safeguards for users of platforms such as Facebook. India has made a good beginning by creating one of the world’s most robust net neutrality laws. Europe’s General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) is another step in the right direction. But far more needs to be done in order to regulate the manner in which technology companies control the world. The onus, however, is not just on governments. As users, we must demand the right to own our data and know how it is used and by who — be it Facebook, or even our elected governments.

Vidya Subramanian is a post doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay