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Equality

The oldest profession in the world is alive and well in Silicon Valley

April 1, 2015 2 Comments

Of course we’ve all been agog at the Ellen Pao trial. Silicon Valley loves nothing more than to talk about itself. The self-obsession goes hand in hand with ego, intellect and ambition.

But an unexpected side effect of the discussion of the blow-by-blow of the trial is now, for a while, everyone will be looking for covert sexism. And nowhere better to find it than cougar night at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park.

This is not a new phenomenon. I blogged about it in 2011 after spending an amused Thursday evening there people watching. Even back then the VC, wanna-be, hooker dynamic was in full force.

Now, it’s out in the mainstream press. New York Magazine no less, reported on “Where Silicon Valley Looks for Love in the Era of Ellen Pao”. The crowd in question at the Madera bar, sitting outside in the fading sun and rising moon, is a mix of older (white and Asian) men, older women, younger women, and, just sometimes, ordinary people wanting a cocktail with a friend.

And this latter case is how I usually observe “Cougar Night”. The Rosewood is on my way home. It’s the only high quality bar on the 280 corridor (indicating a market opportunity I suspect). It has very good bartenders who can make a mean Basil Grey Goose Martini (except on Thursdays when they take it off the menu because it takes too long to make – so you have to know to ask for it). And by Thursday I am often in the mood to relax, meet a friend and have a martini on my way home.

It was one such Thursday a few months ago that I saw just how efficient the scene is at the Rosewood. Three middle aged men (one white, two Asian) sitting in one of the large outside booths. The waiter comes up and introduces them to three women who were about 30. Each had long hair, each had a skirt that would not have made it past the nuns at my middle school (i.e. only an inch or two below the crotch) and two had plenty of back skin showing. Initially they sit together, but within 5 minutes they had moved around so they were each paired with one of the men. It was like a dance. The toss of the hair, the hand on the thigh, the eye contact.

I watched in admiration. The oldest profession is alive and well preying on the equity-rich customers who are hoping to not only benefit from the greatest wealth creation of our time, but also find some love at the same time.

My friend chastised me when I said I wanted to take photos to document the dance. She was sure we’d get thrown out and not be allowed back, and the location is just too convenient for us to blot our copy book with the management. So I behaved (unlike the time she and I were asked to leave a restaurant in Rome for being too noisy) but watched in fascination and amusement. The girls were good!

Rest assured, dear reader, Silicon Valley may seem like a dry, stuffy place filled with male nerds, but it’s not. There are actually plenty of interesting, professional tech women hanging out in the Rosewood on Thursday nights (because, after all, the drinks are good), but they’re the ones smiling, watching the dance.

Equality

Technology, Women and Equity at the 2014 Grace Hopper Conference

October 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Guest post from YY Lee, my business partner and COO of FirstRain

I am proud of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (@ghc) community this week for raising important issues and grappling with uncomfortable, difficult-to-solve questions.

I appreciate FirstRain’s own Penny Herscher (@pennyherscher) for putting herself out there to moderate the Male Allies Panel, despite the concerns going-in about how to constructively include that perspective.  The fiery reaction to that session raised
the level of engagement around deep-seated systemic equity issues in
our industry in a way that would not have been achieved otherwise.  And
in Penny’s usual way — she engaged those issues head-on, in direct personal and online exchanges with the men & women, leadership & grassroots members of the community.

Satya Nadella’s wrong-headed comment the next morning  (as he has acknowledged),
underscored the complacency and problems around gender-equity issues,
even among the thoughtful and well-intentioned.  This forced the
realization that this is not an simply an issue of perception,
interpretation or over-reaction. But will require a real introspection
and major change — even from colleagues and leaders who are confident
they are already totally on-board and acting as allies for equity.
This was the near-perfect opportunity, timing and forum to
examine the truth.  It is remarkable that even given the charged
emotions around this,  the discussion started relatively politely, and
besides excessive piling on, it remained safe — this in stark contrast
to the ugly violent targeting has been simultaneously unfolding around GamerGate.  Which only further highlights the reality of the technology industry’s toxic differences in how men and women are treated.

It is too bad that before Nadella’s KarmaGate comment, he stated one of my favorite quotes of the whole conference — summing up why I’ve loved doing this work, nearly every day for over two decades: 
“[We work with] the most malleable of our resources, software… That’s the rich canvas that we get to shape… paint…”  -Satya Nadella
He nailed it.  He put his finger on that the one thing
that probably links all the men and women in that event.  This is a
deep-thinker who understands the heart of matters, which is what made
his later comment so doubly surprising and disheartening.
I am encouraged to see the after-effects like Alan Eustace trying to do things differently.
 And honest conversations with ABI executives about their awareness and
struggle with the impossible balance of growing their reach and impact
while containing the inevitable, unintended side effect of corporate
co-opting.
To all of you “good guys who do care” — Satya, Alan,
Mike Schroepfer, Blake Irving, Tayloe Stansbury — less patronizing talk
is nice, listening is refreshing, but which of you and your companies
is going to commit to results?

==> Here my question to all the “good guys” out there as well as my fellow female leaders:  Who is going to set and deliver specific targets
for ratios of women and minorities that reflect the real population —
in technical leadership by a specific date… 2016? 2017? Who is going to
hack their orgs & companies to solve this problem, rather than running feel-good, look-good “programs”?

The Grace Hopper Celebration is an inspiring, important
and high-quality gathering in an industry that is littered with mediocre
PR-flogging events.  
  • The technical and career presentations are given by
    presenters who truly care about their audience and strive to offer a
    valuable, nutritious exchanges — not just advance some commercial
    agenda.
  • The leaders remind us of how our work is linked to important broader social dynamics outside of our privileged community. The ABI exec responsible for this conference, introduced the eye-opening Male Allies Panel with a personal reminder about about how social change is about connecting across communities:

“The Asian community owes a lot to the black community. They opened a lot of doors for us [in the fight for equality].” -Barb Gee

  • From early mornings until late into the night, it was a
    surround-sound ocean of substantive discussions between old friends,
    colleagues and strangers about leading-edge technical work, honest and
    vulnerable personal experiences, deep examinations of culture,
    inclusiveness, safety, aspirations and disappointments.

  • There is a natural balance of empowering women create change
    in themselves and their environments. While calling out that real change
    is impossible without the corporations, managers and executives, and
    yes the men who make up 80% of our co-workers, to fully own making that
    change with us.

I’m not going to end this post with some rah-rah “just go get
’em girls!” trope. Because the women technologists are already out there
— delivering effort, innovation and results at 120% while receiving
70%… 80%… (to be wildly optimistic) of the recognition and reward.

I will share just one final favorite conference quote, which is how this gathering makes me feel every time I attend:

“… at #GHC14… Just not enough space to desc. Wow. Much women. So much brain” -@michelesliger

It is our industry and companies that need to be fixed, not the women in it.
I have to believe it is becoming increasingly obvious to our leaders,
managers and co-workers that under-valuing this incredibly intellectual
resource is idiotic, bad business, and just plain wrong.

– YY Lee (@thisisyy), COO of FirstRain

Equality

Don’t Cat Call to Me – I’m Too Busy!

October 1, 2014 Leave a comment
Really, what are you thinking?

I was walking to work this morning when a man in a car calls out to me “Hey Baby, what are you doing? Nice dress! Hey come over and talk to me. I’ll give you a ride…” and more. I shake him off, try to ignore him, but he’s rolling down his other window, leaning across, calling out what he obviously thinks are smart and endearing comments about my person.

It’s ridiculous, and I am sure ineffective 99.9999% of the time, unless responding to calls like that was my business. Given how conservatively I typically dress, surely it’s obvious I’m not going to respond?

I was raised to be polite, and when a man gets particularly aggressive I also don’t feel safe, so I don’t do what I would like to do which is walk over and give him a piece of my mind about how to treat total strangers on the street – and just how busy I am since it’s a Wednesday morning, and I have a thousand things I have to deal with at the office – give me a break!

Given how annoying I find cat calls, this video on what the world could look like if women cat called men tickled my funny bone. Enjoy!

Equality

How Smith College Turned Christine Lagarde’s Cancellation Into a Win for Women’s Voices

May 20, 2014 Leave a comment

Ruth Simmons gave a brilliant, beautiful and moving commencement address
at Smith College, MA on Sunday. Emotional to be back at Smith where she
was previously president, she spoke to the students about free speech,
about the importance of “tak[ing] good care of your voice” and the power
of the opinions of people who disagree with you.

Her perspective
is one of a child growing up in the South: “My coming of age was marred
by the wide acceptance of the violent suppression of speech,” she said.
“No forums of open expression existed for me in the Jim Crow south of
my early youth. Once you have tasted the bitterness and brutality of
being silenced in this way, it is easy to recognize the danger of
undermining free speech.”

But what made her speech so perfect for
that day was a disappointing event that had happened earlier. A small
group of Smith students (less than 500) signed a petition objecting to
Christine Lagarde as their commencement speaker because of objections to
the policies of the IMF. Christine is the first female leader of the
IMF, and a powerful role model of how a woman can change the world, so
perfect for Smith College but, given the controversy, she withdrew, as
Condoleeza Rice had withdrawn from giving the commencement address at Rutgers a few weeks earlier.

So
Ruth spoke about the importance of allowing, and hearing, opposing
points of view. How when you speak out, and someone disagrees with you,
and then you stand up your voice is stronger. How disagreement is a key
part of learning, and freedom, and something we must all protect. And
so, how it was limiting free speech to reject Christine Lagarde. The
Smith faculty agreed in a HuffPost article
and Smith’s president, Kathy McCartney, told the students “Those who
objected will be satisfied that their activism has had a desired effect.
But at what cost to Smith College?”

It is still so new that we,
as women, have a strong voice. It needs to be heard and not suppressed,
no matter how much we may disagree with some of the voices. The movement
to suppress women’s voices is alive and strong. In radical Islam in
Nigeria, in attacks on Hillary Clinton (she’ll be a grandmother — she
can’t be president), in the relentless drive to reverse our rights to
our own bodies.

Nora Ephron spoke so eloquently about this in her commencement address at Wellesley in 1996 (as Jessica Goldstein reminds us here).
Every attack on our path to leadership, and our voices, is an attack on
women’s progress to equality. To reach the goal of equal opportunity
regardless of our gender (or color, or sexual orientation) we must all
vigorously pursue equal pay (Jill Abramson stood up and was fired),
equal seats at corporate decision making bodies (less than 17 percent of board seats are held by women in the U.S.), equal representation in our governments (still only 20 percent of the U.S. senate and 18 percent of the house are women).

We
have a long way to go. But Ruth Simmons strengthened Christine
Lagarde’s voice on Sunday by reminding the audience of parents (me
included), students and faculty, with clarity and passion, that we must
speak, and protect our right to speak, and just as importantly protect
the right of those who disagree with us to speak, so we can move forward
to a world of learning and equality of opportunity.
 

Posted on the Huffington Post earlier today

Equality

Would you be intimidated being alone in a crowded room?

April 24, 2014 Leave a comment
Imagine you are a successful business professional. You are invited to many events after work to network, create useful contacts and learn about new areas impacting your work. You go to such an event one evening and, as you walk into the room, you quickly scan to see if there is anyone there like you. And event, after event, you are the only one of your kind in the room. There may be 100 people in the room and you are still the only one.

This is the experience of being a female CEO, or I suspect an African American CEO of either gender, in Silicon Valley.This week I went to an evening event run by one of the top executive recruiting firms on Developing Business in China. I walked into the cocktail reception, scanned the room, and saw no women, not even a waitress. As I sat down for dinner at a table of white men (all charming) the dinner guest to my left asked me “Don’t you feel intimidated coming to a dinner like this since you are the only woman?” He noticed, and projected, and predicted intimidation. I just laughed and said “it’s the norm for me, so no” – and proceeded to have a delightful evening.

A few months ago I went to a PE (private equity) reception for CEOs to meet the partners and each other (they were developing deal flow). Again I walked into the room of about 100 people and saw no women whatsoever, not even a waitress. Sometimes there will be a young woman on the desk handing out badges (most firms have good looking young women on the front desk), but rarely in the room with the players. That particular evening was a “Monday Night Football” cocktail party – huge screens and speakers, lots of alcohol, and so I worked the room and briskly left. Not my scene.

If you are a white male, can you imagine how you would feel if almost
every time you went to a professional event for executives, investors and CEOs (of which you are
one) you were the only man in the room. Or the only Caucasian in the
room in a room of African Americans. How would you feel? Remember, you’re not there for social reasons. You’re there to be respected, engaged, treated as a professional equal. Could you?

How many times would you have to be put in that situation for you to become blind to it?

Equality, Leadership

Three things you can do to hire women and change your company forever

February 19, 2014 Leave a comment

Posted in the Huffington Post

Our world is changing very fast, and the role of women is changing
fast with it — and, mostly, for the positive. We have more women in
power, more women in the workforce, more women in control of their lives
but there still aren’t representative numbers of women at the top of
companies.

And yet, we now know that diverse teams make better decisions. We know women make 85 percent of consumer
buying decisions, and so, if you sell anything to them, you probably
want women in your decision structure. As a CEO, if you’re making
strategy decisions, and hiring decisions, you want a diverse set of
opinions around you to advise you. It’s time to pro-actively bring women into your workforce.

So
why would any company build an all-male leadership team now, or an all
male board, or a board that is mostly male with one token female? The
most often-cited reason is that there are no qualified candidates —
what baloney! When Twitter filed for its IPO with no women on the board
(despite the dominance of women on social media) the reason given was:
“The issue isn’t the intention, the issue is just the paucity of
candidates.”

It’s just not the truth (as the NYT kindly pointed out
to Twitter at the time). There are women available to hire, but you
have to be determined to build a diverse leadership team to make it
happen because the easier path (less work) is to hire people just like
you: men. You have to be willing to do the extra work, find the diverse
candidates, and open up your job spec to change your company for the
future — and for the better. It’s just good business.

Here are three roles where you can change the numbers:

Board of Directors: Mostly male still. Women hold only 16.9 percent of board seats,
10 percent of boards have no women on them and those numbers are barely
changing. If, as many boards do, you set your search criteria
narrowly… for example, must have been a CEO (that cuts most women
out), must have prior board experience (that cuts most women out), must
be retired (the women in the workforce are newer and so less likely to
be retired) then, presto! all you see are male candidates.

The
solution here is to open your search up to operating executives who are
not CEOs. They are in related industries in powerful operating positions
like CIO, GM or CFO and probably have no prior board experience. But
everyone starts somewhere, and there are excellent training programs you
can go to to learn how to be a public company director.

Software Engineers: Mostly male still. And with hiring practices like the “Bromance Chamber”
at DropBox not surprisingly! Twenty percent of CS majors are girls, and
the best technology companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel et
al) both compete to hire them and invest in programs like the Anita Borg Institute
to learn how to both recruit them, and retain them. But the best
companies also reach outside the rigid spec of pure computer science.

Again
the solution is to be open to a wider set of candidates, without
compromising quality. Open up to girls (and boys) with math majors, or
double majors in math and computer science — those who wouldn’t make it
through the narrow filter of typical CS hiring processes, but who are
likely smarter, harder working, and need just a small amount of training
to be fully effective for your company. Facebook even runs a summer
intern program for students without technical degrees, knowing they can
train them and wanting the very best brains for their engineering teams.

Sales People:
Mostly (white) male still. A lingering bastion of the smart,
golf-playing male in a crisp white shirt. When challenged on the limited
number of female candidates being presented, most recruiters will whine
and complain about the limited pool.

The solution: Deliberately
ask your recruiter to do the extra work to find the diverse candidates.
At my company our sales recruiter did, and we found excellent female
candidates immediately. It’s been my experience that women sell just as
well as men, so why not get a mixed team in place so you see the selling
challenges from more than one perspective?

In all these cases,
you are not trying to hire women. I’d never compromise the quality of
the hire for race or gender. Many women would (quite rightly) be
offended if they thought they were only being hired because of their
gender. What you are doing is insisting on a diverse candidate pool and a
level playing field for those candidates. And, in my experience, that
leads to stronger candidates, to gender balanced teams and, as a result,
to better decisions.

At my own company, FirstRain,
where I am CEO, our board is 50 percent women. My senior leadership
team is half men, half women. That’s no accident. If you are determined
to see diverse candidates you will — and have absolutely no compromise
on quality — quite the reverse!

Equality

Hey Mr Waiter! Don’t insult me at the table

February 18, 2014 Leave a comment

Insult can be about blindness as much as it can be overt.

Case #1: My husband and I are at a lovely restaurant. The wine list is put in front of him. He hands me the wine list, I chose a wine, and I tell the waiter when he comes. The waiter returns with the unopened wine, opens it and asks my husband if he wants to taste it. Bret has seen this movie before. He usually smiles at the waiter and says “My wife ordered the wine, if you want a tip I suggest you let her taste it”.

This scenario used to happen every time we went out to dinner. But after 30 years of marriage it happens about 1 time in 20 in California now, but still almost always when we are in Italy. Waiters of Italy take note – my husband knows how to say it in Italian too.

Case #2: I am out to dinner with a friend, who happens to be male. When you work in a male dominated industry like tech, and you make most of your friends through work, this happens often. We’re at the end of the meal, I signal to the waiter that I’d like the check, and the waiter brings the check to my male friend. We tussle over who’s going to pay and, if I win, I place down my card. If the waiter isn’t on the ball (or checking the name) he still brings the check back to my male friend.

This second scenario is a source of great amusement to one of my friends who thinks I shouldn’t be allowed to pay anyway because I am “a girl”. He, of course, says it just to get a rise out of me. But I win enough times with him, but when I do it, and the waiter returns the check to him, it makes his teasing laughter that much more annoying.

Ah, but life is short. I’ve now become skilled at gently telling the waiter his (or her!) mistake and letting it go. But I look forward to the day when waiters are trained to be gender-blind.

Image: Agent-Hope on Deviant Art

Equality

Someone should have protected Tom Perkins

January 27, 2014 Leave a comment

Yes, Tom Perkins’ letter to the WSJ was shameful, but now, 48 hours later, I too feel shame.

If you missed it you can read his letter to the Journal here, and then his follow up here. The Twittersphere lit up, everyone piled on (including me) that his comments were stupid, and the rants of a now irrelevant old man, and tone deaf about the gap between the 1% and the 99%, and an insult to the Jews, venture capital etc. etc.

But this morning I am wondering how did his family, or the WSJ for that matter, let this happen? Tom Perkins was born in 1933. He was alive when Kristallnacht happened. I am sure, if asked 20 years ago, he would not have said these things even if he thought them! He would have known it was reputational suicide.

I spend a lot of time around old people these days, and I am grateful for the time with them. On one side we have Alzheimer’s and on the other we have healthy, honest-to-goodness old age. And I’m learning that, as people age, the self-governors can come off. My father and his friends can sometimes say things that make me cringe, and that I know they would not have said even ten years ago. But they’re older and less tolerant, and frankly care less about what other people think. So they speak their minds and sometimes reveal prejudices that they were taught as children in the 1930s, which they suppressed as thinking adults, and which are re-emerging as they age. Sometimes idiotic, sometimes upsetting, but often just raw and unfiltered.

But Tom Perkins is considered a fair target because he’s a billionaire. Because of who he is, and because of his prior role as both a founder of the venture capital firm that bears his name (Kleiner Perkins) and a former board member of News Corp., he was given the platform to speak his 82-year-old mind. And, unlike conservative friends at a private dinner, Tom Perkins was allowed to embarrass himself in front of the world—and to destroy his reputation in a single day.

But should he be a target? Should we not remember his age? Or if he is still a target in our society, then surely someone should have stopped him?

Yes he’s rich, and has been crass with his wealth, and offended a lot of people, but now he’s at an age where his mind may be weakening and his judgement may very well be off. He is no longer in power. He’s not on HP’s board, he’s not involved in KPCB in any way, he’s out of the picture. I’d feel differently if he was still driving companies and investments, but he’s not. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing his letter, realizing how tone deaf and inflammatory it was — chasing clicks at the expense of an octogenarian.

And I hope his family now knows they need to protect him from humiliating himself in public.

Equality

A living example of how the “princess romance” theme can backfire

January 13, 2014 Leave a comment

If you were raised on Disney princess movies, and Hollywood musicals, as I was, you were probably brainwashed into thinking that to be happy you had to find a man. Even a few years ago in Sex and the City, the girls were all pursuing relationships as their ultimate goal. Most movies don’t pass the Bechdel test because what few women are in the movie have only one topic of conversation—relationships with men.

But this weekend I was reminded of how very toxic this brainwashing can be. My mother-in-law is now 83 and in assisted living dealing with slowly-progressing Alzheimers. Some days she’s good, some days she doesn’t want to get up and just lies in bed staring out of her window. Saturday was one of those days.

As I sat on her bed quietly talking with her, trying to cheer her up, I asked her what she thinks about. She told me she thinks about the past and all her good memories are about husbands. Part of her sadness now is that she sees no future for herself because without a man she has no future.

Margit was married first at 19 in Malmo, Sweden, and divorced at 20. She then moved to New York, a beautiful Swedish girl who spoke little English in the early 50s—a time of fur coats, night clubs and martinis. There, she had a part-time job in the New York Public Library but quickly started dating, and then married, a man 30 years older then her. She and Harry were happily married for almost 20 years when he died at age 70.

Once widowed, Margit took off, dropping all contact with her teenage kids until she had another husband (they learned to fend for themselves younger than most). Again she married an older man, this time a Swedish restauranteur. He died after an 8-year marriage and at 53 she had a facelift, lost a lot of weight and set out to find another husband. This time, she chose a man her age with whom she lived happily for 20 years. But when he fell ill and died, she was truly alone, and her attention latched onto her son, my husband, whom she now expects to be the source of all her care and attention.

What’s so sad listening to her talk as she looks back is that she has never lived an independent life where she was happy with herself. She’s never really worked, never really spent much time with her kids, her whole existence revolved around her husband—and now that she doesn’t have one she has no center or purpose. She has told me she is embarrassed to be without a husband and, while she’s had a few female friends through her life, she’s not making any now. When we discuss events happening to my family and friends she always asks me what Bret thinks, or my father thinks, because my ideas don’t really carry weight unless validated by one of the men in my life. With my kids she openly favors our son, and has little time for our daughter or her own daughter.

Why, I wonder? Why build your whole existence, your whole source of happiness, around whether you have a man or not? And yet in film after film that is the woman’s sole objective—find your prince, marry him and fade out. I’m all for being in happy, stable relationship, but not as your entire source of happiness.

Which is why it is so very important that we support filmmakers who show independent women living full lives without a prince. Why Geena Davis’ work on the portrayal of girls in media is so critical. And why we must help our girls get to college, have meaningful careers and build independent lives so that their husband, if they chose to have one, is a part of their life—not their whole life.

Equality

Dressing like a woman — not a man

November 25, 2013 Leave a comment
A year ago at Dreamforce 2012 I was delighted to see women dressing as women – and posted on the trend. And this year in 2013 we had both Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Meyer on stage with Marc Benioff looking like women! Fashionable, professional but very feminine.

Why do I care? Well here is my employee badge from Synopsys in 1990. Thirty years old, very, very much in the minority, and I decided to poke fun at the system and the dress code (I always was a bit of a rebel). A baby face in a suit and tie — I figured I’d have fun with the dominance of men and dress like one so they just might not notice I was a woman.

So yes, I appreciate that we can dress like women in the office now!