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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

Leadership

5 Keys to Authentic Leadership

July 23, 2014 Leave a comment

From a talk I gave at VMware in Palo Alto earlier this month

Leadership comes in many styles – charismatic, intellectual, bullying – but in all cases leadership is hard to sustain over time unless it is authentic. Real. Genuine. These 5 keys are from a woman’s perspective, but most apply just as much to men.


1. Embrace making decisions. 

Not only embrace them, but have confidence in how you make decisions. I’m a fast, intuitive decision maker. I make a decision on minimal visible information and then use data to check my decision. This means I cannot be afraid to be wrong and change my decision, but I will make it in my head, whether I like it or not.

For a long time, I thought that my method of decision making was in some way bad. Shortcut, or lazy but not a studied, analysis based approach which is what “smart” people do. I doubted myself and did not feel authentic about my own decision making! Until I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

As I read Blink I gradually realized that I was not crazy, but my method of decision making is actually very human. We have evolved to make snap decisions on limited amounts of data – some visible to us, some not – and when you can tap into that skill and embrace it is an advantage! But you do need to keep one ear open and keep listening to additional information as it comes in so you can course correct if you need to.

Embrace your decisions and be real about your decision making process. Don’t pretend otherwise – even if you’ve been taught it’s not ladylike to be assertive. If it’s your decision make it; if it’s someone else’s support them. Be direct.  It takes guts to make big decisions, but it’s what leaders do.

2. Don’t ask “whether”, ask “when”

This is an area where men typically differ from women. There are many studies now that show that men will ask for promotion before they are ready, whereas women will wait until they are over qualified to put themselves forward for promotion. I believe, if you have a goal, it’s really important that you communicate that goal out to your leadership confidently. Don’t think about whether you’ll get a promotion or a big opportunity, think about when you’ll get it. Talk with your management about what you want, and ask for their help to get you there.

American Express used this understanding of how women wait to change the demographics at the top of their company. They won the ABI Top Company for Technical Women in 2012 and when Yvonne Schneider accepted the award she spoke of how AmEx proactively trained their male managers to reach down into the organization and ask women to apply for promotions, often before they would have done it naturally themselves. As a result, women moved up into management alongside of men, and the top of AmEx was changed. AmEx didn’t ask whether, they asked when and reached down.

I knew I wanted to be a CEO after I had been working a few years. And being verbal, I talked about it with my network. With the coaches and VCs whom I was getting to know. And as a result I got told all the reasons I was not ready and the education and experience I needed to get to be ready. It was invaluable, and included my company Synopsys sending me to the Stanford Executive MBA to learn about finance and management (since all my formal training was in mathematics). Had I not spoken out about “when I’m a CEO” I would never have got the smack down and been told to learn about running a P&L first, which was the best advice I could have received at the time!


3. Learn to Act As If

You might think that learning to act is in contradiction to being authentic, but I find it’s a part of the process. There are so many situations where I have had to learn to act as if I belong, even though I am the odd man out (so to speak). For many years I went to Japan every 4-6 weeks for business meetings with my customers. In 6 years I was never, ever in a meeting in Japan with another woman. The only women I met were tea ladies. And through that experience I learned to act like a man. I was treated as an honorary male. I learned to drink whiskey late at night in small Osaka bars, and eat food that was still moving, and most of all, never show traditional female traits. That made me effective, and over time my behavior became natural and authentic to me.

And just a few weeks ago I went to a dinner in Palo Alto for 100 CEOs and I was the only woman in the room. By now I’ve learned to “act as if”. As if it’s not odd being alone in a crowded room and relax. That allows me to be authentic in the moment.

4. Balance is a myth

I’ve written and spoken about this many times here and here. I spoke about it again at VMware. We’re in a competitive industry. We’re competing on a global scale. It’s important to decide what matters to you at any point in time, and focus on that. Balance doesn’t win intense market share fights or create dramatic innovation. 

And sometimes you just have to let go and be human. Like the time my son broke his arm on the last day of the quarter. This story always gets a laugh… because it’s true!

5. Laughter is the best weapon

Gender discrimination is all around us, all the time. Some days I think it’s getting better, some days when I see the games being played in the San Francisco tech startup world I think nothing’s changed, but my approach remains the same: when it happens to you keep a sense of humor. It’s hard for men to discriminate if you are humorous in your response, and it help you keep your head on straight and not get mad.

One day, when I was a CEO, I was at the beginning of a meeting with a group of investment bankers who did not yet know my company. We had not yet introduced ourselves and one of the group knocked over a diet Coke. Without missing a beat the banker turned to me and said “sweetie can you clean that up?” I smiled, went to kitchen for paper towel, came back, cleaned up, went and washed my hands, came back, reached out my hand to the banker and with a big smile said “Hello, my name is Penny, I am the CEO”.

One evening, I was at a dinner with people I did not know, at a table of men. During dinner I felt a hand on my knee, creeping under my napkin suggestively. I leaned towards the man whose hand it was, gave him a big smile, lifted his hand up and put it back on his lap and said “no thankyou”.

I have a thousand stories like that, and I have found humor defuses almost any situation. Especially if you are a leader in the group. If someone discriminates against you it is rare that it is overtly intentional. And if you can, try to work with men who have wives who work or daughters. Your humor will make them catch themselves and think about what they are doing.

In the end effective, authentic leadership is all about results. Being authentic means you are focused on the real, the now and reaching the end in mind. You don’t get caught up in what people think about you – instead you try to be your most complete self in the moment – and so be effective.

Equality

Women Computer Scientists – Yes They Exist!

October 4, 2012 Leave a comment
Published earlier today in the Huffington Post

Women are doing some amazing work in Computer Science and
Engineering, how come we don’t know about them? We all know about
the stereotypical hot start-up out of Silicon Valley led by some
twenty-something white guy but we don’t hear much about women
entrepreneurs, computer scientists, researchers and business leaders in
tech. How come?

Is it like the research study recently reported in the New York Times
where a scientifically oriented resume with a women’s name at the top
was consistently rated lower by professors than the exact same resume
with a man’s name? Do women have to be substantially better than men to
get recognized?

Maybe today, but the 7th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), going on this week, is all about changing that.

Downtown Baltimore is teeming with technical women today. Three
thousand, six hundred of them! More than 1,500 are students, passionate
about developing new technology, and not afraid to say so just because
they are girls.

And here at the conference they are surrounded by other technical
women who don’t fit the tech frat boy stereotype that Silicon Valley is
so known for, but who instead just set about changing the world of
technology from a diverse point of view.

Consider Lilli Cheng who is GM of the Future Social Experiences
(FUSE) Labs in Microsoft Research. She leads a team who invent, develop
and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home
and work, and she speaking on Creativity, Learning and Social Software.

Or Lori Beer who is the EVP for Enterprise Business Services at
WellPoint and manages over 30,000 people developing new health care
products for you and me, and is speaking today on Transforming Health
care Through Data.

Or Ann Mei Chang who is a Senior Advisor on technology at the State
Department and has the Silicon Valley engineering who’s who on her
resume, including being a Senior Engineering Director at Google. She’s
speaking on Leveraging Mobile and Internet Technology to Improve Women’s
Lives in the Developing World.

Or Nora Denzel, who was both funny and wise in her keynote today, and
has led large, cutting edge software and business teams at IBM, HP and
Intuit, and can go nose to nose with anyone on technology.

Imagine 3,600 confident girly geeks together, mingling with each
other as students and mentors, inventors and developers, investors and
founders. Women working together to change the ratio of women in
technology by recruiting new young women into the field and helping them
stay in the field, despite the odds. Less than 25 percent of the STEM workforce in the U.S. are women, more than 50 percent of women who start in engineering drop out
of technology in the first 10 years of their careers, the numbers of
women graduating in computer science has been dropping over the last 10
years, and yet by 2020 the U.S. will graduate less than 30 percent of the engineers we need to be competitive.

It just makes sense to get more girls into technology. It’s an
incredibly exciting field and women make great computer scientists.
Thousands of them are at GHC in Baltimore today. Join us and change the
world!

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a program
of the Anita Board Institute, which is funded by the world’s best
technology companies to help industry, academia, and government recruit,
retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in
higher levels of technological innovation. You can learn more at www.anitaborg.org.

Career Advice

Engineering is the way to bring jobs back to America

October 25, 2011 2 Comments

We are facing an ongoing threat to America’s global economic leadership and increasing the number of engineers in our workforce is one powerful way we can change our destiny as a country.

In Silicon Valley we have one engineering job open for every two engineers that are employed – this means it is hard to find enough qualified workers and so companies move jobs offshore to India and China where they graduate many more engineers than we do. Today we simply do not have enough people trained in the “STEM” areas to staff the technology build up that is happening (STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

When Steve Jobs met with President Obama earlier this year he made this case strongly. From Walter Isaacson’s new biography… “Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. ‘You can’t find that many in America to hire,’ he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. ‘If you could educate those engineers,’ he said, ‘we could move more manufacturing plants here.’ “

But today not only do we not graduate enough engineers, women are a huge untapped resource. Less than 10% of our computer engineering graduates are women, and less than 20% of our total engineering bachelors are women – a criminal loss of potential contribution from half our workforce.

Technology is an area that is a wonderful example of American leadership. Leadership, innovation and the place where we can say “Made in the USA” with pride. Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook – all are growing, innovative global technology leaders. All are changing the world today in dramatic ways. All are essentially American and all need more engineers. Google and Microsoft both invest heavily in change agents like the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology precisely to change the ratio of men to women in engineering and so produce more qualified engineers to grow their businesses.

Just as in the Second World War we had a national shortage of skilled workers for manufacturing, today we have a critical shortage of technology workers. Women and education are the two keys to the solution.

Seventy years ago the Rosie the Riveter campaign moved 6 million women into the workforce. These women were trained and they showed that they could do the work – building the planes, ships and munitions necessary to win a devastating war.

Senator Gillibrand of New York talks about a revival of the Rosie the Riveter campaign to galvanize women to become more empowered and she speaks about the need for women to get Off The Sidelines and get more involved in politics. She’s right, and it’s bigger than that. The low percentages of women who graduate with technology degrees in the US shows the untapped resource. Getting women involved and into technology creates more jobs for both men and women in manufacturing and the ecosystem around the technology jobs.

We are in the middle of a 100 year technology revolution, analogous to the industrial revolution that dramatically changed the Western way of life through the 18th and 19th centuries. This technology revolution is taking us through a series of engineering inventions – the computer, the microprocessor, software applications, the internet, mobile devices and there is more to come we can only imagine.

It’s time for Rosie the Engineer and Robert the Engineer. I’m a Silicon Valley high-tech CEO and I see the need first hand. We need our political leadership to invest in STEM education, and especially for our girls to bring them into the technology. It’s time to put programs in place to motivate our students to get technical degrees so they can get jobs when they graduate. We need engineers, the technology jobs pay more, and they create more jobs in America for everyone.

Equality

I Am A Technical Woman – Anita Borg Institute

October 2, 2009 Leave a comment

I am at the Grace Hopper Conference today in Tucson Arizona – here as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology. Check out the video the team made last night (and which is at the top of Digg this morning) – it will make you smile and give you sense of the power of this group of young women.

The conference is a spectacular success – 1600 attendees – 99% technical women and 50% students. The energy and enthusiasm for technology is contagious and exciting to see.

The Institute is all about women AND technology: helping women come into and stay into technology – particularly computer science today although we are expanding – and helping the influence of women on technology. We’ve gone from barely surviving 6 years ago when Anita died to now being a thriving organization with a budget of over $3M and an annual conference that is a sellout even in a recession year – and I fully expect that we will continue to grow from here.

Today we are very strong in the IT sector – the majority of our sponsors like Google, HP, IBM, Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp (to name just a few) to our newer sponsors like SAP and Symantec – are in the IT business but we have strong interest from the financial services sector and the government and defense sectors. I bet today we are going to be talking about how we staff up and bring up some sectors specific programs to bring the leaders in financial services into the Institute. I had the pleasure of meeting with senior women from companies like Goldman Sachs and BP last night and no matter how diverse their businesses are they need and use technology and want diversity in the workforce – and we can help!

Equality

Celebrating Anita Borg on Ada Lovelace Day

March 24, 2009 1 Comment

I never met Anita Borg while she was alive – but I serve on the board of the non-profit that bears her name and so I am reminded of her legacy frequently.

The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology is about the impact of women on technology and the impact of technology on the world’s women. It was originally set up by Anita to bring women together and advance them in technology and when she died it was renamed in her honor — it’s a testimony to Anita that the institute survived her. As happens with many non-profits, the future without the founder was unclear, and I was recruited right at that moment by two friends on the board. I watched as Anita’s friends and admirers: professors, CTOs and VPs of engineering at the largest technology companies, came together to put a healthy funding model and growth strategy is place. ABI is now funded by world leaders like Google, IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco to name just a few.

Now, 5 years later, the institute serves thousands of women each year with conferences like the annual Grace Hopper Conference, the Systers online community and training programs like Tech Leaders.

Anita’s direct impact is well documented – especially at the ABI site. I am celebrating her on Ada Lovelace day not only because of how she impacted women in technology during her life but also because she found a way to leave a long lasting impact on the world’s technical women through her institute.

Equality, Leadership

Leadership and Risk

October 2, 2008 Leave a comment

I visited the Grace Hopper conference today in Keystone Colorado to give a talk on Risky Business – Building Teams and Taking Risk as the Leader.

As I always find when I talk on leadership I had a great time. About 300 women in the room (GHC is 1400 technical women this year), 50% of whom were students. My objective was to share my principles on how to build a company from a startup (an inherently risky proposition), illustrate my principles with stories and have fun at the same time.

I started with three key principles to leadership of a startup
1. Have a clear vision of what you are building
2. Refuse to compromise on the quality of your team
3. Embrace risk (note embrace not take risk)

The talk was very interactive. When I talked through how important it is to have a clear strategy that everyone understands I illustrated it with how we have all hands meetings and any question is OK, how I take every opportunity I can to make sure every employee can use the strategy as context for their decisions. That opened the floor up to questions – since I’d said any question is OK!

I talked about being uncompromising about the quality of people on the team – from interviewing practises to letting people go who are in the wrong job. A senior manager from Cisco asked me where I thought B players belonged then, and I said (not entirely facetiously) in a large company. There is enough risk in startups already – you have to have A players. And diversity helps because you get a better mix of ideas and opinions into the room.

I feel strongly that you cannot tolerate politics in a small company – it is just too inefficient. This is something I learned the hard way at Simplex and so at FirstRain I simply won’t allow it. Trust is incredibly efficient. It lets you move quickly, it lets you make decisions without getting everyone involved if you have to because the team trusts each other to always act in the best interests of the company.

Then I took two examples of risk where I felt very exposed and talked them through with the group – taking Simplex public in 2001 when the window was supposedly closed, and taking my new baby into an executive staff meeting at Synopsys because I had to go into work (but was the only female VP in the industry at the time). I fessed up that my style of leadership – very open and transparent – does make me vulnerable personally and I have learned to embrace it (most of the time).

Of course, any time I present to a roomful of professional women I get the question on balance – how do I do it? do I think I am superwoman? do I judge women who slow down their careers for their families?

I think balance is a myth and I ended my talk with one of my favorite stories that always gets a laugh – how I dealt with it when my son broke his arm (the link takes you to my personal blog with just a few stories from my life).

It was great to see so many technical women together at the conference – it’s inspiring because we still see disproportionately few women in CS/EE degrees and we need more, as a profession and as a country. And it was a privilege to share my beliefs and life stores with them.

My Personal Journey

Motorola’s management churn foretold today’s troubles

January 23, 2008 Leave a comment

Motorola’s troubles just keep getting worse – as reported today in the WSJ. At least the new CEO, Greg Brown, is predicting “no quick fixes”.

Looks like a quick fix was tried last summer, though prior to Ed Zander’s departure. We track management turnover and you can see from the MOTO chart that there was a major reorg in July. [Red are departures, blue internal moves and green hires – dark are execs, light are managers]. That July spike looks like it was a reorg to take management from ICS – the Integrated Supply Chain group (procurement etc.) – over to mobile devices – maybe in an attempt to cut costs in the phone business. When logged into the system you can see the details of each move easily so you can determine what departments are affected by the changes.


As you can see from the FirstRain chart, this was just the beginning of the churn and the drain of management has been increasing ever since, including Ed’s departure at the beginning of December. These charts make fascinating reading for many companies.