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Women In Technology

Leadership, My Personal Journey

Me in the New York Times: What Parents Can Teach A CEO

September 28, 2014 1 Comment
When the New York Times said they wanted to interview me for the CEO Corner I had a series of reactions:”Wow – that’s great!! Fantastic exposure for FirstRain!”

“OMG – what will I say? What if I sound like an idiot?”

“Help! What will I wear?”

Classic girl. Worried about what I’ll wear and what other people will think. Yes, even 54 year old CEOs have the same thoughts you probably have if you are female. But in the end, I’m very pleased with the result… and I wore my favorite dress.

Penny Herscher of FirstRain: What Parents Can Teach a CEO

Boards, Equality

Why the Debate About Twitter’s Board and Women at the Top in Silicon Valley Is a Healthy One

October 7, 2013 Leave a comment

Posted in the Huffington Post today

Is the fact that Twitter has filed for its IPO with no women on the board,
and only one (new) woman in management a question of supply or demand?
Is it the “arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia,” as Vivek Wadhwa believes,
or “difficult” due to a lack of qualified candidates as Twitter
insiders have implied, or just competing priorities while managing a
rapidly growing company?

This is a critical debate, one that has been growing since Lean In was released and a debate that is good for technology companies. We now know that having diverse product design teams creates better products. We also now know that having women on boards makes companies more competitive. So why would a company build its management team and board entirely from men?

Some would argue it’s a priority issue and the debate Vivek and Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo,
sparked on Twitter gets us thinking about the priorities. When you’re
building a company, especially one as visible and ground-breaking as
Twitter, it can be hard to do anything that takes extra effort. It’s all
you can do to keep up with the demands of the voracious needs of your
company and a second-level issue, like diversity, probably does not feel
urgent. It takes time and effort to build a diverse team because to do
so you have to demand that your recruiters do the extra work to provide
you with diverse, qualified candidates.

The trustees at the Anita Borg Institute from Women in Technology,
where I have served on the board for the last ten years, know this
firsthand. ABI is funded by companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft,
IBM, Facebook, Amazon, HP… the board is made up of both men and women,
executives who believe growing women in technology is important and the
way to change the numbers is to make diversity a priority. To focus at
both the college level and in the workforce — to focus on solutions
that keep women in technical roles, that reduce the isolation many women
feel in tech, and that teach the skills necessary to get ahead in a
male dominated world.

Some would argue it’s a supply issue – that there are just not very
many women in tech to chose from so finding qualified ones is hard.
It’s true, there are not as many of us as there should be, but there are enough that boards can find one, or two, women to help them diversify their ranks. It’s a question of good governance in the end. Catalyst research has shown women on boards increases the rate of return to shareholders over time which is one of the reasons the EU is moving to quotas of female directors, and why the UK has a percentage target
of female directors for the FTSE by 2015. But in the fast pace of
private Silicon Valley companies few VCs would tell you having women on
their boards matters because it’s all about rate of growth, and when
you’re moving fast you hire who you know, or people who’ve done it
before, which is most likely men like you. My experience over the last
twenty years is that the bias in neither conscious, nor intentional.

So yes, women on boards is not usually a priority to young tech
companies, but Silicon Valley is not ” virtually closed to women,” as
the NYT
claimed on Sunday. There are plenty of us here running companies,
building products and building companies that we believe will change the
world. For the first time we have women at the top of several high
profile technology companies — all at once! We have the glamorous
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook; we have the
intensely focused Meg Whitman at HP and Ginny Rometty at IBM; we have
high-growth, smaller company leaders like Amy Pressman at Medallia and
Christy Wyatt at Good Technology and we would all tell you that while
we’re not done, the environment is so much better for women now than it
has ever been.

But in the end, the debate itself if the best thing that’s happening.
Sheryl’s making people talk about how to encourage women in the
workplace with Lean In, ABI is challenging leaders to measure the
quality of their company by what kind of company it is for technical
women to work in (Intel was the most recent winner),
and Twitter’s IPO gives us another chance to look at the statistics,
take a deep breath, and once again set out to change them. As Dick Costolo’s final tweet last night said, “The issues are much bigger than checking any 1 box.” It’s time to address them.

Equality

Wonder Where the Women in Power Are? Look to Silicon Valley

March 13, 2013 Leave a comment
Posted on the Huffington Post March 13, 2013

There is a tectonic shift happening and we’re living the future right now here in technologyland. Women are gaining and holding power at a rate we have never seen before and finally they are openly talking about it.

Sheryl Sandberg’s well-marketed new book Lean In, is stirring up the timely discussion about what it takes for women to get ahead. Sheryl says you need to “lean in,” believe in yourself, and not hold yourself to impossible standards of doing everything; and she’s rightly pointing out that men and our workplaces have to change to make it possible for women to broadly have equal opportunity for leadership.

Sheryl’s saying what those of us who lead technology companies here already live: you have to have confidence, embrace your opportunities and be ready to not get hurt by the “likability gap” that women in power face. Her situation is particularly fortunate in that she joined not one, but two, very high growth opportunities (Google and then Facebook) and so she’s now rich and is taking criticism for telling those less wealthy than her what to do, but hats-off to her that she’s speaking out and putting the issue of gender in leadership onto the national agenda.

But she’s one of many now in Silicon Valley, and not all the stories are as sunny. Women are also taking on some of the hardest turnaround challenges in technology today:

• Marissa Meyer stepped up to be CEO of Yahoo! — a challenge so difficult that even a strong product executive with her technical chops may not be able to pull it off. When she stopped employees working from home she was strongly criticized by men and women alike (ironically, often on the grounds of gender equality), and yet she is making the tough business decisions needed to change the Yahoo! culture from one of entitlement to one of growth. If a male CEO had made the same decision it either would have not made the press, or it would have been lauded as a “brave” and “bold” move to turnaround Yahoo!

• Meg Whitman has taken on the thankless task of righting HP after a disastrous revolving door of CEOs — not a challenge for the faint of heart — but early indications are she’s going to win and accelerate revenue growth in 2014.
 

Whether you consider Safra Catz, President of Oracle, Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel, or Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, women are winning and holding leadership positions and showing us the future today. And it’s hard not to include Ginni Rometty, the CEO of the technology powerhouse IBM, even though she is not based in Silicon Valley. The fact that these executives are women is a distant second to their ability.

So why is it different here in Silicon Valley for women? There are two fundamental reasons.

1. Generational. Many of our new, fast growth technology companies are run by men, and women, of a younger generation than in other industries. Consider the leadership of Facebook, Google, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn — they are all under 50 and many are under 40. Even Tim Cook of Apple is only 52. Their generation have grown up with women working in their families and so they don’t bring the same prejudice the over 60 generation bring. As a female technology CEO I’ve found the number of times I get asked “what about your kids?” goes down dramatically every year as the peers I work with drop below 60.

2. Technology is a meritocracy. It’s all about how good your product idea, your code, your algorithm is, not your race, gender or whether or not you are gay. And it is especially true in the new generation of tech companies. The competition for talent in the San Francisco Bay Area is ferocious and the competition for market share never lets up, so we simply can’t afford to not hire the best engineers, regardless of gender. We just need more of them.

When Pamela Ryckman was researching her new book Stiletto Network (releasing May 2013) she found that the unique entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley has benefited women disproportionately. Instead of rigid organizational structures, Silicon Valley thrives on change: companies come and go, teams form and disband, and so talent gets spotted and adopted regardless of gender.

Companies, and whole industries, are going through disruptive change now as the impact of software increases the power of the individual. The payment industry is being rocked by disruptive changes like Square and Google wallet. Manufacturing is being rocked by 3D printing, making it possible for you and me to manufacture products from our imagination without having to build a factory.

The demands made by the pace of change and fierce competition in our industries do not leave room for gender bias at the top any more. And that’s why more and more women are emerging as leaders and holding power here in Silicon Valley.

P.S. This does not mean women, however, are gaining equality across technology as a whole. We still hold a distant minority of board positions (9.1 percent of board seats in Silicon Valley are held by women) and we still have a dire need for more girls to go in to, and stay in, computer science and technology (less than 18 percent of our CS graduates are girls). The work of non profits like the Anita Borg Institute to coach and encourage female geeks is still essential for the technology industry as a whole.

Equality

Three Disruptive Ideas

February 20, 2013 Leave a comment
I love being asked to talk to groups of women or girls. Especially high school girls who are a future untapped resource for technology and so if I can move just a few of them to consider tech I’m happy.

Last week I had the opportunity to do just this at Wycombe Abbey in England. Wycombe is my alma mater and one of the top girls schools in England. Really smart kids (and definitely privileged, but that is not their fault). It was surreal for me to go back for the first time in 34 years as I had left swearing never to go back (yes, I was a terrible rebel in high school) but walking around the school and talking with staff, old friends and kids I was transported back and it was not all bad.

I took the opportunity to challenge the girls with three ideas that dramatically influence them today and will shape what future they craft for themselves. A few gasps, some embaressed laughs (yes, I said porn and pornification a few times) but overall I think they were intrigued by…

1. Software is everywhere – being able to write and understand software is as important now as being able to read and write. High school students spend on average 10 hours a day working with software, they just don’t know it.


2. You are being watched – every action you take is being stored and analyzed and this creates a fascinating area called Big Data. Understand it, tap into it and have fun with the technology. Build you own app.

3. Don’t believe what you see – women are objectified, hyper-sexualized and diminished by our media (advertising, TV and movies). Don’t buy into the stereotypes. Educate yourselves so you see it, and see through it, and then get involved in changing it – become a part of #NotBuyingIt. Yes this is where I showed some shocking images and said some shocking words, but my 16 year old niece told me afterwards it was “cool”.

A tame one from the Harrods children’s bookstore shelves February 7 2013 – hard to believe!
Equality

Why women need sponsors more than mentors

October 11, 2012 1 Comment
I was on a panel at GHC 2012 last week “Sponsors or Mentors – which will get you there?” Standing room only in a large room, it was clearly a topic of great interest to the female tech students and geeks at the conference. And the questions were priceless…

The panel, lead by Anne Losby of Thomson Reuters,  was prompted by a report Catalyst put out last year on Sponsoring Women to Success. In it the research clearly shows sponsorship is a powerful differentiator at the top and key to overcoming the barriers for women. And while we are making good progress as a gender, and women make up more than 50% of the workforce, they still only make up 3.8% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500. So plenty of room to improve the ratio.

First – do you know the difference? Mentoring has been talked about for
years but talking about sponsorship is a fairly new fashion. Mentoring is about advice and coaching, helping the younger employee figure out the system and skills. My advice to people seeking mentors is seek someone willing to tell you the truth about yourself. Seek someone who will hold the mirror up to you (and your behavior), even is the image is ugly. And a great mentor will put the time in to teach you.

A sponsor, however, is not a mentor. A sponsor has power and the ability to help you get ahead. They know you — strengths and weaknesses, talents and warts — and are ambitious for you. They help you prepare for opportunity by steering you into the right experiences and the right training. They will advocate for you and make the case when you are not in the room for why you should get the next promotion, the next cool project. They win when you win be because the company, and possibly their reputational capital in the company, are stronger when you do.

I experienced this myself in my first 12 years in Silicon Valley. I worked for 2 companies – one for 4 years, one for 8, but was never in the same job more than 21 months. I had two sponsors (although I could not have labeled them as such at the time) who were watching me, grooming me and putting me into opportunities to learn and stretch. Both were men, because back then there were no women in the organization above me. I would not have become a tech CEO at 36 without their sponsorship.

So why is this so important for women?

The tough reality is that women face a double bind. Catalyst research has shown that women who advocate for themselves can be penalized in the workplace. Women get labeled as “aggressive” when the same behavior in a man would be labeled as “assertive”. I’m not complaining, it’s just reality and so sponsors can help women get ahead by advocating for them and helping them avoid the double bind.

Sponsors are also important for women because men tend to know what they want and ask for it, women tend to wait to be asked. There is unconscious sterotyping going on with the men judging the women who do ask, but there is also stereotyping going on by the women who restrict their own behavior. Afraid to appear “pushy” or “too aggressive” they moderate their own behavior to meet the expectation of humility from women.

And this is where the questions lead on the panel. All the discussion, in the end, led to the double bind. How to get ahead and ask for the project, the job, the doctoral research without offending the men around you and being judged? Lots of advice ensued, but in the end I told the group to “Just go for it and course correct when you are in the job. Don’t tap down your natural energy and your drive, we need that in our companies!” Strong women (and men) – apply here.

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.