Category Archives: women in technology

my life in tech, women in technology

Twenty Years of Being a Woman at Tech Events

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Since the early 1990s, I have attended tech events large and small in the US, Italy, Germany, and India. I was usually one of a small number of women attending or staffing in some technical capacity, i.e. able to speak knowledgeably about technologies and products. There were always other women around, but most of those were contracted for the duration of the event to work in a booth, taking business cards and giving out schwag. That work is useful and needed, but was not what I was there for.

I understood early on that I was an anomaly. A few times I even played on it: wearing a miniskirt while on booth duty, then waiting in glee to see how long it would take people to realize that I actually knew what I was talking about. (In Italy, it is not unusual for women to wear miniskirts to professional events.) But, even when I played with it, I wanted to be recognized for my brains and technical knowledge, not for my body.

No matter how I dressed, it was always an uphill battle.

Continue reading Twenty Years of Being a Woman at Tech Events →

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“You Can Always Go to a Startup”

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“You can always go to a startup.” Job seekers in the Bay Area hear this refrain, especially from people with no experience of startups (or tech, or the Bay Area). Startups are seen as the sexy option. Some startup employees even dismiss those who stay in “safe” jobs at bigcos: “You must lack the guts or the talent to be out on the tech frontier, boldly disrupting the establishment!”

Easy for you to say. For many of us, working for a startup is not a realistic option. Not because we lack guts or talent (many of us have worked at startups before) but because most startup jobs are – by design – suited only to a very particular demographic. This limits employment prospects for the many who are not part of that group, but it also hurts the startups themselves.

If you’re a startup founder, you may think you don’t care about this particular problem, but you should.

The Lifecycle Barrier

I am not (for the moment) talking about the sexism and racism rampant in tech today. These are real problems and I in no way dismiss them, but there’s another barrier to job mobility, one that sooner or later everyone may face. I’m referring to the human lifecycle which, for many of us, looks like this:

  1. childhood
  2. college
  3. relationships / marriage
  4. babies
  5. kids growing up
  6. kids in college/empty nest
  7. retirement

For the first phase or two of this cycle, we usually have others providing for us. From phase three, we start providing for others, including our future retired selves.

The financial onus of a traditional middle-class family lifestyle today is staggering, more so in real estate markets like the Bay Area. People with families need decent salaries, good benefits, and humane hours: basic working conditions that are not met by most startup jobs.

The Trouble with Startups

Startups tend to offer lower salaries and skimpier benefits*,  while expecting long working weeks. As an employee, you are asked to invest a lot of time and brainpower in a venture which is extremely unlikely to pay off for you. The bait is lottery odds of getting rich on stock options, or a (usually illusive) sense of participation in “changing the world”.

It’s tempting to believe that startups and the VCs who fund them rely on the naïveté of young techies to fill these jobs. Regardless, most older employees can’t follow a startup dream even if we’d like to: we simply can’t afford the financial risk while we have responsibilities to provide for others. This is what I call the lifecycle barrier.

The lifecycle barrier is not exactly the same as ageism. It is possible to be older and less encumbered – e.g. divorced, kids grown, retirement funds safely socked away. But then ageism does come into play: many startups and VCs won’t even look at older people anyway.

Why You Need Lifecycle Diversity in Your Startup

The lifecycle problem harms startups in at least two critical ways.

First, it reduces the pool of candidates available for hire by startups. There’s huge demand for young people willing to work (and be compensated) startup-style, and every company is competing for a limited pool of such. Hence the increasingly strained attempts to stand out in cheap perks like free lunches, designer coffee, and employee drinkups.

Even if you manage to hire all the bright young things you want, you’ll still be missing something: your team will lack the perspective that diversity brings. The kind of perspective that comes with different cultures and experiences, sexes and sexualities, and just plain years of life and work. If the intended users of your products include any demographic other than young techies, you’re at far greater risk of failing (with a company, a product, or a feature) through lack of life experience and the broader empathy that such experience brings. You risk death by groupthink.

And then… young employees do get older, and eventually start to care about mortgages and school districts. If your financial model relies on your staff working 80 hours a week for relatively low wages, you may be sitting on a time bomb: can you cash out before key employees leave because they can no longer afford to work on your terms?

Fixing the Problem

If you’re a founder or investor, what could you change? What could you do to attract the diverse range of employees that your startup needs?

It probably requires rethinking your financial model and compensation structure, and thinking about what it means to be a desirable employer to a broad range of people. It requires thinking about company culture and how it is expressed, and whether yours is welcoming to more people than the stereotypical [young, male] startup employee. Myself and various middle-aged friends have had the experience of walking into a startup office and thinking: “I would not fit in here. Nor would I even want to.” Does this describe your company? Fix that.

So here’s a challenge: Think you’re a disruptor? Prove it. Start by disrupting the startup employment model. A whole bunch of smart, capable potential employees will be watching. And you might even persuade some of us to come work for you.

PS

As for me, I now work for Ericsson, arguably the most multinational company in the world, which keeps the long-term welfare of its employees very much in mind. People who join Ericsson tend not to leave.

People with families do, of course, sometimes found and work for startups. But those who can afford to do so often have already achieved sufficient financial security (perhaps having been winners in an earlier startup lottery) to take the risk. To be a serial entrepreneur, you have to have had a success somewhere along the line.

For more reasons and ways startup culture needs to change, read Shanley Kane’s YOUR STARTUP IS BROKEN: INSIDE THE TOXIC HEART OF TECH CULTURE. It’s uncomfortable reading. I highly recommend it.

Thanks to Melinda Byerly for very useful comments on this piece!

* The original article “Benefits matter, or why I won’t work for your Y Combinator startup” appears to have been completely removed from the Internet by its author. Which is a pity. It made some good and true points, and generated some useful discussion, you can see examples at the link above.

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my life in tech, women in technology

Marketing Your Tech Talent

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I was thrilled to have the opportunity to present this talk at the Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine.

Slide deck with notes – Marketing Your Tech Talent

Some very kind words about the talk from Joe Brockmeier here.

I’m just gonna brag a little here:

“Datashits” was a Freudian slip. Really. I promise.

Monktoberfest tweets
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Monktoberfest tweets
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Men, Women, and Salary Negotiation

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“To get ahead in business, women need to speak up, blow their own horns, and always negotiate their salary offers. In other words: act like men.”

Women hear this sort of thing often. I’ve said it myself as well-meaning advice to other, especially younger, women. We heard it from many speakers at the WITI summit, successful women who were presumably giving this advice because it had worked for them. Research shows that it can be effective in getting that raise, VC meeting, promotion, or next job.

There are two problems with women emulating men in this way:

  1. The social rules are different for men and women. A man who is assertive and self-promoting is considered, well, manly. A woman who does the same is more often considered a bitch. Both men and women react negatively to “pushy” women.
  2. Because of Point 1 or for socialized reasons, most women feel uncomfortable behaving this way. As a male friend pointed out, telling women to behave more like men is similar to telling introverts they should behave like extroverts. It implies a judgement that the extroverted or “male” way is the “best” mode of human interaction, and we should all strive to emulate it. For some, this may be harrowingly uncomfortable – for some, it’s downright impossible.

There are reams of advice given on doing business in other cultures: how to fit in, how not to offend, how to negotiate with someone who may see things very differently than you do and may not give the cultural cues that you expect. Such advice stresses understanding and compromise, and we all agree that it would be unproductive and gauche to expect our counterparts from other cultures to adapt entirely to our ways.

So why is it acceptable to demand that women take on the modes of interaction more native to men (or introverts to extroverts)?

I have read articles about how even hirers are frustrated at the way women “leave money on the table”. To paraphrase a piece written by an anonymous hiring manager: “I’m authorized to give a higher starting salary, but only if they ask for it. The women never ask, the men always do.”

The women in these situations say, if asked, that they felt the offer was fair – i.e., they assumed the employer would treat them fairly – and/or they didn’t feel comfortable making a counter request and being perceived as pushy broads before even starting a new job. But if they later learned or guessed that they were paid less than a man (or another woman) for the same job, you can bet they resented the hell out of it, and felt betrayed by their employer.

Avoiding “politics” of this kind is a big motivator for many women to found their own businesses: when you’re the boss, you can ensure that your employees are treated fairly.

My own feeling is: if you (my employer) think my job is worth $n, that’s what you should pay me; I should not have to ask. (If you don’t know what the job is worth, I may not either – why don’t we figure it out together?)

Telling women that we’re leaving money on the table by not asking is blaming the victim. Paying higher salaries to those who merely ask rewards negotiating skills, not professional merit or hard work in a particular role which may have nothing to do with the ability to be an aggressive bargainer.

The same applies to introverts – which, by the way, often describes some of your most valuable staff: programmers. Many male engineers are naive, young, introverted, and/or socially awkward, which puts them in a similar position to women at the bargaining table. They may accept your first offer and not subsequently question their salaries, as long as they can pay the rent.

But, in a hot job market, you’re taking a risk when you pay people less than you can afford and know they’re worth. Your best and brightest (men or women, outgoing or introverted) get job offers every week, and if you’re paying them at the low end of the scale, it’s easy for someone else to make a better offer. Company rules may “discourage” your employees from discussing their salaries with each other*, but a recruiter may be happy to say: “Oh, we pay a lot better for that position.”

If you value an employee and want to keep them, it’s in your best interest to deal with them transparently, honestly, fairly, and in a way that accommodates their individual character and style. If that’s not already part of your company culture and policy, perhaps it’s time to revisit those things and think about what kind of company you want to be, in order to keep your best and brightest, and attract more like them.

* In California, it is no longer legal for companies to prevent or penalize employees discussing their salaries. Furthermore, “California’s newly effective (January 1, 2017) pay equity law indicates that reliance on an individual’s salary history does not justify a pay disparity, but the law does not specifically prohibit employers from soliciting the information on applications.”

Especially in light of a recent (April, 2017) court ruling which seems to undermine that law, the best advice is never to give recruiters any previous salary history. However, it can be difficult to avoid doing so. When I interviewed for a job at Google, before I could go there I had to fill out a web form that required me to fill in a “previous salary” field, along with a statement that falsifying any part of the form would end forever my chances of employment with them. That was only the first of several red flags around that interview, I didn’t get the job and that was probably for the best.

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GHC09: Becoming a Person of Influence

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Still trying to catch up with my notes from the talks I attended at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in October…

Jo Miller was a very popular presenter at GHC08, so was invited back this year to speak on Becoming a Person of Influence. Jo, an Aussie with a somewhat confused accent after years in California, does Women’s Leadership Coaching for a living, and I suspect from this experience of her that she’s good at it.

This talk had the particular merit of being useful to everyone attending, at whatever stage of their tech career.

I was amused that she started the session saying: “Anyone caught blogging or tweeting during the session will absolutely be invited back next year!”

From my notes:

The emerging leader’s quandary: you can’t get to the higher level job without leadership experience, but you can’t get the experience without the job.

How can you establish yourself as a leader while doing your current job?

Question: Are you the best-kept secret in your organization?

“In my company, influencing skills are the single most important success factor after knowing your job.” JoAnna Sohovich, Honeywell

Are power and influence good or bad? “Power is like manure: it really stinks if you keep it to yourself, but it’s good if you spread it around.”

Wanting to be an influencer means wanting to be a person who can make a greater difference than one person alone can.

An influencer arrives at the meeting early to greet everyone, and doesn’t wait for permission to speak when it’s her area of expertise. If you walk into a room with confidence and authority, people are predisposed to hear what you say.

Don’t think about influencing a specific situation but “how do I become a person of influence?”

First impressions count, but the cumulative impact of all impressions is more important.

The dog whisperer doesn’t train the dog – he/she actually trains the owner to exude an air of calm authority.

Our behavior teaches people how to treat us.

You can influence others in every conversation you have.

Jo asked people in the room to mention what they think of as leadership qualities. Responses included:

  • know the people you’re working with, and care about them. People are not a means to an end, they ARE the end.
  • be consistent and principled, good at engaging people in interesting conversations
  • a leader makes you want to be a better leader

Countdown: The Six Sources of influence Available to Women Leaders

6. Positional influence: the influence inherent in your job title/role

For example, a woman was reorged into a situation where no one knew what she did, but her boss made a point of having her meet people.

“How are you introducing yourself?” You need an elevator pitch.

Building on positional influence:

you have an important job and people need to know about it
take every opportunity to educate others about the importance of your role and how you can help them

create a 30-second commercial:
1. name
2. title
3. I am responsible for…
4. come directly to me when you need…

You may need multiples “ads” to cover various aspects of your job.

Mine might include:

I’m Deirdré Straughan. I am responsible for helping people communicate about technology. Come directly to me when you need help/advice/training with social media, especially videoblogging and video streaming.

Or:

I am responsible for building and nurturing tech communities. Come directly to me when you need help with community strategy and execution.

One pitfall with positional influence is to over-rely on it and to imagine that, if you are higher up, influence comes naturally.

5. Expertise influence: background, qualifications, experience and expertise

Make sure you don’t let someone else take credit for your work!

Ways to build expertise influence:

  • don’t wait for an invitation to speak up about your area of expertise
  • promote your accomplishments
  • present in meetings etc.
  • write
  • speak on panels, conferences

Pitfalls: “Are men smarter than women? No, but they sure think they are.” Women underestimate their own candlepower while men overestimate theirs (2008, Newsweek). Male job candidates are not shy to claim expertise they may not necessarily have! It’s not about paper qualifications, it’s about owning and making visible the achievements you already have.

4. Resources Influence:– the ability to attract and deploy resources you need to do your job well.

e.g. budget

Ways to increase resources influence:

  • become a strong negotiator – know how to ask for and get what you need
  • learn matrixed management
  • cross-train others in your area
  • gain visibility for the importance of your work and the effort it takes
  • suggest special projects as developmental opportunities for others

3. Informational influence: being an informational powerhouse, who keeps finger on the pulse on business, personnel and organizational issues

Know the above, know who the other informational powerhouses are. Walk around and gossip, but filter useful info from noise. Seek out info about changes before they occur, e.g. new projects, opportunities, resource allocations, budget, long-range plans.

2. Direct influence aka coercive

Being firm,professional and direct when someone’s behavior is detrimental to team or org (1% rule) – when something really important is at stake. But also share a vision of what would be possible for them if they changed their behavior – show that you care.

Tips: be firm, fair, professional, direct and concise with tough news
explain what was unacceptable and why
focus on a positive vision for the future

1. Relationships influence: that which comes when you know who the key people are in your organization (and other areas of life), when you reach out to them and build authentic, trusting relationships and an influential network.

The most importnat thing you will build in your career is your network, aka your sphere of influence.

McKinsey leadership project – What drives and sustains successful female leaders? Connecting.

Think about:

Which sources of influence are you most strong in?
Which do you intend to strengthen?

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