Women, loyalty, and power

The tech industry feels very much like a men's club. Is there still a glass ceiling?
Yeah, I've been on several glass ceiling panels! I'm usually the one that thinks the glass is half full. [Laughs.] I think that some companies, Apple and IBM included, have done a very nice job of promoting women from within their ranks. I do know that for example at IBM there were specific programs aimed at promoting and improving the role of women in the organization. So I think that's one indicator.

The second is the number of boards women are on. I'm on the Colgate-Palmolive board and I'm on the Aetna board. I think those boards and others are showing that women are having a place in corporate America.

Having said that, when you look at the numbers of female CEOs, there still is a gap. But I think all of these things take time, and I think it is wrong to move women into positions where in fact they haven't been trained or are not ready for them and the like. I do not go along with that notion. But I do think we are getting to the point where we should be seeing more CEOs on the list, as women keep rising.

I do have to say that [the high-tech industry] and in particular the software industry has been very supportive of women. If you look at the data processing side, if you ignore telecom and you ignore semiconductor, you will see a fair number of women in reasonably responsible positions. And so I think that the industry is not an inhibitor to women. But clearly, we do need to see some more visible women in the CEO slot.

You say the software industry in particular. Why is that?
I'd say it goes back to the education women have had. You don't find a lot of women in chemical or mechanical engineering, having tried to hire some. Women have taken much more to math, which is what I did, and then later on to comp sci. Women are coming into the workforce with more software training than they ever did on the engineering side.

You're active with the Committee of 200. Can you talk about that a little bit?
It's a group of women who are either head of their own businesses or have a significant role in a large company. There is a selection process to be a member of the organization. It's an organization that spends a fair amount of time dealing with issues related to business, politics, and women's issues. And I have found it to be reasonably supportive. [A friend] at MCI encouraged me to join because he thought it was important that some of the women in the IT field took a more assertive role. At his advice I joined the group and I've attended several of their meetings. I have in fact participated in some panels. One of the panels was how to maintain your privacy in a public position--as you can see, my responses match my views on that subject. But it is a very supportive group for women.

You have two degrees in mathematics, then you started [at IBM] as a programmer. Did you see yourself then where you are now?
I saw myself more involved in science and would never have guessed that I'd be doing what I'm doing. When I was a college senior I was asked to write an essay on what my future life would be like 25 years out. There's no correlation whatsoever between what I thought I would do and what I'm doing! And so I feel a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. I'm having a wonderful time.

28 years at IBM. How does spending that much time in one place form your thinking?
At the time I went to IBM, a lot of people were making lifetime career decisions. At that point in time--it is quite awhile ago--jumping from job to job was considered a negative on a resume rather than a positive. It was somebody who couldn't keep a job very well.

There was a loyalty factor and a family factor that were extremely important. And that was true until the end of the '80s and into the '90s, when a lot of companies, IBM included, changed its own thinking relative to the relationship between the employer and the employee. IBM in the past had very seldom brought anyone in from the outside at very high levels. It was very unusual--you could almost name the names. They went from that to bringing in quite a few people with different experiences into the company.

Certainly out here in Silicon Valley there's a positive notion of going from company to company and learning from that experience. I would say that industry has shifted and now we're much more aligned along the Silicon Valley model: employees feeling free to go from one company to another, and employers feeling they can change the mix and change the environment by bringing in people at significant levels. It will take us several years to figure out the impact of the change, but I think that the bond that occurred between the employer and employee doesn't exist in the same way today as it did years ago.

Sounds like you miss that to a certain extent.
Well, I think it was an easier life. We all have to recognize the fact that it has changed. I think there was a bond that's currently missing. And now that we have these options as an employer, we have to acknowledge the fact that employees have more options than they used to have. So we have to do something to make up for that bond that's now missing--whether it's incentives, or however else we do it.

Here in Silicon Valley, because there's so much access to different companies, I think the workforce is more mobile. You don't have to move from your home--you just change which parking lot you pull into. But I think it's more than just the proximity. From what I'm seeing, the notion of lifetime employment is one that's not as obvious today as it was 30 years ago when I joined the workforce.

Was there something that has socially or politically driven this shift?
I'm not sure I've done enough research to understand what it is. But take the case of IBM, when rather than promoting from within, you bring a CEO from outside. Right at the top you already have someone who has made a career move, and it generates down to the employees who say, "Well, if the CEOs are moving around, shouldn't we also be exercising some of our rights?" And the answer is yes.

I think there were a series of trends. This notion of benchmarking has caused a lot of people to look at different companies. It is much more popular today to take people from one industry, and to move them to another industry if their skill base transfers over and you've done enough benchmarking to know it. Downsizing by itself caused some of this; outsourcing by itself caused some of this. I remember some of the early outsourcing decisions. They were traumatic at the time. Today a lot of companies have outsourcing discussions and it's not considered the same way.

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