The Only Woman in the Room (Still)
Meditations on Tech Across Generations
Dear Daughter,
It is dismaying that “being the only woman in the room” is still a thing.
By the time you and your brother arrived to the professional scene, I was certain these “only woman in the room” stories would be a thing of the past.
Thirty years ago, 40 percent of my law school class was female, and the same was true of my undergrad finance degree program. It seemed a given back then that we women would move up through the ranks and the world would be a different place by now. By now, the girls and boys your age would have grown up with mothers, or aunts anyway, in the career realm, and women my age would be making up 40 percent of the boards of directors and executive ranks of corporate America. Meanwhile, the men would be interested in paving an egalitarian path for their daughters.
This vision of the future has sustained me through the toughest times of my career. The fact that it hasn’t yet played out this way is tough to take.
Last Friday, it happened to me, again. I was in a meeting with a senior government official with a large group of solar developers. My bright green dress was the only spot of color in a roomful of men in dark suits.
This “green dress feeling” is a familiar one.
Here are some best practices for women who still find themselves in this situation.
Be an Irrepressible Force
You are powerful when you work at the intersection of your talents and your passions.
When I was growing up in small-town Iowa, my mother’s friend took us to visit her ad executive daughter in Chicago. Her daughter took me to see her corner office in a busy agency, high in a skyscraper. It was getting dark, and as I looked at all the lighted windows across downtown, it struck me that there was room for a lot of professionals in the world. In high school, I read my father’s Wall Street Journals and Business Weeks, devouring stories — about junk bonds and leveraged buyouts — like they were good novels.
When I was a junior in college, my department head saw promise in me. He took the initiative to call me in to meet with him and two of the business school professors. These were men from the “real world.” They told me they wanted to help me and asked me what I wanted to do, career-wise.
“I’m going to be a corporate takeover artist,” I answered. They exchanged glances and laughed. Gender-specific laughter.
I didn’t budge. When they realized I was serious, they became serious, too. They ended up giving me invaluable advice — “Go to law school” — and then helped me make that happen.
These powerful, well-meaning men, laughing at my dream, could have been an immovable object, an end to my story, had I not been riveted to my vision. It made me an irrepressible force. Something had to give, and it was their initial reaction that gave way.
So, set your intentions and be clear on them. By doing so, many perceived barriers simply give way.
Play the Cards You’re Dealt
When I was a young lawyer, I called my father, in shock over a very sexist client. “He has a real problem,” I said. Dad said it was me who had the problem. I needed to figure out how to be effective with my client, accepting him where he was. I protested the unfairness.
Dad replied, “We didn’t raise you to waste your energy, railing against the cards you were dealt. Being female is not a good card, or a bad card. It’s just a card. Play the cards you’re dealt.” Playing your cards means finding a way to get yourself “dealt into” situations where the real action is. The high-stakes tables.
Join and forge teams who recognize what you bring to the table. Your attributes include a small subset of strengths and weaknesses that come with gender. In a highly functioning team, the members can reinforce each other and neutralize individual weaknesses. I remember negotiations where my team would brainstorm how to be effective with the other side. If external adversaries underestimated me because of gender, we used it to advantage until they realize their mistake. I still find men are overly willing to tell women things that strategically they should keep to themselves. Like confiding their bottom line, if you ask them during a break, early in the negotiations. Work with your team and use others’ preconceptions to your advantage.
As for the sexist client, I asked him if he would share with me his biggest concerns, both on the deal itself and my being assigned to it. I wrote down what he said, and asked if he would review his goals and how we were doing after our first meeting with the other side. His chief gender concern — that the other side would dominate me because I was so “nice” — proved unfounded. I earned an ally in the world.
Don’t Accept Others’ Reasons for Why You Shouldn’t be In the Room
Step over “conventional wisdom” about gender roles.
As an energy executive, my work took me all over the globe. A lot of books, and some of my internal critics, at the time, preached that women couldn’t be effective in other cultures.
My experience could not have been farther from this assumption. People from other countries see Americans as Martians first, separated only after that by gender. Having had to adapt myself to a male corporate culture, my domestic career was an immersion course in cross-cultural effectiveness. I was better, not worse, than my male colleagues at bridging language and cultural gaps. The conventional wisdom was just plain wrong.
Another common reason given for not promoting or assigning women to a leadership role in my era was that a company was “engineering driven.” In your generation, they are doing it again, using STEM as a code word.
We want women to be encouraged and represented in Science, Tech, Engineering and Mathematics. But the idea that what is missing in Silicon Valley is a pipeline full of STEM girls is bunk.
It does not explain or excuse the embarrassing and inexplicable lack of women in the room in 2015.
I can lead a technically driven team not in spite of my lack of a technical degree, but because of the skill sets I bring, including abstract-random ways of brainstorming and seeing, looking radially, and intuiting the connections between various data points. Sure, a strong “operating engineer” type needs to be part of any energy company’s leadership team — but it is folly to assume that every company’s problem set calls for an engineer at the helm. In the world of venture capital, which, by definition, is finance-driven, this defense becomes even more preposterous.
The problem is that if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I have not seen a single company that can succeed by focusing solely on its engineering problems. Every company has a host of strategy, financial, legal, marketing, supply chain, regulatory, political, and human capital problems that can only be solved by a leader who can unleash the potential of a multi-disciplinary team. By definition, successful leaders in these realms must be comfortable with ambiguity and purposeful in exploiting the creative tension of diverse trains of thought.
Get clarity in your own mind on this. Male-dominated industries are not industries where males have some sort of natural edge or capability. And we know that “domination” is not an award-winning leadership style. Men certainly don’t have some corner on being stewards of power, using it for the good of the world, or to empower their own team.
Develop Yourself, No Matter What
Don’t leave your professional development to chance — especially if your industry is male-dominated. Studies have shown that women get promoted based upon their actual, current skill sets, while men get promoted based upon their perceived future potential.
Find a way to demonstrate that you are ready for your boss’s job, while you are doing your own.
Ping yourself every week to write down one thing you are going to do in order to “sharpen the saw.” Hold yourself to it. Whether it is touching base with someone in your network, reading a book that caught your eye, taking a course, or asking your boss for five minutes of very specific, job-related advice, this will flex your curiosity muscles and keep you looking forward.
Whenever you have a performance review, prepare a personal development plan in advance, and share it with your boss. Offer your observations about what you’ve been doing, what you’ve done well, and where you would like to develop yourself further. Most things in your development plan do not need to cost money. I find myself very willing to invest time and money in employees if I understand the context of the “ask.”
For example, I had a promising young engineer who wanted to learn how to build and run a complex financial model. We were in start-up mode, and the development budget was non-existent. He offered to do extra work, under the direction of the finance guy who had the responsibility for financial modeling, in return for the course fees he needed from the company. Irresistible.
You can enlist even the busiest senior folks in your organization to help you develop, but in my experience it is best for both of you if the mentoring is directly related to the work you are doing for or with them. Take on extra assignments, and use them to stretch and grow.
Some of my best mentoring came from reading books. Covey’s Seven Habits taught me how to expand my circle of influence. Collins’ Good to Great taught me that the highest performing leaders paired a ferocious commitment to the goal with great personal humility. A book of Danish proverbs taught me that to know what you don’t know makes you omniscient.
Address Your Fears Before They Burn You Out
It’s important to have conversations in your company about implicit assumptions and norms that are burning you out and wasting your creative energy. Fear of anything is a sign that the culture is off kilter.
Bad cultures affect everyone, but for some reason I tuned into them more than my male colleagues, so I was more inclined to feel the burnout first. Solitary women in an enterprise are the canaries in the coalmine.
I worked for one company that had a culture that rewarded really long office hours, rather than results. There is no surer way to drive out talent. Unnecessarily long office hours are a sign of ineptitude, not commitment and potential. They also drag down everyone’s performance and morale. King of the Mountain is not a leadership strategy.
I define “culture” as a by-product of every act, communication and decision made throughout an organization. An effective culture drives out fear.
Identify what you fear, and decide how to address it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of becoming mindful of your internal dialogue, and mastering it yourself. At other times, you may decide to bring up an assumption you believe is implicit, and by making it explicit, you will be pleasantly surprised. It may be that courage on this front requires three months of savings, or an identified Plan B job, or a decision to gut it out where you are, while you try to address the problem. Deciding to accept the status quo forever will not work. You — the canary — will die and a whole bunch of other talent will go with you.
In cultivating courage and mastering your fear, your natural leadership will emerge. Your voice will become an important asset to yourself and your enterprise. If the culture is corrosive, it may seem career-limiting to speak up. The truth is, you don’t have anything to lose. And in my experience, if you raise the tough issues with courage and consideration, you will gain respect and influence.
Ask the Others to Pitch In
My advice places a big burden on the women in the room. But a lot is at stake. Advances in our civilization depend on us tapping the potential of more than just 49 percent of the human race. Gender bias isn’t just demoralizing, unjust, and beneath a society that calls itself “free.” These conditions simply won’t get us to where we need to be.
As one of the greatest leadership thinkers of all time, W. Edwards Deming taught us in his “total quality management” and “continuous improvement” programs, we can’t just leave you young women working in the system and expect things to change. Meaningful change only happens when we change how things are, by working on the system.
This means that unless change is sought by those that can influence the system — policymakers, corporate shareholders, corporate boards, and CEOs — meaningful change will not occur.
So, how about you, your peers and I enlist today’s leaders, who have grown from fresh-faced law students to be those policymakers and CEOS (and your peer group’s mothers and fathers), to continue to work on the system, so that in another 30 years, my future granddaughter won’t find herself to be the only woman in the room.
