Though industry numbers don’t yet reflect it, I have to say now is a very exciting time for women in tech. Why? Because for the first time in my career, there is an active conversation taking place about achieving gender and overall diversity in our industry.
This was illustrated yet again this past week by the “Women in Tech Executive Roundtable 2015” hosted by Silicon Valley’s venerable Churchill Club.
I was honored to be one of the speakers, joining a panel of five amazing and inspirational women for the breakfast event in Palo Alto, which brought us together with an active audience of the Valley’s women in tech – and even a few men, who were brave enough to join us. (And I don’t use the word “brave” in a negative way – but in the best possible meaning – as in it was encouraging to see them showing up and participating in a discussion on women’s issues.)
You can find the Churchill Club video on their YouTube Channel here.
The bottom line, as my co-panelist Julie Hanna, the executive chair of Kiva and newly named Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurism, so eloquently describes it: the discourse on gender equality is not just a women’s issue, it needs to be a question for humanity.
As fellow panelist Amity Millhiser, Managing Partner at PwC, noted: “Think about our daughters and how do we want them to think about diversity?” I will paraphrase her here: but in addition to it being a justice issue, gender equality is a “success” issue.
There is no denying that women still lag in STEM education, tech jobs, equal pay, and the C-suites and boardrooms. But the numbers also tell another story. As I was reminded earlier last week by a new study on IT industry and gender diversity by The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT): Companies with women on their executive boards outperformed companies will all-male executive boards. Gender-diverse management teams also showed superior return on equity, debt/equity ratios, price/equity ratios, and average growth.
The NCWIT analysis of 2,360 companies corroborates statistics on women-led company performance findings in a study Babson College Research last year, which I’ve written about previously.
The place where gender bias is most prevalent tends to be at executive and boardroom levels and in the VC funding process — where women have the smallest presence (and somehow seem to be “heard differently” than males – as many of my colleagues on the panel have witnessed).
Another salient point made by our discussion group that I, myself, identify with is how we as women are sometimes part of the problem. For example, the audience asked the panel about “cattiness” in the workplace, and why women can be jealous of other women’s success.
Julie Hanna spoke to the dichotomy and “strangeness” of being an engineering-geek woman, who had predominately worked with men, then going to working with other women and encountering a new kind of fear. “It’s like we have to, on a primal level, learn to recognize one of our own and know we/they mean no harm.”
Dr. Tanja Rueckert, Executive VP & Chief Operating Officer Products & Innovation for SAP further underscored: “Remind yourselves to hire for diversity” and for female VCs to invest in female startups.
I believe, much as one panelist reminded us – as Madeleine Albright famously said: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
It is also my strong belief, that as women, 1) we all have an inherent responsibility to educate ourselves what diversity means and why diversity is important and 2) vote with our pocket books – only work with and support companies that support diversity.
Here are some other key pieces of advice from the panel:
- Always be yourself
- Don’t apologize for your success; take credit when credit is due
- Accept feedback, and don’t take criticism personally
- Be supportive, not jealous of other women
- Women need both women and men to sponsor, mentor and support them
And by the way, if you are in Silicon Valley and want to stay on top of insights and trends to empower women, and to help create a new conversation in the year ahead, please check out the Churchill Club. It is an extraordinary non-profit organization with a rich history of bringing together the best and brightest in Silicon Valley in conversations that ignite change – and it’s also a mecca for industry networking!
