Continuing on the topic of the WSJ conference, I found one of the most thought provoking speakers to be Geena Davis. She founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media http://www.seejane.org. The institute describes itself at “the only research-based organization working within the media and entertainment industry to engage, educate, and influence the need for gender balance, reducing stereotyping and creating a wide variety of female characters for entertainment targeting children 11 and under.” I found this work so interesting because it is directly related to two topics I’ve written about on this blog. One is the insidious biases – these unconscious preferences we have and two – the lack of women entering the technology fields. This research uncovers a potentially major source of these biases as well as job preferences. According to her institute’s research:
Males outnumber females 3 to 1 in family films…this ratio, as seen in family films, is the same as it was in 1946.
Females are almost four times as likely as males to be shown in sexy attire…Generally unrealistic figures are more likely to be seen on females than males.
From 2006 to 2009, not one female character was depicted in G-rated family films in the field of medical science, as a business leader, in law, or politics. In these films, 80.5% of all working characters are male and 19.5% are female, which is a contrast to real world statistics, where women comprise 50% of the workforce.
To summarize, using the infamous words of Woody Allen in Annie Hall – not only is the food bad (the main occupation for women in animated films is princess) the portion are small.
I found the 19.5 (call it 20) % number very sobering. It seems that once we get to that level of penetration by women in particular fields or even levels the urgency for change goes away. No wonder we have become so accepting of this 20% number and even consider that success – subconsciously that’s what we’ve been trained to accept as a norm.
Fortunately Geena Davis has good company working on exposing this issue – Misrepresentation http://www.missrepresentation.org/ is doing a great job exposing issues of gender bias in the media – I love their tagline “you can’t be what you can’t see” – we need to help girls imagine themselves as engineers, programmers and even VP’s and CEO’s
As I’ve found myself concluding in other blog posts where the personal action items is not clear, I’ll wrap up with the point that awareness is the first step. Personal awareness as we consume media (and accompany our children as they consume it) and awareness of how this is impacting our society.
I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to be a member of the WSJ Task force on Women in The Economy – we’ve been meeting the last two days. There have been so many great ideas and speakers – certainly enough to provide blog fodder for a bit.
The conference opened with some interesting data from an extensive study conducted by McKinsey. They examined the pipeline of women in the Fortune 500 from entry level professional to CEO. Women comprise 53% of entry level professionals, 37% of early to middle management, 26% of VP and senior management, 14% of Executive Committee members and 3% of CEO’s.
Generally, women are entering the professional work force – they are just not making it through the funnel in great enough numbers. In fact they leak out at every stage. There are myriad reasons – women opting into support roles, exiting completely when perhaps they could stay if there were part time or more flexible work during childrearing times, lack of desire to be in the C-suite not to mention bias in the system. Focused programs can help – there were a significant number of companies within the survey with better results keeping upwards of a 30% female participation in the C-suite.
Interestingly, the technology firms in the study had a quite different profile – their pipeline had a very different shape. They had relatively fewer women in entry level (30%) but more consistent participation throughout. Top of funnel was low but the funnel leaked less. The message for us in technology is quite clear – encouraging women to study technology fields and to recruit women business students into the technology world.
There is improvement but the rate of change is slow. For instance, at the current rate of improvement in the federal legislative branch we’ll get to parity in 500 years. The percentage of women on the boards of F-500 companies is also relatively stable at a low number (after some improvement in the past). I learned that one reason for this is that the average tenure of a F-500 board member is 14 years. That certainly slows the rate of change.
Overall I found this data eye opening. The US is behind the top 10 OECD countries on metrics of women participating in the economy and government and the improvement is simply not happening fast enough. On the positive side it has been incredible to be here. Being in a room full of successful women executives, professors and political leaders – all of whom have incredibly busy calendars – yet took time to focus on this issue makes me optimistic about the future despite the numbers showing slow progress. That attention and focus and commitment to give back to others inspired me to think about what more can I do, both through my role at SugarSync as well as in the community at large.
This headline caught my eye last week: “The Marriage Plot: Single CEOs Make for Riskier Investments”.
The article, which appeared on CNNMoney summarized a study conducted by two Wharton professors and released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study tracked 1500 public companies and found that the stocks of companies headed by executives who are single are riskier than shares of companies run by married CEO’s. “The companies with an unmarried CEO tended to spend more money on things like R&D, acquisitions and other investments that could more rapidly increase the size of their businesses, but also had a higher chance of blowing up. The result was a more volatile stock price.”
At first I found myself smiling reading this – after all, being married for 27 years and seeing a study that has data showing that marriage is tied to positive business results was appealing. Even the thesis that tied that better performance to a steadier, more spendthrift and less impulsive hand at the tiller felt good.
But I stopped myself – doesn’t this pose a risk of leading to the same bias issue I’ve written about? Where does one go with a study like this – should a board of directors therefore give preference to married CEO’s in their hiring? The problem, of course, is it focuses on a demographic label rather than the person’s individual characteristics. The board needs to assess the appropriate degree of growth through acquisitions, investments in R&D and other types of leadership that are needed by the company. They should combine this assessment with the other objective factors in their CEO selection and chose accordingly.
Furthermore, the best CEO’s will modulate their propensity to take risk to be appropriate to the company and it’s situation. Those CEO’s skills will be flexible for the situation. For instance HP today requires different strategies than those required of Meg Whitman at EBay in 1999. Maggie Wilderotter (CEO of Frontier Communications) is leading a >$4B market cap communications company while she previously lead a venture back startup – Wink Communications.
Timing also affects these assessments. When I worked at Check Point, pundits would often criticize the company and its CEO Gil Shwed for not being aggressive enough either in terms of marketing and R&D spend or acquisitions – and as such comparing the company unfavorably to Cisco or Juniper. A quick check of the Nasdaq shows how temporal these views can be. Check Point was able to cleanly weather the economic downturn and is now well positioned for growth significantly outperforming those company’s stocks over the last 5 years.
As I look back on my three years as CEO of SugarSync I believe that in the first year, stabilization and conservative management were particularly important to build employee and customer confidence. In hindsight, during the following two years I think we probably could have handled a bit more risk and aggressiveness and I am changing some of our strategies accordingly. How correct this assessment is won’t be known for some time.
Last night we hosted the 16th Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner, and we had a blast! The first Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner was hosted in 2008 at Google, and ever since they have been organizing great events focused on giving women in the Silicon Valley a place to meet, network, and discuss the topics that are facing women in technology today.
As many of you know, I have a deep personal interest in the presence of women in technical fields and the advancement of women in the workplace. I started my personal blog – The Kitchen Sync – as a place where I can openly discuss these topics, as well as tackling subjects like work/life balance, travel, and other passions of mine.
So when we had the opportunity to host the Girl Geek Dinner, I jumped on it! I was excited for a couple of reasons, but primarily:
I believe that women in the Silicon Valley need more venues where they can meet, network, and support each other – so I applaud the mission of Girl Geek Dinners in making this happen.
I have been extremely fortunate in my career, and have learned a lot along the way, and I value the opportunity to mentor people whenever I can.
And, from a company perspective, SugarSync is growing like crazy and we have a ton of open positions we are trying to hire for, and I viewed this event as a great way to meet a bunch of smart, qualified women.
We were asked to speak to the group, so after I addressed the crowd, I invited Paula Long one of our Board members and the co-founder and VP of Engineering of EquaLogic (acquired by Dell) up to share her thoughts on how to build your career and be successful as a woman in technology. Overall it was a spirited conversation. The group had a ton of great questions, and I feel like we all got to learn a little more about each other.
We had over 110 attendees show up for the event, and we had a great time speaking with and getting to know you all. Thanks again for attending, and we look forward to hosting more geeky events (regardless of gender) in the future!
Here are a few pictures – the full event album will be on our SugarSync Facebook page soon.
Several months ago I wrote a post about Performance or Potential. It was a response to a research report finding that women are promoted based on performance, and men based on potential.
I believe we’re seeing a corollary to that type of thinking in a recent NY Times article about Sheryl Sandberg. While a good chunk of the article was positive, the following section had a decidedly negative tone:
“Some say her aim-high message is a bit out of tune. Everyone agrees she is wickedly smart. But she has also been lucky, and has had powerful mentors along the way. After Harvard and Harvard Business School, she quickly rose from a post as an economist at the World Bank to become the chief of staff for Lawrence H. Summers, then the Treasury secretary. After that, she jumped to Google and, in 2008, to Facebook.
She is married to Dave Goldberg, a successful entrepreneur and the C.E.O. of SurveyMonkey, which enables people to create their own Web surveys. She doesn’t exactly have to worry about money. Or child care. (She and her husband have two young children.)
To some, Ms. Sandberg seems to suggest that women should just work harder while failing to acknowledge that most people haven’t had all the advantages that she’s had… ‘“I think she’s had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition,” Ms. Hewlett continued. “Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they’re actually derailed by other things, like they don’t have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.’”
The Atlantic had a great article that pointed out a double standard – why is luck even brought up here when it is rarely mentioned in similar articles about successful men in business?
In addition to agreeing with the content in theAtlantic article, I started thinking about all those “lucky” women (including me) who also went to Harvard Business School. What has become of them? How many of us are there and what are we doing now?
I went into the HBS alumni directory for my class -‘88 (Sheryl is ‘95) and did a bit of informal research. The class of ‘88 is about 25% women. It’s hard to know exactly but judging by how many list a job in the directory it appears that about half of the women are working outside the home. The next question is how many of that working group have children. This is tricky, as it’s not listed explicitly. For my husband Steve and my two sections (where we know and are in touch with many of the people) it seems to be that approximately half of the “working half” have children.
What can we conclude from this? Well it turns out that the “luck” of going to HBS does not alone make one worth $1.6B while being married with two kids. In fact, and on a very serious note, it is a minority of those lucky HBS attendees that are even in the demographic category of doing what she is doing – working full time while raising young children, not to mention achieving her extraordinary level of success.
Given the fact that so many of the HBS women graduates are not working, I believe the messages she has been delivering at TED and in the Barnard commencement speech are highly relevant to this group. Be proud, be ambitious, stay in the game. I also can’t help but wonder about her point that the successful women are less well-liked then successful men as many of my career-oriented female classmates are not married. We need to work to change this in our society.
Another sore point for me in this NY Times article is the implication that having a high income means that you don’t have to worry about childcare. Of course, the challenge is even greater for the working poor and even middle class but I know of no mother, regardless of income level, who does not worry about childcare. Finding the right childcare, dealing with transitions, worrying if all is ok at home. Managing a high-powered career while parenting young children is simply hard work leaving not a lot of free time or sleep for Sheryl or anyone else. That’s why I believe that changes in business and government policies such as parental leave for both parents are so important. Plus, role modeling, showing working new moms that it can be managed and our children can thrive, is critical as well.
In her Barnard address Sheryl said that our generation of women hasn’t broken through to the CEO level in great enough numbers despite the good fortune of education. The HBS class of 1980 was 20% women and they are at prime CEO age. We certainly do not have 20% penetration in the large company CEO ranks – for instance only 18 of the Fortune 500. What needs to change to increase these numbers? That is a huge topic and inevitably will involve many elements both individual and societal but the suggestions Sheryl makes in her speeches can only help.
I hope I have the humility to appreciate my good fortune and the friends and family who have helped me along the way. I’ve talked about many of those people, in particularly my husband and parents, in this blog. My education was a gift from my parents – I hope they know how much I appreciate it. My husband has truly been a partner in all aspects of my life. SugarSync is a team effort by all of the employees, investors and executive team. But nobody but me walked out the door in the morning and returned to work with a six week old sleeping sweetly at home. Nobody was in my head as I lay awake figuring out how to solve a business problem or woke up with an early alarm to finish a project before getting the kids off to school. I take pride in what I have done to bring SugarSync to the place it is today and will be proud of us achieving even more success in the future. I’m even prouder of my children and the people they are. I hope that the lens through which these accomplishments are viewed will be less biased than the lens trained on Sheryl now.
It is a privilege, and perhaps even lucky, to have professional parents, a great education and generous mentors. What the numbers and common sense show, however, is that what is noteworthy for Sheryl Sandberg and what is deserving of coverage in the NY Times and elsewhere is not her luck, but her hard work, talent, drive and contributions.
A key part of parenting is being a role model for your children. I believe that one of the reasons I have been comfortable with my decision to work full-time while my children are growing up is that that is what I saw my mother do. I never felt like it was a negative having a mom who worked. In fact I was (am) proud of her and even felt special talking about her work in school and with my friends. I think its no coincidence that my husband is comfortable with this situation as well – his mother worked – at first as a teacher, then as an attorney, then as a college professor and part-time judge. In fact my mother is still working, half of her time as medical-director of a drug rehabilitation program and part time seeing patients in the office.
So part of this cycle relates to our daughters and daughters-in-law. Do we want them to feel empowered to and comfortable pursuing a career? Do we want them to be financially self-sufficient? Independent even if they never marry or something happens to their husband or marriage?
Beyond role modeling there is also the exposure to mom’s specific career. In my case – with both my parents as physicians that exposure was not as much about business but I certainly learned a lot about medicine. I learned how doctor’s offices were run, I learned about many diseases and treatments because my parents discussed medical issues, including answering our questions, frequently around the dinner table. I worked two summers in a nursing home where my dad was medical director. Had I wanted to be a doctor this would have been a huge leg up.
In our house, the dinner table discussions about our day are much more about business – how Steve and I are building our companies, what issues are we facing. It is a great opportunity for the kids to learn about what life is like in a silicon valley company and how we handle the issues of the day. In our house they have 2 sources of this information. As the kids became teenagers these conversations were great for me too as they are discerning consumers of technology! I’ll never forget the evening while I was working for Yahoo – we had just started hearing the rumors of the impending launch of Gmail with unlimited storage – Yahoo was still offering 5mb (yes the “m” is correct). Todd quickly pronounced that we would lose all our customers if we didn’t up our offer!
I think it is no accident that two of the very small number of Fortune 500 women CEO’s grew up in the same household as sisters. They were brought up on a diet of business skills and were encouraged early on to be ambitious. All of my children have spent time in my offices over the years. Mostly brief visits – stopping in while I catch up on a few things. Todd and Margot actually did some office and tech support work during summers – I think this is a great chance to learn about the business world.
More generally, I think my children got an extra dose of independence training – starting young with getting dressed and making school lunches themselves to starting homework and problem solving after school. I believe their nannies and (in Derek’s case) daycare experiences exposed them to new people and ideas and challenged and therefore developed their communication skills. At a more subtle level I think that seeing a mom as a working person confirms for children the sense that people—especially women—are multidimensional. Studies have also shown that both boys and girls have more egalitarian attitudes towards marriage, family and men and women’s roles when their mothers were employed which could help their future marital happiness. Finally, I believe that having a working mom helps prepare children for their future where both they and their spouses are statistically likely to both be working.
When we discuss the challenges of balancing family and a career and the desirability for a mother to work full-time outside the home we often hear about the negatives. In my experience as a daughter and a mother I must say that I see many positives. I’m not talking about the ones the psychologists study and report on (e.g. that children of working moms have higher reading scores and better social skills – there are negatives on this front as well). What is on my mind are the specifics – what specific experiences did my children have because of my career.
The one that is most obvious for our family is travel and international experiences. I was interested in international relations since college and international marketing and sales since I started my business career. When I started my career here in the valley I wasn’t able to find a position focused on international marketing from the start so I began in product and channel management but I was looking for international opportunities from the start.
I worked quite a bit with the European sales teams at Informix then when Informix started its Latin American division I joined. I ended up moving to Sao Paolo for six months to open the Informix office and Derek (6.5), Todd (4) and our nanny Susan came with me. It was an incredible experience for all of us. The boys got to experience school in Brazil, play on a local youth soccer team and briefly live an urban lifestyle. We traveled every other weekend all over the country. The school was an international one so we made friends with people from all over the world.
Steve and his partner Gus Spanos had just formed a company to purchase 2 Miller beer distribution franchises so they were incredibly busy. Of course the separation was very hard on all of us, especially the boys, but Steve was able to come down and spend 2 weeks with us in the middle. We took a great trip to the Amazon and several other regions of Brazil.
I wrote previously about my experiences traveling with Margot in Latin America. I continue to take the kids with me when possible. Margot joined me at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona two years ago and last year Adam, Margot came with me to Tokyo. We’ve also had innumerable international visitors to our home for dinners and meetings and the kids have gotten to know them. I believe that there is something different and more educational being exposed to a foreign country and culture when connecting through work (or volunteering) rather than simply as a tourist. You get to know people and about their day-to-day lives – not just the tourist sites, although those are great too which brings me to my next point…
There is that second order benefit. I’ve racked up literally millions of frequent flyer miles – it’s been several years since I received this card in the mail. Steve has earned his share of miles as well and that has funded the air part of a good many of our trips – South Africa, Vietnam, Europe, Peru – you name it. Of course there is the downside to all this travel. Time away from home is not without consequences – there are things I’ve missed and it’s hard on the spouse at home. But even that has some benefits – the kids learn a bit of independence and see that Dad is competent to keep them fed and productive and even tucked in with bedtime stories at night.
It’s hard to know exactly how these experiences have affected the kids. I have to believe, though, that given how small our world is becoming, familiarity with other places, people and cultures will only be more important. Derek and Todd, as physicians will be taking care of people in a country where more than 10% of the population are immigrants – that percentage is certainly much higher for their likely patient populations during residency. Margot is considering a foreign language major (among many possibilities). Adam is enjoying Spanish 3-honors – who knows where this can lead 🙂
When we talk about entrepreneurs – a certain image comes to mind. This person we imagine usually has a few common elements. She takes a tremendous amount of initiative, is willing to take risks and embodies the leadership to bring together the capital and resources for the organization and the management skills to see the initiative through. They will pursue their goal without regard to the resources they currently have yet they must be practical and action-oriented.
With the success and attention garnered by several highly successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of or barely graduated from college to start their companies, we begin to think that that is the typical entrepreneurial model and that, given their youth and relative inexperience, their success was inborn.
The reality though is that – while these young, apparently inborn entrepreneurs are exciting – the data show that they are still rare exceptions, as opposed to the norm, and that in fact entrepreneurs are created by a life full of experiences.
A friend sent me this Forbes article – 30 Under 30 – with the question – why the focus on youth? It is a really good question. My first thought when I read the article was where was I and what was I doing before I turned the dreaded 30, after which, implicitly in this article – one’s accomplishments become theoretically less impressive.
So let’s turn the clock back to just before 30. December 1993 – I had three children (Adam was born when I was over the hill at 31) ages eight, five and six months. I was working at Informix as a sales manager for the Central American, Caribbean and Andean regions of Latin America. Steve had just bought two Miller beverage distributorships (in Watsonville) and was finishing law school at Berkeley. We lived in a ranch house in a family-oriented neighborhood of Los Altos, CA. The kids were doing well – the boys immersed in school, sports and music and Margot was thriving and, thankfully, sleeping through the night. Life was great but “x” busy. I put an “x” because even in synonym.com I can’t find a word that adequately qualifies busy.
The physical energy and lack of sleep required to keep up with three kids and a job with intensive travel is something that could be hard for me to maintain today. However, the mental energy and stress of a startup is something that I would not want to have shared with my young children. So for me I’m glad for the order in which the different stages of my family and the different stages of my career occurred. More importantly, I always knew I wanted to have several (well actually four) children. Waiting until one’s mid 30’s (or later) post entrepreneurial success to try to have a family is playing with fire and sadly I’ve seen many of my female colleagues get burned. You can be an entrepreneur at any age. You can’t get pregnant at any age. And BTW, one can maybe be a dad at any age but is that what you want?
In my case, however, I was not deliberately working in a big company rather than being an entrepreneur. Frankly it didn’t occur to me to jump ship at that point. I was on an incredibly exciting and steep leaning curve at work. Learning sales (I had switched from marketing to carrying a quota), learning to do business internationally, learning fluency in Spanish and Portuguese (for more details on the logistics see here). As long as the learning stayed steep and the company environment positive I was happy to stay (It turns out that I am using all of those skills today, but that was a previous post). So while I am enjoying entrepreneurship more than big company life, those big company jobs were pretty exciting, I developed skills, networks and great friendships.
Our American society, not just in business, does glorify youth. I probably will not be able to change this and anyhow, I must acknowledge that it is jaw-droppingly impressive what the 30 people under 30 in the article above have accomplished in such a short amount of time. There may be some advantage to youth in their ability to imagine or identify major innovations. Perhaps because they have learned fewer limitations or perhaps there may be some innovation advantage to having lived only in the Internet-enabled world.
Nonetheless, here is what my personal value system says we should glorify for entrepreneurs. It should be simply what they have done and how they did it – not how old they were whey they accomplished it. Did they create a product or service that improved people’s lives? Did they make a great return for their investors? Did they treat their customers fairly and with respect? Did they take care of their employees and support their personal and family goals? I think the most important criteria is not how old or young you are or the color of your skin, religion or gender. Did you build something of lasting value? Were you (and your team) mensches* in doing so. That is my goal at SugarSync.
*Mensch (Yiddish: מענטש mentsh, from German: Mensch “human being”) means “a person of integrity and honor”
Last week was an interesting one in the “why aren’t there more” and “should there or shouldn’t there be more” women CEO’s. Lots of posts and a lot of anger on all sides and finally some humor. For a sampling see here:
I got super turned off by the anger and then fortunately a few rational posts were written and published so I decided to move on from this flurry. The fact that I had a super busy week was probably part of it. I spoke at a conference in Half Moon Bay and we are knee deep in 2012 planning at SugarSync.
To top off this busy week I had committed to attend an event sponsored by Dell, the “Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN).” They had invited me to a big event they organized in Brazil last spring. Although typically eager for a chance to go back to Brazil I couldn’t make that trip work in my schedule. Last weeks event was logistically easier – a cocktail party in San Francisco, but I must say by Thursday evening, I was pretty tired and the idea of a networking event where I knew nobody seemed a stretch. Fortunately I HATE the idea of cancelling last minute so I didn’t.
Dell’s VP of Corporate Marketing, Kelly McGinnis, hosted the networking event at her home. There were probably about 30-40 women there. Well, first off, it was an incredibly friendly group. Plus, it turns out that when nobody at the party knows each other it’s very easy to meet people and strike up conversation. It seemed like each person I met was nicer and even more interesting than the last person. Many good business connections were being made all over the place. I talked to several potential partners on the business development side, agencies, and several of the women’s companies were even interested in SugarSync for Business accounts. The women there were at all stages of growing their companies and their families and lots of advice was shared on both topics ☺. Dell is organizing the next major DWEN event in India and expecting the quality of the attendees to be as good as this event I really look forward to attending.
Kudos to Dell who is an important business partner of ours for sponsoring this program. Lots of business was getting done which certainly in a small way and possibly in a large way helped the women entrepreneurs and their companies. Most importantly, this event was a good reminder to focus on doing not whining – better results happen and it’s a lot more fun!
Laura Yecies | The Kitchen Sync 