Much of my work is focused on helping women and families get out of poverty because that’s where I feel I can make the biggest impact. I also want all women to be able to develop our talents, contribute our gifts, and flourish. Gender equality benefits all women, no matter our level of education, privilege, or accomplishment, in the home or the workplace.
Women in the workplace is a vast topic. So much has been said and written on it that it’s impossible to know it all, and yet most of us know the issues personally because we’ve lived them. I’m sharing here my experiences in a workplace and industry that I know well, drawing some lessons that apply broadly, hoping to sketch the outlines of the workplace of the future where women will be able to flourish as ourselves without sacrificing our personalities or personal goals. I’m giving special emphasis to my time at Microsoft because the stories I will tell you from those days formed many of my views on the workplace—and also because the tech industry has disproportionate power to shape the future.
One of the most influential figures in my professional life was a woman I met only once. During spring break of my last year at Duke, I flew home to Dallas to pay a visit to IBM, where I had worked several summers during college and grad school. I had an appointment with the woman I’d be working for if I took IBM’s offer of a full-time job, which I expected to do.
The woman greeted me warmly, offered me a seat in her office, and, after a few minutes of courteous conversation, asked me if I was ready to accept her offer. I was a bit more nervous than I expected when I said, “Actually, I have one more place I plan to interview with, this small software company in Seattle.” She asked if I would mind telling her which one, and I said, “Microsoft.” I began to tell her that I still expected to take IBM’s offer, but she cut me off and said, “If you get a job offer from Microsoft, you have to take it.”
I was stunned. This woman had spent her career at IBM, so I had to ask, “What makes you say that?” She said, “The chance for advancement will be incredible there. IBM’s a great company, but Microsoft’s going to grow like mad. If you have the talent I think you have, the chance you will have there to advance as a woman will be meteoric. If I were you and they made me an offer, I would take it.”
This was a pivotal moment for me, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a passionate advocate for women in tech—I want to pay forward the generosity of my mentors and role models.
When I flew into Seattle for my interviews, I was still pretty sure I would go back and work at IBM. Then I met some of the people at Microsoft. One of the more memorable guys greeted me with drumsticks in his hands and drummed his way through our whole interview—on his desk, on the walls, all over his office. It wasn’t something he did with just women; it was something he just did. I had to raise my voice to be heard, but he was listening. I thought it was kind of funny, actually, and eccentric. You can get away with eccentric if you’re great at what you do, and it seemed everyone I met was great.
I loved the pulse, the electricity, of the place. Everyone was so passionate about what they were doing, and when they talked about their projects, I had a feeling I was seeing the future. I had written a lot of code in college, and I loved it, but this was a much higher plane for me. I was like a girl playing youth soccer meeting the US Women’s World Cup Team. I loved hearing them talk about how people were using their products, what they hoped to do next, how they were changing the world.
At the end of the day, I called my parents and said, “My gosh, if this company offers me a job, I will have to take it. There’s just no way I can’t take it.”
Then I went off to spring break with friends in California, and my parents went off to the library to look up this Microsoft company. My mom and dad were excited about the idea that I might come back home to Dallas and work, but they always said they wanted me to go where adventure and opportunity led me. That’s the path they took. I want to take a moment here to tell you about them, how they met, and how I learned from them to follow my dreams.
My parents both grew up in New Orleans. My dad’s father owned a machine shop, which in the 1940s was focused on making machine parts for the war effort. The shop’s profits were the sole income for the family, and my grandparents didn’t have a dime to send my dad to college. Luckily, though, my dad attended a Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers, and a Brother there became his mentor and kept telling him, “You have to go to college.” The word of a Brother carried weight in my dad’s house. So the fall after my dad graduated from high school, his parents put him on a train to Georgia Tech in Atlanta with his newspaper route earnings and a jar of peanut butter.
Once in college, my dad split his time between studying in Atlanta and working in Dallas, where he got a job with an aerospace company. That’s how he earned the money to put himself through college, and that’s how he eventually ended up working at LTV Aerospace on the Apollo program.
When my dad came home to New Orleans for Christmas after his first quarter at Georgia Tech, two Dominican nuns decided he needed a date during the holidays—Sister Mary Magdalen Lopinto, who was a mentor of my dad’s and had given him jobs during high school, and Sister Mary Anne McSweeney, who was my mom’s aunt. (She was very significant in my life. I called her Auntie growing up. She taught me how to read, and I remember trying on her habit once when I was little!) The sisters were best friends, and they were amused that my father had recently had two girlfriends who both left him for the convent. My great-aunt, Sister Mary Anne, told her friend about my mom, who for a while had attended a juniorate high school as a candidate for the sisterhood. They decided she was the one for my dad.
Sister Mary Magdalen called my dad and said, “You don’t have any girlfriends anymore. You sent them both off to the convent. So we’re going to send you to this house on South Genois Street, and you will meet a girl, Elaine, who’s already been to the nunnery and come out, so you won’t lose her the way you lost the others.”
So my dad went to South Genois Street and met my mom.
She said, “They called me and asked me if I would be willing to go out with this guy whom I’d never met, and I thought, Well, he can’t be too bad if nuns are suggesting that I date him.”
A few days later they went out for a date on The President, a big multi-deck boat with a stern paddlewheel that cruised up and down the Mississippi River. It must have gone well. They dated for five years while my dad was in college. Then my dad got a scholarship to do graduate work in mechanical engineering at Stanford, so they got married and drove out to California, where my mom, who never went to college, supported them both with her income as an administrator for a company in Menlo Park. When they moved back to Dallas, my mom was pregnant with my sister, Susan, their first child, and right away my dad was working on the Apollo program and NASA was racing to land a man on the moon. My mom said that she remembers him working almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Some days he would go to work and come home three days later, getting brief naps on his office couch.
That left absolutely everything to my mom. She ran the house. She raised four kids. And when my parents started a residential real estate investment business so they could afford to pay for us kids to go to any college we could get into, my mom ran the business during the day. My dad contributed hugely in the evenings and on weekends, no question, but my mom’s to-do list every single day when she was working on the business was just unreal. How she juggled it all, I have no idea. (But I’ve noticed now, looking back, that for all my mom did to raise four kids and run the house, it’s when my parents ran their real estate business together that they gained more equality in their marriage.)
My mom and dad knew from their own lives the pull of opportunity, and they had done their research at the library and were ready to support my move to Seattle when the Microsoft recruiter called my home and reached my mom. Mom, who is all of about five feet, with her sweet southern accent, said, inappropriately, “Oh, please can’t you tell me if you’re going to give Melinda a job offer?” And the recruiter said, “Well, I’m really not supposed to do that.” So she put the charm on and asked him again, and he caved and said, “Well, in fact, we are going to make her an offer.” So Mom jotted down the details on a small notepad (which she saved and I still have), then started calling me in California. As soon as she reached me with the message, I called Microsoft and accepted.
I was thrilled!
A few months later, I flew to Seattle for an orientation with my new employer. I was in Microsoft’s first class of MBAs, and the company decided to have the ten of us come out for a visit and figure out which group we should join at the start. Our first session was in the boardroom—the biggest conference room they had; that’s how small the company was back then, about 1 percent of the size it is today. As I looked around the table, I saw only men. That didn’t seem weird; majoring in computer science in college got me used to being in rooms full of men. But then the vice president of applications marketing came in to talk, and as he was presenting, the guy sitting next to me, the same young age I was and fresh out of Stanford Business School, got in an all-out debate with this VP. This wasn’t just a spirited exchange; it was a brash, escalating face-off, almost a brawl, and I was thinking, Wow, is this how you have to be to do well here?!
It took me a few years to get my answer.
When I started work, I realized instantly that my mentor at IBM had it right. I got opportunities at Microsoft there was no possible way I would have gotten anywhere else. Three weeks into my start, I’m 22 years old flying to New York for a meeting and I’m running the meeting. I’d never been to New York. I’d never even hailed a cab!
It was the same for all of us at Microsoft. We laughed about it later, but it was scary. One friend told me his manager came in and said, “I want you to figure out higher ed,” and he said, “What do you mean, figure out higher ed?” and the manager said, “What do you mean, what do I mean?” It was not a place for people who needed a lot of guidance. We were climbing the mountain without a map, and we were building the mountain without instructions. And we were all madly excited about what we could help people do with software.
Our customers were just as excited as we were, so the opportunities kept coming. I started out as product manager for Microsoft Word, then became group product manager for a series of products. Then marketing manager for a larger set of products. (“Products,” by the way, was the in-house term for software programs.) Then group marketing manager. Then I wanted to focus on the product, not just the marketing, so I became product unit manager for Microsoft Publisher. That involved managing teams doing the testing, development, and all the things that go into creating a product. And guess what—when you’re that young and get that much opportunity, you get the opportunity to make mistakes, too, and I took full advantage of that! I was the group product unit manager for Microsoft Bob. (You don’t remember Microsoft Bob?!) We hoped it would make Windows more user-friendly. It was a flop. The tech critics killed it. We’d already announced the product and knew we faced some headwinds before our first public demo. So I went onstage for that event wearing a T-shirt that said MICROSOFT BOB on the front and had a bright red bull’s-eye on the back. They hit the target. I got pounded. But you just can’t put a value on what you learn when you stand up as the face of a project that failed. (There was a joke in the company that you didn’t get promoted until you had your first big failure. Not entirely true, but useful solace in difficult times.)
Mercifully, most of my other failures weren’t as public as this one, or as painful. But all those failures were useful. In one sequence of missteps, I made the mistake of expensing something I wasn’t allowed to expense. Yikes! Not something that a good Catholic girl who sits in the front row and gets good grades ever wants to do—especially when she’s the new girl in a male-dominated company. Not just my manager but my manager’s manager came down on me. I tried to explain that I had asked an admin about the procedure. No one cared. No time for that.
Soon afterward, I was in a meeting with the same manager, and he was throwing me questions about how we should price our new product, and I didn’t know a particular number—our cost of goods sold, which is a key number that a product manager should know to the penny. It’s not just that I didn’t know that number. That wasn’t the big issue. The big issue was that I didn’t understand my customers well enough to know what they would be willing to pay. I learned that, from that point on, I needed to know the key numbers—and I’d darned well better know where they came from and why they’re important.
After that meeting, I thought, Wow, I may not survive. This is the top manager in my area. I’m one of the few women, I messed up on my expense report, and I misstepped on this. I remember asking a few people, “Can I ever regain this guy’s trust?” It took me a while, but I rebuilt my relationship with him, and I ended up better off than if I had expensed things properly and knew the number he’d asked for. Nothing sharpens my focus like a mistake.
All these experiences and opportunities made me see why the IBM manager urged me to take the job. It was exhilarating and challenging, and I was learning a ton, but something about it wasn’t right for me. A year and a half into the job, I started thinking about quitting.
It wasn’t the work or the opportunities; they were awesome. It was the culture. It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating. It was as if every meeting, no matter how casual, was a dress rehearsal for the strategy review with Bill. If you didn’t argue strenuously, then either you didn’t know your numbers or you weren’t smart or you weren’t passionate. You had to prove you were strong, and this is how you did it. We didn’t thank each other. We didn’t compliment each other. As soon as something was done, we took little time to celebrate. Even when one of the best managers left the company, he just sent out an email saying he was leaving. There was no party, no group good-bye. It was weird. Just a speed bump as we raced through our day. That was the standard of how you had to be to succeed there—and it felt pervasive in the company. I could do it. I did do it. But it was draining, and I was getting tired of the rough-and-tumble. Maybe I should go work for McKinsey, I thought. McKinsey is a top management consulting firm known for driving its people hard—but not compared to what I was living at the time. I had interviewed with them before accepting the job at Microsoft, and they had called me a few times to check in on me and ask me if I liked where I was. So I nursed that escape fantasy for months, but I couldn’t make myself do it because I really loved what I was doing at Microsoft. I loved building products, I loved staying ahead of the curve, I loved knowing what users needed even before they did—because we saw where tech was going and we were taking it there.
The truth was that I loved the mission and vision of Microsoft, so I said to myself, “Maybe, before I leave this amazing place, I should see if I can find a way to do all the things that are part of the culture—stand up for myself, know the facts, have a spirited debate—but do it in my own style.” From the beginning, instead of being myself, I had been acting in the style of men I perceived were doing well in the company. So the question came to me like an epiphany: Could I stay at the company and be myself? Still be tough and strong, but also say what I think and be open about who I am—admitting my mistakes and weaknesses instead of pretending to be fearless and flawless, and above all finding others who wanted to work the way I did? I told myself, “You’re not the only woman in this company, and you can’t be the only person trying on a false personality to fit in.” So I looked for women and men who were having the same trouble with the culture that I was.
What I realized much later, paradoxically, is that by trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like I didn’t fit in.
I started by reaching out more intentionally to other women in the company, seeking support for the way I wanted to be at the firm. The friend I leaned on most was Charlotte Guyman. Charlotte and I met about eight weeks into my time at Microsoft. I remember the day vividly because the day I met Charlotte was also the day that I met my future father-in-law. We were all at the American Bar Association Conference in San Francisco, where Microsoft had a trade booth, and Charlotte and I were both scheduled to be working there, demonstrating Microsoft Word.
She and I were in different work groups, but we were both told to figure out how Microsoft Word could break into the legal market, where our competition, Word Perfect, had a 95 percent market share. Charlotte was in a new group called channel marketing, and she was trying to market all our products to a given customer set, in this case the legal community. I, on the other hand, was the Word product manager trying to market Microsoft Word to any market. So Charlotte and I were coming at the same goal from two different directions. With some people, that could have turned competitive, but with Charlotte, it wasn’t that way at all. As soon as we realized we had this shared assignment, we opened up to each other: I’ll do this, you do that, and we’ll both do this third thing together. It worked perfectly because we both wanted the same result and we didn’t care about who got credit—we just wanted Microsoft to win.
I arrived at our trade booth first, all abuzz because I loved doing the demo for Word. Then Charlotte showed up, and we were all energy and excitement. I’ve heard that you never actually meet a great friend; you recognize her. That’s how it was with Charlotte. We were instant friends. We had a blast doing the demos, watching each other’s style, learning a ton. Later in the day we spotted Bill’s dad in the hall. He wasn’t hard to pick out; he’s six foot seven. He walked right up to me and I did the product demo for him. I was amazed at how lighthearted he was and how easy he was to talk to, how he made everyone around him comfortable. (Bill and I weren’t dating yet, so I didn’t know the significance of our meeting!)
Overall, I had a fantastic day. It always was that way with Charlotte. In retrospect, I realized that the core of my new effort to become comfortable at the firm was to try to work with everyone in the same way I worked with Charlotte. Arms and heart wide open.
(Charlotte not only wanted to work the same way I did; she had a striking way of critiquing the culture. She once said, “It’s not okay for women to cry at work, but it’s okay for men to YELL at work. Which is the more mature emotional response?”)
As I began to see how I might be myself in the Microsoft culture, I found a group of women who wanted to work the same way I did, and also some like-minded men. By far the most important guy friend of mine was John Neilson. I mentioned John earlier. He was one of my best friends in life, who would die before he turned 40. He and Emmy came with Bill and me on that first trip to Africa in 1993, and John and I responded to that trip in the same way, as we did to so many things. We were both very social people, we’d probably both be called “sensitive” by our colleagues, and we bonded through our efforts to be a part of the culture at Microsoft and also bring some empathy to the work. John was a vital support for me, and I hope I was the same to him. Years later, when I first heard the term “male ally” as a phrase for men who were passionate advocates for women, I thought, That was John.
Connecting with other women and creating our own culture had payoffs beyond anything I’d dreamed of. Charlotte has remained one of the closest friends of a lifetime. John and Emmy Neilson were best friends with Bill and me. Then Charlotte introduced me to Killian, who had just moved to Seattle from Washington, DC, and would found Recovery Café in 2003. Killian is deeply passionate about community and the spiritual life. Her faith tells her to include the excluded, and she brings that faith to life more than anyone else I’ve ever met. When she arrived, she encouraged the conversation the four of us were eager to have. “Okay, when you have more than you need at a material level, what’s next? Where do we go from here? Where do our gifts connect with a need in the world? How do we use our lives to build up our larger human family?”
Charlotte, Emmy, Killian, and I started jogging together every Monday morning as soon as we got our kids to school. Then we decided to add some friends, all women, and form a slightly larger group with a spiritual focus. There are nine of us, and we’ve been meeting on the second Wednesday of the month for almost twenty years now, reading books, taking trips, going on retreats, exploring ways of putting our faith into action. Our Monday jogging foursome is still intact, too, though we do more walking than jogging these days, and try not to dwell on what that might mean!
Every friend I made helped change the culture of the workplace for me, but if I had a breakthrough moment in becoming myself at Microsoft, it was when Patty Stonesifer became my boss and mentor and role model. (As I mentioned earlier, Patty was so trusted and respected by Bill and me that we asked her, as she was leaving Microsoft, if she would become the first CEO of our foundation, which she was for ten spectacular years.) Patty was seen as a star early on at Microsoft. She had her own style, and people flocked to work for her. Her group was a place where people came and wanted to stay because they felt very supported. We could be honest about what our strengths and weaknesses were, about the challenges of growing some new and difficult categories of business. Nobody knew the answers, and if we pretended we knew, we weren’t going to make any progress. We had to be willing to try stuff, kill things that didn’t work, and try something new. And we began to grow a strain of the Microsoft culture that was always there, but we gave it emphasis, and that was the ability to say “I was wrong.” It was amazing to be able to admit weaknesses and mistakes without worrying that they would be used against us.
Working for Patty, I began to develop a style that was really my own, and I stopped suppressing myself to fit in. That’s when I fully realized that I could be myself and be effective. The more I tried it, the more it worked. And it shocked me. As I moved up, and eventually was managing 1,700 people (the whole company was 1,400 people when I started and about 20,000 when I left in 1996), I was getting software developers from all over the company who’d been there for years, and people would say, “How did you get those stars to come work for you?” I got them because they wanted to work in the same way I did.
I found the guts to try it out because I saw it work for Patty, and that’s the power of a role model. She encouraged me to be true to my own style, even if she didn’t know she was having this effect on me. Without Patty, I never would have been able to accomplish the goals I set for myself—not then and not since.
In the midst of my reinvention, probably because life has a sense of humor, I became friends with the Stanford recruit who started the brash exchange with the VP during our orientation visit. One night when we were with a group of friends for dinner, I asked him, “Do you remember that time in the MBA orientation, where you had this all-out brawl with the VP? I couldn’t believe you did that. I know you now, and it just doesn’t seem like you.”
He turned completely red—embarrassed as he could be—and said, “I can’t believe you remember that. The truth is, I had an organizational behavior professor in business school who had just told me the week before that I wasn’t assertive enough and I should try to be bolder. So I was trying it out.”
That was a lesson for me. Men also face cultural obstacles in the workforce that keep them from being who they are. So anytime women can be ourselves at work, we’re improving the culture for both men and women.
That’s how I turned things around for myself at Microsoft—being myself and finding my voice with the help of peers, mentors, and role models. Being yourself sounds like a saccharine prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture. But it’s not as sweet as it sounds. It means not acting in a way that’s false just to fit in. It’s expressing your talents, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing your self-respect. That is power.
If I had to summarize the lessons I learned at Microsoft, where I started work more than thirty years ago, it’s that I reported to a woman who supported my efforts to work in my own style in a culture that rewarded results, which is why I was able to get promoted and do well. If I had tried to do it on my own without colleagues who encouraged me and a boss who supported me, I would have failed. The backing I got at Microsoft a generation ago was something all women should have today. But even now, some women get the opposite. I want to tell you the story of one.
Before I do, I want to be open about something that concerns me. One of the challenges of writing my stories and telling other people’s stories is the risk that I might be seen to be suggesting some equivalence between my stories and theirs. I think the best way to manage that risk is to state flat out that the challenges of the people I highlight in this book far outstrip mine. That’s why they’re in the book. They’re heroes of mine. I’m certainly not equating my efforts to prosper in the Microsoft culture with the efforts of other women to survive and withstand the trials of their workplaces. For so many women in the workplace, “being yourself” is a much tougher challenge than what I faced at Microsoft.
Here’s a story from the world of technology that is far different from mine.
When Susan Fowler started her new job at Uber in 2016, her manager sent her a series of messages trying to talk her into having sex with him. As soon as she saw the messages, she thought that this guy had just gotten himself in trouble. She took screenshots of the conversation, reported him to HR—and learned that she was the one in trouble. HR and upper management told her that this guy “was a high performer,” it was his first offense (a lie), and Susan had a choice: She could switch to a new team or stay and expect a poor performance review from the guy she’d reported.
Susan had grown up in a rural community in Arizona, one of seven children of a stay-at-home mom and a preacher who sold payphones on weekdays. She was homeschooled, so at 16 she started cold-calling colleges and asking what she needed to do to get in. While working as a nanny and a stablehand, she found out how to take the ACT and SAT and submitted a list of books she’d read to Arizona State. They gave her a full scholarship.
Susan eventually transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy and to take more science classes—but administrators tried to keep her from taking physics because she’d had only sixth-grade-level math. She wrote a letter to the university president asking, “Didn’t you give a speech saying Penn is here to help us fulfill our dreams?” Susan won the support of the president and began teaching herself all the math she’d missed out on and then took graduate-level physics courses.
That’s the woman Uber hired. And some of her bosses expected to be able to abuse her and lie to her and suppress her efforts to speak up for herself, but it didn’t work out that way. Susan’s attitude, as she later told The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, was “No. You don’t get to do that.”
Susan transferred to another department, found a new role at Uber she loved, and started receiving perfect performance reviews. But then, because her new manager needed to keep some token women on his team, he began adding hidden negative performance reviews so Susan couldn’t get promoted out of his group. She asked about the negative reviews, and no one would explain them. The reviews not only kept her from pursuing the work she wanted, but they affected her bonus and take-home pay, and made her ineligible for Uber’s sponsorship in a Stanford graduate program she loved.
Susan began filing a report with HR every time she experienced something sexist. Eventually, her manager threatened to fire her for reporting incidents to HR. And Susan and other women endured gratuitous slights, like the company ordering leather jackets for all the male employees but not ordering them for the female employees because, they said, there were so few women at Uber that the company couldn’t get a volume discount.
Meanwhile, women were transferring out, and the percentage of women in Susan’s organization dropped from 25 percent to 6 percent. When she asked what was being done about the plunging number of women, she was told that the women of Uber needed “to step up and be better engineers.”
In one of her last meetings with HR, the rep asked Susan if she ever considered that maybe she was the problem.
When Susan decided to leave Uber, she had a job offer in a week. But after she left, she still faced a decision. Should she forget it or should she speak out? She knew that going public with sexual harassment charges could define people for the rest of their lives, and she worried about that. But she also knew many women at Uber who’d had similar experiences, and if she spoke out, she’d be speaking for them too.
Susan came down on the side of “No. You don’t get to do that.” She wrote a 3,000-word blog post on her year of being abused. The day she posted, it went viral. The next day, Uber hired former attorney general Eric Holder to investigate. After Holder submitted his report, Uber’s CEO was forced to resign, and twenty other people were fired. Soon other women in the tech sector began speaking out, and there were more firings and new policies. One headline said, SUSAN FOWLER’S UBER POST WAS THE FIRST SHOT IN A NEW WAR AGAINST SILICON VALLEY SEXISM.
A few months later, the war spread beyond tech and a few other industries when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke. Women from around the country shared stories of sexual harassment and abuse with the hashtag #MeToo. We adopted activist Tarana Burke’s phrase “Me Too”—which Tarana used in 2006 to build a community of sexual assault survivors—and took it viral. In just twenty-four hours, there were 12 million posts on Facebook alone.
At the end of 2017, Susan was on the cover of Time’s Person of the Year issue along with other prominent women of the #MeToo movement. The magazine called them the “Silence Breakers.”
The women who came forward and spoke up should be celebrated and their numbers expanded. But we also need to support women who are in blue-collar jobs and service-sector jobs, women who don’t have access to social media, whose abusers are not famous, whose stories aren’t interesting to reporters, and who live from paycheck to paycheck. What are their options for fighting back? How can we help them? Every woman who speaks up is a victory—but we need to find a way to make each victory matter to the women who still have no voice.
The #MeToo movement, and every woman and organization that contributes to it and emerges from it, is winning important victories for women and men. But it’s just a start. If we want to broaden and sustain these advances, we have to understand how they happened.
What happened? Why did change take so long, and why then did it come so suddenly? When women hear our own voices in another woman’s story, our courage grows, and one voice can become a chorus. When it’s “he said/she said,” the woman can’t win. But when it’s “he said/she said/she said/she said/she said/she said,” transparency has a chance, and light can flood the places where abusive behavior thrives.
In 2017, the offenders kept lying, but their defenders gave up. They couldn’t hold back the truth, and the dam broke. When women saw that more people were taking the side of the accusers over the abusers, the many stories that had been held inside came pouring out, and the abusers had to go.
When overdue change finally comes, it comes fast. But why did the abusers dominate for so long? Part of the answer is that when women are trying to decide whether we should stand up, we don’t know if others will stand with us. It often takes many women, arms linked, to inspire other women to speak.
Before I met Bill, I was in an unhealthy relationship. The guy encouraged me in some ways but held me back on purpose in others. He never wanted me to eclipse him. He didn’t see me as a woman with my own dreams, hopes, and gifts. He saw me as someone who could play a useful role in his life, so there were certain ways he wanted me to be, and when I wasn’t that way he could be extraordinarily abusive. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I get so angry today when I see women being put down or kept in certain roles. I see myself in them.
When I started my relationship with him, I was young. There was no chance of my being myself or finding my voice at that point in my life. I was confused. I felt awful, but I didn’t understand why. There were enough moments of support to make me want to overlook the abuse and dismiss the feeling that I had to get out. When I look back, it’s clear to me that I had lost a lot of my voice and confidence, and it took me years to see what I had lost and get it back.
Even after it was over, I still didn’t really understand what had been happening until I came to have some healthy relationships. But I never fully grasped the sick power of that abusive relationship until years after it had ended, when I went to a YWCA fundraiser for a women’s and family shelter. A woman in a smart blue business suit stood at the podium and told her story, and that’s the first time I ever said to myself with full understanding, “Oh my gosh. That’s what was happening to me.”
I believe that women who’ve been abused may be quiet for a time, but we never stop looking for a moment when our words will make an impact. In 2017, we found our moment. But we need to do more than identify the abusers; we have to heal the unhealthy culture that supports them.
An abusive culture, to me, is any culture that needs to single out and exclude a group. It’s always a less productive culture because the organization’s energy is diverted from lifting people up to keeping people down. It’s like an autoimmune disease, where the body sees its own organs as threats and begins attacking them. One of the most common signs of an abusive culture is the false hierarchy that puts women below men. Actually, sometimes it’s worse than that—when women are not only below men in the hierarchy but are treated as objects.
In workplaces around the world, women are made to feel that we aren’t good enough or smart enough. Women get paid less than men do. Women of color get paid even less. We get raises and promotions more slowly than men do. We don’t get trained and mentored and sponsored for jobs as much as men do. And we get isolated from one another more than men do—so it can take women a long time to realize that the bad fit we’re feeling is not our fault but a fact of the culture.
One sign of an abusive culture is the view that members of the excluded group “don’t have what it takes.” In other words, “If we don’t have many women engineers here, it’s because women are not good engineers.” It is unimaginable to me both how flawed the logic is and how widely it’s believed. Opportunities have to be equal before you can know if abilities are equal. And opportunities for women have never been equal.
When people see the effects of poor nurture and call it nature, they discourage the training of women for key positions, and that strengthens the view that the disparity is due to biology. What makes the biology assertion so insidious is that it sabotages the development of women, and it relieves men of any responsibility for examining their motives and practices. That’s how gender bias “plants the evidence” that leads some people to see the effects of their own bias and call it biology. And that perpetuates a culture that women don’t want to join.
It’s frustrating to me that women are still facing hostile cultures in many fields today, and I’m especially upset that these issues are keeping women out of the tech industry. These are such exciting jobs. They’re fun. They’re innovative. They pay well. They have a growing impact on our future, and there are more of them every year. But it’s more than that. Tech is the most powerful industry in the world. It’s creating the ways we will live our lives. If women are not in tech, women will not have power.
The percentage of computing graduates who are women has plunged since I was in college. When I graduated from Duke in 1987, 35 percent of computing graduates in the United States were women. Today, it’s 19 percent. There are likely a lot of reasons for the drop. One is that when personal computers made their way into American households, they were often marketed as gaming devices for boys, so boys spent more time on them and it gave boys exposure to computers that girls didn’t get. When the computer gaming industry emerged, many developers started creating violent war games featuring automatic weapons and explosives that many women didn’t want to play, creating a closed cycle of men creating games for men.
Another likely cause is the early view of the ideal computer coder as someone with no social skills or outside interests. This view was so prevalent that some employers used the hiring process to identify candidates who showed a “disinterest in people” and disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” That screened out many women.
Finally—and this shows the gender bias in our culture when it comes to who’s considered fit for a task—when software engineering was seen as more clerical in nature and much easier than the hardware side, managers hired and trained women to do the work. But when software programming came to be understood as less clerical and more complex, managers began to seek out men to train as computer programmers—instead of continuing to hire and train women.
As the number of men in the sector grew, fewer women went into tech. Which made it even harder to be a woman in tech. So even fewer women went into tech, and men began to dominate the field.
Fortunately, there have been some encouraging shifts. The forces that made computer science into a boys’ club are softening, and people in the industry are doing more to counter the gender bias. These changes may have begun moving the trend in the right direction.
Another challenge is the low percentage of women in venture capital, which is even lower than the percentage of women in the computer industry. Venture capital is a crucial source of funding for entrepreneurs who are just starting a business and can’t afford a bank loan. Investors give them the capital they need to grow in exchange for a stake in the business. It can make the difference between failure and huge success.
Only 2 percent of venture capital partners are women, and only 2 percent of venture capital money is going to women-founded ventures. (The amount of venture capital that goes to firms founded by African American women is 0.2 percent.) Nobody can think this makes economic sense. Women are going to have a ton of great business ideas that men are never going to think of. Unfortunately, “Who will have the most exciting business ideas?” is not the question driving the decisions.
When you’re funding start-ups, there is so little data on what works in early-stage investing that the funders give money to the people they know—guys who went to the same schools and go to the same conferences. It’s an old-boys’ club with younger boys. In 2018, Richard Kerby, an African American venture investor, polled 1,500 venture capitalists and found that 40 percent had attended Stanford or Harvard. When there is such a concentration of people from one group, one sector, one set of schools, the impulse to fund people from your own peer networks drives you toward a homogeneous set of firms. When you try to fund outside that network, the firm and the funder might both feel it’s just not a good “fit.”
That’s why I’m investing now in venture capital funds, including Aspect Ventures, that invest in women-led companies and companies formed by people of color. This isn’t charity on my part. I expect a good return, and I’m confident I’ll get one because women are going to see markets that men won’t see, and black and Latina and Asian women will see markets that white entrepreneurs won’t see. I think we’ll look back in ten years and see it was crazy that more money wasn’t flowing toward markets understood by women and people of color.
Gender and racial diversity is essential for a healthy society. When one group marginalizes others and decides on its own what will be pursued and prioritized, its decisions will reflect its values, its mindsets, and its blind spots.
This is an ancient problem. A few years ago I read Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. The book covers the history of human beings, including the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. One of the things that stayed with me was Harari’s description of the Code of Hammurabi, a set of laws that was carved into clay tablets around 1776 BC and influenced legal thinking for centuries, if not millennia.
“According to the code,” writes Harari, “people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Members of each gender and class have different values. The life of a female commoner is worth thirty silver shekels and that of a slave-woman twenty silver shekels, whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth sixty silver shekels.”
One eye of a male commoner was worth twice the life of a female commoner. The code prescribed light penalties for a superior person who committed a crime against a slave, and harsh penalties for a slave who committed a crime against a superior person. A married man could have sex outside marriage, but a married woman could not.
Is there any doubt who wrote the code? It was the “superior” men. The code advanced their views and reflected their interests and sacrificed the welfare of the people they saw as beneath them. If societies are going to elevate women to equality with men—and declare that people of any race or religion have the same rights as anyone else—then we have to have men and women and every racial and religious group together writing the code.
This for me is the defining argument for diversity: Diversity is the best way to defend equality. If people from diverse groups are not making the decisions, the burdens and benefits of society will be divided unequally and unfairly—with the people writing the rules ensuring themselves a greater share of the benefits and a lesser share of the burdens of any society. If you’re not brought in, you get sold out. Your life will be worth twenty shekels. No group should have to trust another to protect their interests; all should be able to speak for themselves.
That’s why we have to include everyone in the decisions that shape our cultures, because even the best of us are blinded by our own interests. If you care about equality, you have to embrace diversity—especially now, as people in tech are programming our computers and designing artificial intelligence. We’re at an infant stage of AI. We don’t know all the uses that will be made of it—health uses, battlefield uses, law enforcement uses, corporate uses—but the impact will be profound, and we need to make sure it’s fair. If we want a society that reflects the values of empathy, unity, and diversity, it matters who writes the code.
Joy Buolamwini is an African American computer scientist who calls herself “a poet of code.” I learned about Joy when her research exposing racial and gender bias in tech began to get coverage in the media. She was working with a social robot some years ago as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech when—in the course of playing a game of peek-a-boo—she noticed that the robot couldn’t recognize her face in certain lighting. She used her roommate’s face to complete the project and didn’t think about it again till she went to Hong Kong and visited a start-up that worked with social robots. The robot there recognized everyone’s face but hers, and hers was the only face that was black. Then she figured out that the robot was using the same facial recognition software her robot at Georgia Tech used.
“Algorithmic bias,” Joy said, “can spread bias on a massive scale.”
When Joy became a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, she tested facial recognition software from IBM, Microsoft, and the Chinese company Megvii and found that the error rate for recognizing light-skinned males was below 1 percent, while the error rate for recognizing darker-skinned females was as high as 35 percent. Joy shared her results with the companies. Microsoft and IBM said that they were already working to improve their facial analysis software. Megvii didn’t respond.
All you have to do is pause and reflect on the various meanings of the word “recognize” to shudder at the idea that the software is slow to recognize people who don’t look like the programmers. Will the software one day tell an agent, “We don’t ‘recognize’ this person; she can’t board the plane, pay with a credit card, withdraw her money, or enter the country”? Will other programs, replicating the biases of the programmers, deny people a chance to get a loan or buy a house? Will software programmed by white people disproportionately tell police to arrest black people? The prospect of this bias is horrifying, but this is just the bias we can predict. What about the program bias that we can’t predict?
“You can’t have ethical AI that’s not inclusive,” Joy said.
African American women are only 3 percent of the entire tech workforce; Hispanic women, 1 percent. Women comprise about a quarter of the tech workforce and hold just 15 percent of the technical jobs. These numbers are dangerously, shamefully low. That’s why I am so passionate about women in tech and women of color in tech. It’s not just that it’s the world’s largest industry. Or that the economy is going to add half a million computing jobs in the next decade. Or that diverse teams in tech lead to more creativity and productivity. It’s that the people in these jobs will shape the way we live, and we all need to decide that together.
I am not saying that women should be given positions in tech that they haven’t earned. I’m saying women have earned them and should be hired for them.
Just about everything I needed to know about the value of women in tech I learned from a man in tech: my dad. My dad was a strong advocate of women in math and science—not just personally for his daughters but also professionally in his career. I told you about the excitement of watching the space launches with him and my family, but just as memorable for me as a kid was meeting some of the women on my dad’s teams. After working on the Apollo space program, he worked on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station, and he recruited women very intentionally for each one of these programs. Whenever he was able to hire a woman mathematician or engineer, he shared his excitement at home with us. There weren’t very many women available, he told us, and his group always did better when he could get a woman on the team.
My dad began to see the extra value of women in the 1960s and ’70s. There wasn’t much data to support him on this back then, but there is now—a ton of it, and it’s impressive. Here’s an example: A 2010 academic study on group intelligence found that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensitivity of the group members, the group’s ability to take turns contributing, and the proportion of females in the group. Groups that included at least one woman outperformed all-male groups in collective intelligence tests, and group intelligence was more strongly correlated to gender diversity than to the IQs of the individual team members.
Gender diversity is not just good for women; it’s good for anyone who wants results.
So how do we create a workplace culture that expands opportunities for women, promotes diversity, and doesn’t tolerate sexual harassment? There is no single answer, but I do believe it’s crucial to gather friends and colleagues and create a community with a new culture—one that respects the larger goals of the existing culture but honors different ways of getting there.
Unfortunately, the effort to create a culture that advances the interests of women faces a challenging barrier: Research suggests that women may have more self-doubt than men, that women often underestimate their abilities while many men overestimate theirs.
Journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman wrote a book about this called The Confidence Code. Kay explained in an interview, “Women often find action harder than men because we are more risk-averse, because the fear of failure is enormous for us. It seems to be bigger than it is for men.” In one example, they point to a review of personnel records at Hewlett Packard, which showed that women were applying for promotions only when they thought they met 100 percent of the job requirements, while men were applying when they thought they met 60 percent of them.
The tendency to underestimate our abilities, for those of us who may have it, plays a role in keeping us back, and it’s hard not to imagine that it’s a result of a male-dominated culture that seeks to marginalize women. These efforts are often indirect; they can be subtle and insidious—not attacking women directly but attacking the qualities and characteristics of women who are most likely to challenge men.
This angle seems to be supported by another line of research, one suggesting that women’s reticence comes not from a lack of confidence but from a calculation. A 2018 Atlantic article cites a study that says women with self-confidence gained influence “only when they also displayed … the motivation to benefit others.” If women showed confidence without empathy or altruism, they faced a “‘backlash effect’—social and professional sanctions for failing to conform to gender norms.” It’s fear of this backlash, according to another study, that keeps women from asserting themselves.
Women may be less assertive from a lack of confidence or out of calculation, but male-dominated cultures remain a key underlying cause for both. There is social approval for women who don’t ask for much, who show self-doubt, who don’t seek power, who won’t speak out, who aim to please.
These gender expectations have been significant for me and for many women I know because they foster qualities that lead to perfectionism—the effort to compensate for feelings of inferiority by being flawless. I should know; perfectionism has always been a weakness of mine. Brené Brown, who is a genius in stating big truths with few words, captures the motive and mindset of the perfectionist in her book Daring Greatly: “If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
That is the game, and I am a player.
Perfectionism for me comes from the feeling that I don’t know enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not hardworking enough. Perfectionism spikes for me if I’m going into a meeting with people who disagree with me, or if I’m giving a talk to experts who know more about the topic than I do—something that happens often for me these days. When I start to feel inadequate and my perfectionism hits, one of the things I do is start gathering facts. I’m not talking about basic prep; I’m talking about obsessive fact gathering driven by the vision that there shouldn’t be anything I don’t know. And if I tell myself I shouldn’t overprepare, then another voice tells me I’m being lazy. Boom.
Ultimately, for me perfectionism means hiding who I am. It’s dressing myself up so the people I want to impress don’t come away thinking I’m not as smart or interesting as they thought. It comes from a desperate need to not disappoint others. So I overprepare. And one of the curious things I’ve discovered is that when I’m overprepared I don’t listen as well; I go ahead and say whatever I’ve prepared, whether it responds to the moment or not. I miss the opportunity to improvise or respond well to a surprise. I’m not really there. I’m not my authentic self.
I remember an event at the foundation a few years ago where I got called out on my perfectionism.
Sue Desmond-Hellmann—our super-inventive foundation CEO who’s a scientist, a medical doctor, and a creative leader who loves to push Bill and me (and herself)—put us on the spot by arranging an uncomfortable exercise for foundation leaders that would strengthen the bond between leadership and staff. I agreed to go first.
I sat down in a chair in front of a video camera (placed there so everyone in the foundation could later watch!) and was given a stack of cards facedown, which I was to turn over one by one. Each card had something that a foundation employee had said about me but didn’t want to tell me in person. My job was to read the card and respond, on camera, so everyone could see me react. The statements were bold, especially the last one. I turned over the card and it said, “You’re like Mary F@$*ing Poppins—practically perfect in every way!”
As my kids said to me that night at the dinner table, “Ouch!”
In the moment, conscious of being on camera, I burst out laughing—probably partly from nervousness, partly because it was so bold, and partly because I was delighted that someone thought I had it together. I said, through my laughter, “If you knew how much I am not perfect. I am so messy and sloppy in so many places in my life. But I try to clean myself up and bring my best self to work so I can help others bring their best selves to work. I guess what I need to role-model a little more is the ability to be open about the mess. Maybe I should just show that to people.”
That’s what I said in the moment. When I reflected later, I realized that maybe my best self is not my polished self. Maybe my best self is when I’m open enough to say more about my doubts or anxieties, admit my mistakes, confess when I’m feeling down. Then people can feel more comfortable with their own mess, and that’s an easier culture to live in. That was certainly the employee’s point. I need to keep working with Sue and others to create a culture at the foundation where we can be ourselves and find our voices. And when I say “we,” I’m not being rhetorical. I’m including myself. If I haven’t helped to create a culture in my own organization where all women and men can find their voice, then I haven’t yet found my voice. I need to do more to become a role model for others in the way Patty was a role model for me, and Sue is today. I want to create a workplace where everyone can bring their most human, most authentic selves—where we all expect and respect each other’s quirks and flaws, and all the energy wasted in the pursuit of “perfection” is saved and channeled into the creativity we need for the work. That is a culture where we release impossible burdens and lift everyone up.
A workplace that is hospitable to women will not only forgive our imperfections but accommodate our needs—especially the most profound human need, which is our need to take care of one another.
We have to create a workplace that is compatible with family life. This requires support from the top, perhaps with a push from below. The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don’t honor the lives of employees outside the workplace. That can make the workplace a hostile place—because it pits your work against your family in a contest one side has to lose.
Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads—set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Even back then it wasn’t true for everyone. Today it is true for almost no one—except for one significant group. The most powerful positions in society are often occupied by men who do have wives who do not work outside the home. And those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.
As of 2017, almost half of employees in the US workforce were women, and seven of ten American women with children under 18 were in the labor force. About a third of these women with kids at home were single moms.
The old-fashioned assumption that there is a housewife at home to handle things is especially harsh for single parents. This is not just a personal problem, but a national and global problem; populations are aging—in the US and all over the world—and the task of caring for aging parents is falling disproportionately to women, which aggravates the gender imbalance in unpaid work that is already there.
When people are torn between the demands of work and home, it can steal the joy from family life. We need our employers to understand our duties to family, and we want compassion at work when a crisis hits home.
When I reflect on my time as a manager at Microsoft, I can think of so many moments when I could have done more to make the culture kinder to families. My leadership on this issue wasn’t great, so I hope you’ll forgive me for telling you a story of a time I got it right.
One day nearly thirty years ago, a very gifted man who had been working in my group for a year or two leaned his head into my office and said, “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I wanted you to know that my brother is very ill.”
“I’m so sorry. Can I ask with what?”
“He’s got AIDS.”
It took guts for him to tell me that. This was in the early ’90s when there was a lot more ignorance and stigma around AIDS. I offered as much sympathy as I could, and I felt uncomfortable that I couldn’t do more. He told me a bit about his brother, and when he was done saying what he had come to say, he stood up, said, “Thank you for letting me tell you,” and left my office.
I pondered our conversation for a few days, and it became clear why he wanted to tell me. As I’ve said, Microsoft was an especially hard-charging culture at the time. It was intense and competitive. Many people didn’t take vacation, most of us were unmarried, and almost none of us had kids. We were in that short period of early adulthood when almost nobody needed us, so nothing got in the way of work. And this young man was an especially high performer. So I think he was worried. He was caught between his family and his job, and he loved both. I think he was hoping that if he told me what was going on, I wouldn’t hold it against him when the crisis hit and his performance dropped because he was loyal to his brother and wanted to spend time with him.
A week or so later, I saw him in the hallway and motioned him into my office. He said, “What? Did I do something?” I said, “I’ve been thinking—it’s going to be really important for you to focus on our top ten resellers this year.” This was back when software was sold through retail stores. He said, “Oh, absolutely, I’m doing that. I’ll show you my list.” He showed me the list; he had the resellers all ranked. And I said, “In particular, I think you should focus on Fry’s Electronics.” He said, “Oh, yeah, they’re in the top ten. I’m already doing that.”
He wasn’t getting my point, so I said, “No, I think that Fry’s is really important. It’s a relationship we need to foster. Anytime you need to be down there, go ahead. I don’t need to know about it. Just go.”
Fry’s might have been in the middle of his list. They weren’t rising up or falling down, so I think he was confused by my emphasis. Then it hit him and his eyes welled up with tears. He nodded and said, “I’ll do that. Thank you,” and left my office.
We never spoke of it again. We didn’t have to. We both knew what was happening. We were creating our own little culture. Fry’s Electronics was in the Bay Area, where his brother lived. I wanted him to know he could go there anytime with the company’s blessing. Long before we had a name for it, he and I were improvising paid family and medical leave.
Paid family and medical leave allows people to care for their families and themselves in times of need. We were improvising because the company didn’t have a policy on paid family and medical leave, and neither did the country. Now the company does, but the country still doesn’t. Let me repeat a point I made in chapter 7, and I hope others repeat it, too. The United States is one of only seven countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave—joining the company of Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of other island nations. This is startling evidence that the United States is far behind the rest of the world in honoring the needs of families.
I’m an advocate for paid family and medical leave because the benefits are massive and forever. Unfortunately, we don’t have the data on every good thing paid leave brings to families, but we can quantify some of the benefits. Paid parental leave is associated with fewer newborn and infant deaths, higher rates of breastfeeding, less postpartum depression, and a more active, hands-on role for new fathers. Mothers are much more likely to stay in the workforce and earn higher wages if they can take paid leave when they have a baby. And when men take leave, the redistribution of household labor and caretaking lasts after they return to work.
The lack of paid leave in the US is symptomatic of a workplace culture that also struggles with sexual harassment, gender bias, and a general indifference to family life. All these issues are aggravated by one reality: fewer women in positions of power. A male-dominated culture is more likely to emphasize paid leave’s near-term costs and minimize its long-term benefits. There are huge personal benefits to workplaces that honor the obligations of family life, and those personal benefits turn into social and economic benefits as well. Unfortunately, those benefits aren’t calculated when the low number of women in positions of power leaves the shaping of the culture to men who don’t see and feel family needs as much as women do.
This is an immense challenge for us. It’s especially hard for women to ask for money or power or promotions or even for more time with our families. It’s easier to pretend we don’t need these things. But workplace cultures that don’t meet our needs persist when we’re embarrassed by our needs. This has to change. If we’re ever going to be who we are, we have to stand up collectively and ask for what we need in a culture that doesn’t want us to have it. It’s the only way to create a culture that meets the needs of everyone with a job.
We’re quick to criticize gender injustice when we see it around the world. We also need to see it where most of us feel it and can do something about it—in the places where we work.