Among the women in our forums, there was a wide-ranging discussion of how to evaluate workplace policies and the limitations of each situation. For example, Anne Neville, director of the State Broadband Initiative at the U.S. Department of Commerce, said of virtual employment, “I think it really depends on the company/role/project and how ‘virtual’ virtual is. I now work remotely, but I couldn’t do it if I hadn’t spent the first two and a half years of the project in the office (usually for twelve-hours a day). This created the relationships so that I’m not the strange voice on the phone or face on video. However, in previous organizations set up with people in different time zones, some working independently and some in small groups, initial face time wasn’t required to build the relationships.”
And some of our participants offered advice for men and women in power. Maura Daly Adamcyzk, former senior manager at Palladium Energy, which manufactures custom lithium ion battery packs, said, “Quit assigning females the paperwork, scheduling, and ‘soft’ people work on your team. Unless women get real experience early in their career in the technical ‘trenches,’ they will not have the opportunity to gain respect and visibility like their male counterparts. Think past gender in assigning work and forming teams. Don’t judge all women from one experience with a female technical worker. Women are as individual as men.”
Priscilla Oppenheimer, an independent consultant in the computer networking field, learned that keeping an eye on job options is key. “The worst piece of advice I got was to stay put in a job, despite it being a dead end. My colleague told me to ‘keep your head down, do a good job, and you’ll be golden.’ This colleague didn’t really care if I succeeded. He liked having me around because I was friendly, but he didn’t care about my career aspirations. Also, he was suggesting a strategy that worked for him and not considering what might work for me. I stayed at the job for five years and was unable to succeed, mostly because the men in the all-male group were misogynists. The man who gave me the advice was the nicest of the men in the group, but even he had a tendency to call any strong woman who expressed her opinions ‘a bitch.’ I should have recognized that this workplace was toxic and not stayed five years!”
In fact, more and more studies are showing how deeply a bad job fit can affect our physical and mental health. A 2013 study by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health found that job stress was a risk factor for diabetes—and that risk was higher for women than men in similar circumstances.[1] And the American Psychological Association added, “Burnout can lead to depression, which, in turn, has been linked to a variety of other health concerns, such as heart disease and stroke, obesity and eating disorders, diabetes, and some forms of cancer. Chronic depression also reduces your immunity to other types of illnesses and can even contribute to premature death.”[2] Gender-bias is just one of many sources of stress for working women, and each woman has to take her own health seriously and know if and when it’s time to walk away from a once-promising job.
In order to change workplaces, pioneers must be willing to enter previously heavily or all-male sectors of the industry. Laina Greene is executive director and chief strategy and investment officer for IBS Tower, a publicly traded telecommunications network in Indonesia. After spending fourteen years in the Bay Area, Greene took an executive position at the company. “Indonesia today is one of the fastest growing countries in the region, and so I decided to grab the opportunity to be a part of the Asian century. I also serve on a steering committee of an informal investment fund that invest into new disruptive technology companies, such as mobile payments and data visualization. There is so much room for innovation in a country of 240 million people with more than 240 million mobile phone subscriptions.”
Indonesian tech is male-dominated, judging by Greene’s descriptions. She has been breaking barriers throughout her career—and has a great role model. “My mother herself was a pioneer as an Indian woman who managed to get a degree in physics. She came from humble beginnings in India and was told a woman cannot do science. She not only studied science, but topped her university. However, when she came to Singapore, her degree was not recognized, so she went back to the university in Singapore and got her second degree and her master’s degree in physics. When I started off in telecom back in 1986, I was one of the few female professionals at these international conferences. Men would harass me or just ignore me and if not for the backing of my boss and his boss, it would have been very hard for me to make it. They not only supported me, but promoted my work, helping me be recognized as an expert in this industry. After twenty-five years in this industry, I still think it is a very male-dominated world. Women still struggle to be heard and be taken seriously. I think key to the solution also lies with men who are forward-thinking, who promote women and will promote the next generation of women, too.”
It can be frustrating to face the obvious bias that occurs even once you have secured a key position. Greene said, “I had a very interesting incident last year at an event at Stanford University. There was a speaker talking about smart grids, something I was very interested in and had learned a lot about. I put up my hand to ask questions, but he would only ask the people in front of me, behind me, or even next to me. So after the class, I went up to ask him why he would not allow me to ask my question and he said with surprise, ‘Oh sorry, I did not see you.’ He did seem genuinely surprised. Another Stanford educator told me that that was her experience usually at campus, too (but then she and I are both non-Caucasian, so it’s hard to tell if it is a women issue or a race issue). So even in the United States, we still have a long way to go in terms of removing these inherent prejudices.”
For other women, reshaping the workplace comes in the form of launching their own businesses. Darlene Damm is the cofounder of DIYROCKETS, which uses an open-source approach to lowering the costs of space technology. Over the years, she learned to trust her own intuition when it came to innovating. “Women are encouraged to pay attention to what other people think and how other people judge them and their ideas. You have to think for yourself and decide for yourself and then test your idea in the marketplace and then respond to that. And then you have to train your own imagination to see who you are and what you can do in the world in a larger way. Initially this can be a lonely process, but once you figure it out, it is very powerful.” She added, “I know that over the course of my career and in my life I’ve been underpaid, undervalued, and overlooked multiple times because of my gender. On the other hand, I think I have also had people and institutions support me specifically because they want to help women succeed. The most important thing is to learn to quickly identify people or institutions that do not respect women and stay away from them, no matter how good they might be in other aspects.”
As we survey how companies treat women in the fields of STEM, we see a variety of outcomes, from bias to opportunity, based on factors including national and regional culture, corporate culture, and the age and stage of a company. (Early-stage startups tend to focus less, at least in a structured way, on fostering diversity than more mature companies.) The bottom line for women in the field is that each person has to make her own decision about how to navigate the inevitable pitfalls of any workplace, when and if to decide enough is enough, and of course, how to make the company and field better not just for herself, but for others.
[1] S.T. Nyberg, E.I. Fransson, K. Heikkilä, L. Alfredsson, A. Casini, et al. “Job Strain and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors: Meta-analysis of Individual-participant Data from 47,000 Men and Women. PLoS ONE 8(6): e67323. (2013) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067323
[2] “Mind/Body Health: Job Stress,” American Psychological Association, http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/job-stress.aspx.