Thank you for your interest in being a participant in this article. This is clearly a topic which has meaning to you. Please share a bit about your background with emphasis on how and why you became interested in a career in a STEM focused field. Also share some of the insight you have gained working in a STEM field as it related to underrepresented groups such as young women.
I came into the high tech world with a business and marketing background but I had worked in both cable as a new industry when I graduated from college and then had also worked at a tech startup for a short-time. Ultimately personal computing was a brand new field and I was super interested in the power of enabling both businesses and individuals with the power of computers.
I’ve done a lot of work with STEM students (such as student developers through the Imagine Cup Worldwide Competition) and with Women owned startups and have spent a good majority of my career internationally particularly focused on underserved markets and populations.
“Go Science Girls” quotes the following statistics, “…in the United States, women make up only ¼ of the entire STEM workforce. Contrarily, women dominate men when it comes a STEM degree. Further statistics show that women constitute 15% of the engineering force and 25% of the computer and mathematical sciences. In Australia, women made up 27% of the STEM workforce in 2016. There are various reasons for such a meager constitution of women in STEM. The prime reason is the lack of practical experiences. Women have been quoted saying that they love STEM activities, but the lack of practical exercises discouraged them from building a career in the field.”
These are not new facts and figures but rather ones that have been heard time and again. What do you feel can be done to decrease the implication that women are not well suited to these careers while increasing the number of young women pursuing a career in these fields? (Editorial note – this is a very broad question. I encourage you to respond as your own experience & life choices/lessons dictates.)
When I started doing work with STEM students across middle school, high school and college levels it became clear that girls need to be able to see themselves in a profession or there is a lack of believing excelling in those roles is possible. Additionally, the schools who made sure that their STEM classes were diverse and highly encouraging for girls and underserved populations were more likely to graduate students in STEM careers and see them off to college on a STEM track. In college, professors are a critical piece to the puzzle to engage and make sure women and underserved populations continue pursuing STEM degrees. What this points to is the ability both within the classroom environment and outside of the classroom (e.g., clubs, study groups, tutoring, etc.) are critical to helping women and underserved populations believe they can make it through what typically leans to a male dominated degrees. Women have told me outright the belief and support from those around them is critical
The work I do today within Microsoft is coaching leaders and product teams on how to create customer-obsessed products by identifying users articulated and unarticulated needs. To do this requires maniacal listening and observing of users’ behaviors as well as telemetry to measure metrics that indicate the user was successful at completing what they needed to accomplish. These are users as diverse as the universe…and as a result if we do not have a diverse workforce in the STEM professions as well as broadly there is no way workers can empathize with their customers and build products and services that meet true market needs. I’ve seen enough examples of “great tech” being built that literally no one wants to use – it’s critical that women have to be part of the mix of leaders and team contributors if we are to meet the needs of almost any type of market.
Many of us have worked for companies that require, value, and reward critical thinking, problem solving and collaborations. These skills, along with other skills, are key elements to all aspects of living and is especially required in areas such as technology, science, medicine to name a few areas. What are the positive ways to engage underrepresented groups in acquiring these skills?
There are several things that can make for success: 1) setting up someone with a more skilled partner in an activity where they can work closely together to learn and utilize new skills, 2) pick a lower-stakes project to work on first to give someone a great way to practice new skills and then challenge them later with a higher-stakes initiative where they can demonstrate what they’ve learned and 3) build in regular check-points on their learning so you can help apply more support, resources or other things they might need to help them more likely be successful at learning and using new skills. While as a manager it may seem scary to put someone more “green” on a project, if you build scaffolding around them to help them succeed you will succeed in building more skills on your team
I have been really fortunate to work on cutting edge STEM product areas several times while here at Microsoft. I think one of the more recent was in entering the realm of Artificial Intelligence for which the technology innovations have been recent and developing in a rapid pace. In coaching product teams using AI I’ve had to interview experts, read a lot, take courses, attend conferences, and host discussions about AI tech and the implications of it’s use with customers. While I’m not coding AI products, the impact of the technology as to how it’s created, implemented, measured and supported has been critical to my role. The lesson here is that it really takes both utilizing many forms of knowledge/skills acquisition with collaboration with others.
Finding a good mentor in a career is one key element to success. Each of you have been both mentee and mentor. As a mentee what was the most valuable advice or experience you have had thus far in your career? How can underrepresented individuals become adept at seeking mentorship? As successful individuals, how can we ensure we look to be more inclusive in tossing out our ‘mentorship net’?
Finding a good mentor is very important – my best mentors have been very honest about the hard work, networking, and speaking up for myself work that’s needed to advance my career. Even more important is finding a great Sponsor – someone who not only mentors but actually advocates, recommends, and/or hires you for your next opportunity. A Sponsor is key – and what’s been the best advice from mentors and sponsors has been to diligently allocate time in your weekly schedule to connect with new people at all levels as a regular habit and to really stretch my connection network well beyond those folks who I might naturally encounter. Of all the advice and executive mentorship/sponsorship I’ve made it a point to do for others what they have done for me – paying it forward is essential for women to do for other women.
Given the amount of purchasing power women have, it is important that ALL voices are well represented in all aspects of daily life. If women are not involved in these critical fields how will their input be translated and included into our day to day needs and products? How will this lack of voice and talent impact products as well as potentially stunt the broader applicability of items in the marketplace? (This includes retail, medical, sports, the arts etc.)
This is a great and hard question to answer. I think it’s going to take a very conscious effort on the part of existing senior men and women leaders to give women early-in-career opportunities to come forward and lead projects, teams, and have the opportunity to be seen. I think there are also opportunities for skill building all the time. One of the most memorable moments for me early in career is that a female CVP signed me up for a communications/presentation class where the teacher focuses in on female communication style. We had to create and present to the class and be recorded and then we’d watch the tape back and analyze what was working well and not well. Communication differences between how a man presents and speaks and how a women does it (e.g., voice inflection, projecting confidence, engaging an audience, etc.) can make or break effectiveness. Those type of experiences are crucial to helping early-in-career females time and time again.
One of the most visible challenges women face today is patriarchy. As a general rule, the way women and men are taught to speak, and act is often very dissimilar. Men are taught to problem solve and speak with authority while women are taught to be demure and defer. This behavior is exhibited in the home, in school and extra-curricular activities as well as the workplace. How can we impact change to eliminate these stereotypical actions? What change do you believe it would have the most impact on ensuring young women step more fully into leadership roles?
If I could make three changes to increase the number of females in very senior leadership roles I would 1) ask every male CxO certainly in high tech and other segments to have a rich slate of potential females along with males for their leadership roles – proactively planning for female succession. 2) I think it will take having more females on company boards to influence succession plans and other corporate policies and 3) I think it will take existing female leaders to be more vocal about what it takes to succeed at those roles to light the way for others.
I always think of the example I’ve seen in play many times when someone of one country is speaking to a non-native language speaker and the speaker increases their volume in hopes that translation will instantly occur based on a louder volume on their part. In retrospect, have you found you may have responded oddly to someone who is different than yourself? (age, country of origin, sex, race, etc.) How did your response help/hurt your business needs? What would you do differently today? How does this apply to being more inclusive in our thinking with regard to women as underrepresented individuals?
I haven’t encountered that situation before even as I have traveled to nearly 110 countries over the 29 years that I’ve been at Microsoft. I do have a funny story where I was in a situation that was so foreign to me that it created an amazing moment of empathy for me about the situation of where a woman would be treated so differently from a man. I was traveling alone to Dubai to run some training sessions for our most special partners. When I received my visa it said “American housewife on vacation” which of course was absolutely not true and so I called the General Manager of our Dubai office who reassured me that the visa was fine and I should just come. When I got to Dubai I found out that there were a dozen men from partner organizations who had arrived from Saudi Arabia and because I was a woman, I would have to present into a camera located in a separate room from the men, pause after my presentation and then wait for questions from the men to be brought to me so I could answer them back into the camera. It was an epiphany for me when I realized treatment of women can be so limiting and really had to think about how I could be a strong woman in the face of clear cultural challenges.
When you think about giving advice or providing your input on issues facing young women entering into STEM field jobs, what would your biggest piece of advice be? As you respond to this question, think about the following: Why would you give this advice? What difference could your advice make in someone’s life? Did you have a similar experience and who helped you through it?
I would advise women entering STEM jobs to be really proactive about building a network of connections, mentors and sponsors across all levels of experience. The more you have people advocating for you and learning the various pathways to experience the more apt you will be to be able to make choices that work for you.
Like many things we are seeing happening today, there will be a reckoning if we do not do a better job in raising opportunity and inclusion of both women and underserved populations in STEM and technology opportunities. Companies will pay a deep price that their products will not be received in the marketplace, and more importantly society will feel a widening of the divide between those who are able to make a life for themselves and their families and those who aren’t able to. Future development of products and services will not advance for the good of people if they are not built with deep empathy for those it serves and that also means that we need a fair mix of men, women and a diverse population represented at leadership levels and ability to advance their experiences and capabilities. All boats can rise when we raise the water across the oceans.