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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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MAY 29, 2003
The Women of Tech In Corporate America, the number of tech outfits run by women is small. But their influence is growing, as are their achievements Quick -- name the most prominent women CEOs in the country. There's Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), Meg Whitman of eBay (EBAY ), Anne Mulcahy of Xerox (XRX ), Patricia Russo of Lucent (LU ). What do they have in common? All head high-tech corporations. Women lead only seven of the companies in the S&P 500-stock index -- that's just 1.4% -- and most of those are tech outfits. Move beyond the top slot, moreover, and you'll find other prominent women in tech. Susan Decker is CFO of Internet giant Yahoo! (YHOO ). AT&T (T ) President Betsy Bernard heads Ma Bell's Business division, which recorded $27 billion in revenue last year. Chief Financial Officer Doreen Toben holds the purse strings at No. 1 phone company Verizon (VZ ), whose 2002 sales totaled $67.5 billion. CULTURAL IMPERATIVE. Size isn't the only thing that matters, of course. Judy Estrin, chairman of Packet Design, is a serial technology entrepreneur who has served as chief technology officer for Cisco Systems (CSCO ) and sits on the boards of Walt Disney (DIS ), Federal Express (FDX ), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW ). Up-and-comers include Sandra Morris, who is co-CIO at semiconductor giant Intel (INTC ), and Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's (ORCL ) chief security officer, is the woman who in charge of ensuring that the company delivers on its promise to make its databases "unbreakable." High tech has come a long way, baby. Well, it has -- even though it's still overwhelmingly a male domain, even more than Corporate America overall. And it's Silicon Valley's own meritocratic culture that has helped these women and others break through what previously seemed to be an impenetrable glass ceiling. "In newer industries, like technology, it's strictly qualifications that get you where you want to go," says David Parker, founder and CEO of executive search firm DP Parker & Associates in Wellesley, Mass. "That's why you're more likely to see women and minorities in senior positions [in tech] than in old-line, entrenched industries such as insurance, banks, steel, or manufacturing." "SYSTEMATIC APPROACH." Perhaps counterintuitively, high-tech companies' short development cycles and cutthroat cultures also have helped women succeed. In a pressure-cooker environment, executives are judged on whether they meet sales and marketing goals, or on whether a project is finished on time, not on who their golf buddies are. "Companies like HP and Xerox developed clearly defined performance-management systems a long time ago," says Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice-president for research and information services at Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that pushes for the advancement of women in business. "Having that kind of systemic approach is a benefit to women." The experiences of the women BusinessWeek Online profiles in this Special Report bear this out. Only 20 years ago, many say, they confronted skepticism and consternation from colleagues and customers who were surprised to find them in sales or technology. "You'd walk into meetings with a big customer in Europe and Asia, and people would have a hard time at first [wondering] 'Should I take this person as seriously as I would a high-level executive?'," recalls Packet Design's Estrin. But she and others say they overcame such barriers by being knowledgeable, prepared -- and by consistently delivering. Says Lucent CEO Russo: "Results matter -- it's hard to argue with them." MANDATORY CHANGES. True, but government intervention also played a role in helping some of these women advance to such lofty levels. Four on our list -- Bernard, Toben, Fiorina, and Russo -- spent a key part of their early careers at AT&T. At one time, Ma Bell was such a bastion of male culture that, in 1970, some 7% of all discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were lodged over its treatment of women. AT&T ultimately signed a $38 million consent decree that aimed to remedy what the government called its "blatantly unlawful" discrimination against women. "One of the things that gave me a huge advantage was the fact that I was in a special [management] program," says AT&T's Bernard. "Those kind of programs are great for anyone -- men or women. But I think the reason there were women in the numbers that there were at that time is because of the consent decree."
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