How Female Executives Make It at the Top in a Male-Dominated

Almost everyone in the IT industry was shocked with Marissa Mayer’s recent appointment as Yahoo’s new CEO and President.  But nothing is new here. Women have been leading multinational IT corporations for years now.  Some of them include Meg Whitman of HP and Ginni Rometty of IBM. This article will tackle some of the ways in which women can make it to the top even if it involves running an IT company dominated by men. How are female business leaders different from males?

Even in today’s era, the glass ceiling is still very much in existence.  This is the invisible barrier that prevents women from rising to the top of the companies that they are working for.  So, even with Mayer, Whitman, Rometty and other high profile females running the show at the world’s top tech companies, women in IT companies are still a rare sight. Statistics show that only 24% of those employed in the field of technology, math, science and engineering are women. That’s way below the ratio seen in the general population, where close to half of the world’s workers are women.

A Forbes.com article also relates that only 10% to 12% of software engineers and developers in Los Angeles are women. The sad thing is that the numbers are just as dismal across the nation, with only one in every four IT professional jobs being held by women.

But if you think that computing is solely a man’s world, think again. The world’s first computer programmer is a woman. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage in creating his analytical engine.

Indeed, we have seen more and more women coming forward to the C-suites, not just in the IT field but also in every industry in every part of the world. Still, when a woman makes it big in a male dominated industry like IT, it is a very big deal.  High-level appointments such as Meyer’s is a cause for celebration for feminists.

But how do these women do it? What is their special formula to have thrived in an industry that is typically associated with men?  Let’s take a look at these female leaders and see what we can learn from them:

Kim Polese, according to a profile on BusinessWeek, co-founded and once led Marimba, a startup that debuted in the 1990s. The company was a pioneer in using Java for its services. Polese, who became a high profile tech entrepreneur, credits it to a combination of good timing, aggressiveness and smarts.

Polese later writes that a good CEO, male or female, needs to make sure that customers are successful, with the company being backed by a highly talented team.  Being first also helps.

When Virginia Rometty took the reins at IBM, she was the first ever woman to chair the century-old company. In an interview with Bloomberg, Rometty revealed that she has never refused to take on things even if she has not done them before and to learn from the experience.  Indeed it is her experience in acquisitions, services and sales that put her into the top spot.

Rometty has been with IBM for more than 30 years and started at the bottom working her way up, each time learning something new.  She was initially in the firm’s financial services consulting arm, then she helped integrate PriceWaterhouseCoopers into the firm when it was snatched up by IBM, and from there, she became a senior vice president of the IBM group.

Rommety also told the Power Women Summit in 2011 to never be afraid to take on something new, and that growth and comfort will never coexist.

Can you be at the top of an IT company and yet not know a line of code? According to Forbes.com, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, graduated from Harvard with a BA in Economics and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.  Yet, she’s responsible for the day-to-day operations of a behemoth social network. Before that, she managed the online global sales for Google.  Both are largely not technical, but with the right skills to do her job, Sandberg has propelled Facebook to what it is now.

Yahoo has been grappling with its search for a CEO to lead the company out of its quagmire, which saw its stock price bottoming out and its dominance being eradicated by rivals such as Google.  Enter Marissa Mayer, former Googler, 37 years old, multi-millionaire, and, right now, very much pregnant.

So what is Mayer’s first move at Yahoo?  Make it feel like Google, run like Google and work like Google.  Mayer has ordered free food for all employees in the company cafe, and all employees would have to be present in an all-hands meeting every Friday afternoon.  Even its headquarters and office locations are getting a makeover.

As you go through your professional career, you will learn things that you know work.  If it works, apply it, and if it does not, then throw it out the window.

So what does it take for a woman to succeed in a male-dominated industry such as IT?

Caroline Simard, Phd and Shannon K. Gilmartin, Phd, researchers at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, undertook a study to create the profile of a successful woman in a technical or technology-related role.  According to them, the successful female IT executive is about 45 years old with more than 18 years of technical expertise, 9 years of which spent in the current company and 4 years spent in the same position. 

They also found that female team members are more likely to be in a manager position because they are also more likely to be encouraged by their supervisor to take on a management job.  Around 79% of female IT executives have a computer science or engineering degree, with another 8% having a degree related to science, math, engineering or technology.  These women are more often described as analytical, innovative, questioning, risk takers, collaborative and entrepreneurial.

However, every female executive you talk to would say that the secret magic formula is not secret, nor is it magic.  They just did what their male counterparts are doing.  In fact, these women just did what any good CEO, COO, CFO — male or female — does.

But it does seem that female bosses in and out of IT would have an advantage over their male counterparts.  For one, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did not have to suffer through gender discrimination or the glass ceiling on their way up.  Female executives, on the other hand, would tell you that these unpleasant things do exist in today’s workplace.

Aside from being able to surmount these challenges, Esther Wachs, author of “Why the Best Man for the Job Is a Woman: The Unique Qualities of Female Leadership,” reveals in her book that female executives are more likely than male executives to be able to:

• sell their vision
• reinvent the rules
• focus on results and achievements
• show courage even under tremendous pressure
• be aware of the preferences of the customer
• create opportunities out of challenges

A woman who is in a man’s world might be facing more difficulties that may be discouraging for her.  But if you have the knowledge and you know-how to do your job right, it should not be very difficult to rise to the top.  Nobody can deny talent and any company who refuses to do so is not worth working for.  

It is not necessary to “think like a man” in order to succeed.  Instead, you just need to invest in yourself with the right training, education and certifications, coupled with the learning and experience you get on the job, and you will be sure to be a tough contender for a slot in the C-suite.