Already Impressive Silicon Valley Women Are Dressing to Impress [Running In Heels]

Many of Silicon Valley's most powerful women are standing out amongst the area's schlumpy braniacs by dressing in expensive couture: Chanel cocktail shifts, Jimmy Choo heels, the works.

Of course, high-ranking men have donned fashion status symbols like cufflinks for ages, but it's a little different in Northern California, where most techies dress down à la hoodie-loving Mark Zuckerberg. But a number of notable women told the New York Times that "dressing well (and talking about it) could help erode the stereotypes that repel some women from the technology field."

"It's possible to hold your femininity and love of fashion," said Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a former Google executive who now runs a video shopping site. "Now I feel not at all at risk that people would say, ‘How can she care about dressing well and run a billion-dollar company or be smart?'"

Marissa Mayer, who once paid $60,000 at an auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta, said she didn't care what her employees thought of her proclivity for full skirts and bright colors. "My willingness to talk about it is because I believe the way we'll get more people into computer science and ultimately more women into computer science is by making it really clear that you can be yourself and don't need to give up parts of yourself to succeed," she said. "You can be into fashion and you don't have to be the pasty white programmer with a pocket protector staying up all night."

This is the first Times Styles trend piece about women and tech (or maybe, actually, Silicon Valley in general) I've read in ages that didn't make me groan. It's awesome that these women are wearing whatever they want, and even more awesome that so many of them are talking about it unabashedly, too.

Techies Break a Fashion Taboo [NYT]

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Fired CEO Says Her Company Canned Her Because She Has Breast Cancer [Running In Heels]

Aug 3, 2012 2:50 PM  

Tuesday Morning Corp.'s former CEO, Kathleen Mason, is suing the home-furnishing retailer for allegedly firing her after they learned she had breast cancer. Classy!

The financially-challenged company and some of its investors have recently criticized Mason for the company's declining revenue and large third-quarter losses; one investment firm, which recently paid millions of dollars for Tuesday Morning shares, said Mason "led an extraordinary destruction of shareholder value in stark contrast to the success of Tuesday Morning's peer group."

But Mason's lawyers say that's not why she was ousted. "The board's attitude toward Kathleen changed after it learned of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment," attorney Rogge Dunn said in a statement Friday. He also claimed that Tuesday Morning had no long-term debt and had been profitable every year Mason led the company, and that it was telling how her severance package "emphasized medical benefits."

The package also includes a 10-year consultancy clause followed by an 18-month noncompete clause, which her lawyer says means would "in effect locking her out of working elsewhere for nearly 12 years."

Tuesday Morning CEO Says Breast-Cancer Diagnosis Factor in Her Ouster [WSJ]

Image via Media Union Shutterstock.

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Women's College Dean Says Same-Sex Education Is Better for Businesswomen [Running In Heels]

65-year-old Cathy E. Minehan, dean of the all-women Simmons College School of Management, a small Boston college which launched the first MBA program designed for women in 1975, says that women have a better chance of succeeding professionally without men around.

In a coed academic environment, "male leadership roles remain unchallenged, and women are left with 'play the game our way, or go home,'" she told the Wall Street Journal.

Before taking over Simmons last summer, Minehan was the chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and spent almost 40 years working in banking in Boston and New York. She said she chose the dean position over retiring because she'd "always had this interest in what you can do, systemically, to make it easier for women to be successful in business."

Minehan is clearly (and rightfully) proud of what Simmons' women have accomplished — "If Harvard wants a case about a woman leader, they usually are looking at stuff we've developed," she said — but her views on same-sex education seem a bit antiquated. "Why is it better to address those systemic issues in an all-women environment when so much of the business world is dominated by men?" the WSJ asked her. "How is that good training for real life?" Here's her response:

Just think about mission-driven education in general-for example, historically black colleges. The schools provide not only a first-class education, but also an environment and culture in which it's easier to talk about some subjects.

[At Simmons, students] can develop tools to navigate better in the business world because they understand the subtleties of a male-dominated culture in a way that they might not understand in classrooms that are dominated by men.

An example: negotiations. Women don't negotiate the same way that men do. We teach classic negotiation theory, classic negotiation practice, but we also teach about the situation women will find in [the outside world] and then how to deal with it.

When (shockingly) asked about Marissa Meyer, Minehan said the whole being pregnant while also CEO thing wasn't such a big deal. "If she's smart enough to run Yahoo, which the board seems to think she is, she's smart enough to figure this out," she said.

We've written at length about how Meyer's refusal to talk about her gender can be frustrating, but the idea that only women should have to learn about "the subtleties of a male-dominated culture" in an academic setting is disheartening in a different way. It's doubtful that "gender-blind" Meyer would ever step foot on Simmons' campus.

Why an All-Female School May Be Best Training Ground [WSJ]

Image via StokketeShutterstock.

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The New York Stock Exchange Really Needs to Move the Women's Restroom [Running In Heels]

Aug 2, 2012 3:10 PM  

No doubt that the goals of the Moving the Needle campaign are noble. Their aim is to help diversify US corporations by creating opportunities for a diverse set of candidates to network with established businesses.

As stated on their website, the goal is not to implement quotas to or put women or people of color in token positions, but rather to create value through diversity that will "improve all facets of a board's and company's performance and ultimately enhance the shareholders' investment value."

After all, in 2010 people of color were 11.9% of Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers and 20.1% of all First/Mid-Level Officials and Managers. And only 16% of Fortune 500 board members were women.

The New York Stock Exchange is one organization that is embracing the Move the Needle program in order to help it diversify. But women familiar with the NYSE have a problem that is representative of the institutionalized sexism that often undermines efforts like Move the Needle.

The problem is the bathrooms.

Yes, the bathrooms. During a meeting designed to highlight the efforts to expand the number of female board members, some of the high-powered and successful women in attendance noticed that the women's bathrooms were so far away from the floor of the exchange that the path had to be marked with multiple signs so women could find their way-all the way from the conveniently-located mens room through three winding corridors to the "Female Clerks Rest Room".

Given the fast-paced nature of the stock exchange, it seems that this workplace in particular would benefit from having restrooms that are available for quick and efficient access.
Perhaps one of the first steps the NYSE needs to make to Move the Needle would be to move the ladies' restroom.

Follow one woman as she photographs the journey from the trading floor to the women's restroom.

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Germany's Family Minister Doesn't Think Marissa Mayer Is Taking Enough Maternity Leave, Just FYI [Running In Heels]

When Yahoo! invited the perilously pregnant Marissa Mayer to captain its rudderless, waterlogged ship (hooray for nautical metaphors!), everybody collectively scrunched their brows and wondered why Mayer would want to give up a sweet Google gig to get in a time machine and go run 1999's search engine. Actually, what pundits, analysts, and soothsayers really wanted to know was how she was going to get Yahoo! back on track (yay for locomotive metaphors!) while simultaneously raising a baby. Much patronizing ensued, but now Mayer is facing criticism for her decision to "work through" her maternity leave from an altogether different observer — German Family Minister Kristina Schröder.

According to Spiegel, parents in Germany can take up to three years off to raise their kids and still have their jobs guaranteed, and, once they're no longer receiving paid time from their employer, the government will pay them commensurate with their previous salary for up to 14 months. Schröder, who's a member of Angela Merkel's cabinet with the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, is pushing for German mothers to take even more maternity leave, and thinks that a high-profile businesswoman such Marissa Mayer isn't doing working women any favors by assuring everyone she'll be working through most of her maternity leave. Says Schröder,

I respect this personal step being taken by Ms. Mayer. But I regard it with major concern when prominent women give the public impression that maternity leave is something that is not important. Maternity leave is absolutely important and not just from a medical point of view.

It would seem that Schröder has tapped into a new wellspring of Marissa Mayer criticism, that is, of course, until one realizes that the Family Minister cut her own maternity leave time short after she gave birth in June 2011. Schröder took just 10 weeks off instead of the mandated — mandated! — 14, and some people criticized her then for not taking more time. She defended that position, however, by calmly explaining that every mother's experience is different:

I was never of the opinion that a family minister should set the example for the country. Besides, the issue isn't such a big deal — I'm not, after all, the first woman to have a child.

Not the first, last or even 47th — it happens all the time, and women deal with childbirth in all different ways. Given the (subsidized) opportunity, sure, taking time off to raise an newborn is important to a lot of people (not just moms, btw), but everyone's priorities are different. Schröder does have a point that Mayer's reassurances of continuous work could negatively affect people's perceptions about paid maternity leave, but Mayer has her own agenda, which right now is intimately entwined with the anxiety of her new company's shareholders, whom she must convince that her company is capable of crawling out of the internet woodshed. However, even without that pressing need, a working parent should be allowed to take as much — or as little — time off as he or she needs because we are all snowflakes and the world is a stovetop.

German Family Minister Slams Yahoo! CEO Mayer [Spiegel]

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What Do You Ladies Know How to Do? [Running In Heels]

The New York Times Book Review's How-To Issue lists eight pieces on its cover, two of which are written by women. And guess what they're about? Raising children and cooking.

"That cover made me feel like I was in a time warp," writes Molly Templeton, who was inspired to create her own How-to Tumblr in response:

There is nothing wrong with cooking and raising children; there are lots of things right and wonderful with these pursuits. They are also, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, traditionally female tasks, and when you take into consideration the VIDA stats, the history of gender imbalance in literature and journalism and the world at large, you might find yourself a little frustrated by the fact that it's 2012 and we are still too often relegated to writing about deeply gendered topics. (Of the 18 bylined reviews and essays in the issue, five are by women.)

I'm sure there's something you know how to do. I'm sure there are things your many brilliant friends know how to do, or something you could write about that has to do with doing a thing (most of the NYTBR pieces were, of course, book reviews). I would like to read the essays, reviews, comics, lists and more we, and they, could write in this vein -  irreverent, funny, heartbreaking, ironic, wry, snarky, sweet, clever, brilliant, silly, and everything else.

Here's how you do it:

1. Write a how-to piece on the topic of your choice. Because time moves extra quickly on the internet, I would like to have the first round of essays/reviews/etc. by Sunday, August 5.
2. If you have a blog/Tumblr/LiveJournal/other internet presence, post the piece on your own blog/internet space, and email me a link.
3. If you don't have a blog, send it to me, and I'll post it here.
4. Read and link to the pieces written by other women.

Go contribute!

[How-To Tumblr]

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