Women who want a job in high tech need a "walk-through-walls" mentality.
And, according to panelists in a session at the Women Enriching Business conference, they also need to be mature about crisis, gracious and courageous, clever and resourceful. "We seek people who won't be shaken to the core" when something goes wrong, said Jane Kirkland, vice president and chief information officer of FreeMarkets, a business-to-business auction site.
Panelist Ellen Levy, development officer of Softbank Venture Capital, added, "When someone tells me, ‘I want to be in the Internet,' it's a bad sign. Everyone has a phone in their office. But no one says they want to work in telecommunications."
The panel, entitled "Women Shaping the High Tech Industry," also included Lu Cordova, CEO of Acteva.com, a service to events planner, and Marleen McDaniel, CEO, president and chairperson of the magazine-style site Women.com. HBS professor Lynda Applegate moderated the discussion.
People who will succeed in high tech, Levy asserted, are those who are in it for reasons other than to just chase stock options. McDaniel, referring to the recent sky's-the-limit boom in high tech, added, "The day of reckoning is coming. Those who can turn the corner will make it, and those who can't will be gone."
Although the high tech industry has only lately become hot, all four panelists were distinguished by long years of education and work experience in the nuts and bolts, sometimes literally, of technology. Kirkland, for example, had been a software engineer at Lockheed Sanders before she went to business school. Levy has a PhD in cognitive psychology, concentrating on human-computer interactions. And McDaniel says she learned all the elements of hardware and software from her tenure at Tymshare, one of the first firms to offer commercial access to computer networks.
Asked by the audience about the best way to choose a mentor in high tech, Levy responded that she has never actually chosen a mentor per se. Instead, she said, she just tried to work with people she admired. " I respected their ethics," she said, "and wanted to learn what they did."
Kirkland added, "You learn different things from different people. Just go and ask questions. ‘How many phone calls should I be making?' I call people up and go out and ask questions."
Cordova, however, allowed that she's never actually had a female mentor, since she's never worked with a woman more senior in the company than she is.
Of course, one of the issues common to many people in high tech is incredible growth. A company can easily go from two or three employees laboring in a small room to over 200 in the space of only a few months — with a lot of interpersonal strain along the way.
"People can be the downfall of [Internet] companies, because the company always outgrows the people," McDaniel reminded the audience. "You have to bring in more senior management constantly.
"The real rewards come to people who pick, pick well, and go with the flow."