‘Male advocates should help elevate women’
Tech hiring pipeline, gender stereotypes addressed by networking group
Afemale point of view matters at a tech company — proven by the global successes of women such as Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. At the grassroots level, however, women looking to advance in their careers are encountering age-old problems.
Learning from stories of female empowerment in innovation and finding male advocates are both pivotal in helping women clear the hiring pipeline in tech.
That’s the mantra for Heather Cabot’s new book, “Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech,” the launching point for a conversation about crushing gender stereotypes in the workplace, held Downtown at BNY Mellon’s Innovation Center on Monday night.
“Entry-level-women are wondering, especially in a male-dominated field, how do you get tothe next level?” said Ms. Cabot during a webcast of a simultaneous event in New Jersey.
The Pittsburgh Chapter of Ellevate, a global women’s networking organization, organized the event. There are about 100 members in the local chapter, which has been in operation since about 2009, said president Kristina Martin. BNY Mellon partnered for the event.
The biggest gender gap across corporate America is the first step up to manager, Ms. Cabot said, citing a 2017 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey. The global management and research institute found that entrylevel women are 18 percent less likely to be promoted than their male peers.
Panelist Yau Cheng, director of diversity and inclusion for BNY Mellon in New York, started her career in finance as an equity investment analyst. She often found she was the youngest in the room, the only woman and one of few minorities.
In the early 2000s, she was working at a Japanese investment firm with a new $125 million fund earmarked for emerging high-growth industries like biotech and defense. She volunteered.
“Something that I just have always been inclined to do is just gravitate toward the hard projects, the things that maybe nobody else would raise their hands for,” she said. “That
eventually just became my brand, the things that nobody knew anything about.”
She had to unabashedly toot her own horn to get promoted. That’s something all women should be doing, she said.
Getting hired is only half the battle, though, Ms. Cabot pointed out. Women’s points of view aren’t always respected, she explained, citing the now-infamous memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” wherein a former engineer argued that women might be less apt for technical careers than men for biological reasons.
“I think that in many ways, that incident really exemplified some of the bias that a lot of women in tech experience both on the technical side and the leadership side.”
Leslie Klapperich, 40, of Collier is a project manager for BNY Mellon. She said she believes it’s vital that men and women work together to create equilibrium in the work place.
“A lot of benefit comes from both men and women supporting their peers when there are competing ideas,” Ms. Klapperich said. “Male advocates should help elevate women.”
Beyond that, she said it also is important that workplaces shake up antiquated ideas about a work-life balance when women are often also mothers.
Ms. Klapperich and her husband — a system administrator in software testing at FedEx — take turns dropping their kids off in the morning, and she said both of their offices are understanding.
“In the past, it was looked down upon [for a woman to come in late to drop off kids]. Now it’s not and that makes it easier for women to say, ‘I need a work-life balance.’”