Managing a Career through the Childbearing Years

Panelists: Lynda Grindstaff (Intel), Karin Meyer (Intuit), Phyllis Stewart Pires (SAP), Mary Anne Egan (Siena College), Elizabeth Psihos (Thomson Reuters), and Lalitha Ramanathan (Symantec)

The panelists offered up some good tips for traditional two-parent families juggling child care, child rearing, and careers. Adding other "family blends", such as a single parent without a spousal safety net or a mother in a same sex relationship, also managing their careers while faced with the added challenges of their situations, would have likely required a larger room for this already jam-packed session.

An audience member shared her situation as the main breadwinner while her husband was the stay-at-home dad, receiving questions from the floor about managing the guilt of a less traditional child rearing arrangement.

A majority of the audience included students who did not yet have children, but who were in the early stages of planning how to juggle multiple priorities. What they heard from these seasoned working moms was that trade-offs are a part of the decision to have children and raise a family and that learning how to manage guilt early in the game came with the territory.

Lynda Grindstaff who, along with her husband, works for Intel told the audience that they "needed to develop a thicker skin and make a conscious effort to spend time with their kids". She uses quality, focused time with her children and shares with them what she does. She gets creative in asking for help. "I don't want my kids to not experience sports and other activities just because mom works."

"Don't waste time at work--get the job done," said Karin Meyer who works for Intuit.

"Don't worry about the timing of having children while in school. If a company wants you they want you," panelist Mary Anne Egan shared with the audience. Flexible schedules are a big part of the safety net that Egan and her husband share--she works for Siena College and he works for himself.

Panelists suggested researching Working Mother magazine and other resources for more family friendly companies. A shared tip from an audience member was to make certain that if you're looking to work for a start-up company that other women with children already work there--married men with stay-at-home wives won't understand.

Phyllis Stewart Pires of SAP has juggled childbearing three times, each time returning to different configurations within the organization. "I've breastfed all three, have used all forms of childcare, and over the course of their early years all my children experienced on-site childcare."

Stewart Pires offered a number of creative tips for working moms:

• Returning from maternity leave - do your due diligence - reinvent your value proposition to the company based on any changes that have occurred while you were on leave.
• Create a 360 safety net of different networks--part-time moms, full-time moms, PTA, etc. Become an involved person within a smaller network.
• Consider hosting the weekend sleepovers if you're unable to have kids over M-F.
• Seize the moments and get your kids to talk to you. Stewart Pires uses a "parking lot strategy" where during the course of the week while transporting her children to different activities, she meets in the car with one while waiting for the other child to finish their activity.
• Create a visual cue to pull yourself out of a negative cycle.
• Set clear expectations with your significant other at the beginning before you have children.
• Find your champions--you may find them in the least likely places, i.e., in your network or at work.
  

Enlisting Male Advocates in the Workplace

Moderator: Caroline Simard, Anita Borg Institute
Skits: Patty Lopez, Intel Corporation

Panelists: Colin Bodell, Amazon | Gabby Silverman, CA Technologies | Will Allen, HP | Bruce Bigler, Intel Corporation | Luis Recardo Fraga, University of Washington

This all-male panel moderated by Caroline Simard included skits by Patty Lopez of Intel Corporation and offered the audience a fun poke at all too real situations that still occur for women--sometimes obvious messaging, sometimes subtle language--but the results are the same; behavior that can undermine a woman's personal power and confidence.

The male "actors" were good sports about offering before-after versions of themselves with female advocate Colin Bodell of Amazon, at one point during a skit, stating that he felt he needed a shower after playing the "unenlightened" manager.

The ability to collaborate across gender boundaries for enlisting advocates while in school and later in business is instrumental to your success. Female technologists who develop effective communication and relationship management skills will find the path to enlisting and engaging advocates easier to navigate.

However, it's just as important to recognize early on the potential barriers to your success and to speak up and challenge others when a situation warrants it.

"Faculty and students need support at every stage of their career. Gatekeepers can be biased and too many companies don't double check or validate. Find the person who will give you the straight scoop. People who shut you down shouldn't be considered as an advisor or mentor," said Luis Fraga, University of Washington.


Advocate or Mentor?

Amazon's Bodell described the difference between a mentor and advocate as the former being more of a 1:1 confidential relationship, whereas an advocate will work externally on your behalf as your champion.

"Mentors know how the system works--they have knowledge beyond your experience. Advocates can serve as a mentor, but not necessarily vice versa," according to UW's Fraga.


Why They Became Advocates for Women

What motivated these men to become not just supporters of women but true female advocates?

HP's CTO, Will Allen, hopes that his own daughters will have an easier path. Finding women who are "stuck" and helping them to move into and up within the organization occurs during 1:1 mentoring or as part of HP's larger mentoring community.

Bruce Bigler of Intel felt it was important to create a sense of fairness. It was Bigler's marriage to a technical woman and seeing her professional challenges, while also noting the struggles of a female mentor, which served as eye openers for him and ultimately changed his perspective.

Colin Bodell's daughter developed an early interest in technology and he wanted to continue to feed her excitement. As VP for Amazon, he asked himself, "Why shouldn't everyone have the same opportunities?" Bodell's aha moment came three years ago during the Grace Hopper Conference when he had to admit that his company wasn't as good as it could be in advocating for women. "Not recruiting and developing women is a missed opportunity."

Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement at the University of Washington, Luis Fraga believes that with great power comes great responsibility in leadership. He wanted to make a real difference from an institutional level, realizing now that resistance to change both personally and institutionally has now become his responsibility.

Gabriel Silberman, Sr. VP and Director of Labs for CA Technologies attended his first Grace Hopper conference ten years ago where there were 700 women and 10 men. When he started hearing the dialogue shared by women, it forced him out of his comfort zone--understanding for the first time what it meant to be a minority.

Before - After Skits

Here are a couple of the skits videotaped on the fly...


Skit #1 - University advisor and his underlying biases (before) and how a supporting male advocate would respond (after).

Student played by Tyelisa Shields (HP)
Advisor played by Luis Frago (University of Washington)






Skit #2 - Manager delivering annual review using non-supportive language (before) and male advocate support and career development feedback (after).

Manager played by Colin Bodell (Amazon.com)
Employee played by Linda Apsley (Microsoft)

Collaborative Leadership in Driving Innovation

Listening to these four dynamic women as moderator, Rebecca Norlander, right, asked them to share their paths taken and the roads not taken, there were commonalities between them that has led to success in their respective fields:

• Mentoring was a critical component
  
• Perseverance when things got tough
  
• Resilience when things took the wrong turn
• Setbacks were viewed as learning opportunities
• Widened their perspective by reframing the experience
• Reinventing themselves became part of their "human fabric"
• Accountability for the personal and professional risks they took
• Savvy career transitions and adaptability to changing condition

Amy Alving, Chief Technology Officer, SAIC
Bio




Pivotal Moment in her Career

"I decided to give up tenure to keep my job in government that I loved. It was risky, but it was a commitment to a new path."

What Amy Looks for When Hiring

She looks for people who can recognize a problem instead of waiting for an invitation to solve it--they step up and own it. People stumble at the lack of initiative.

Reflection: What She Would Do Differently

I would get out of my comfort zone more often.



Kalpana Margabandhu, Director of WebSphere Development, IBM India Software Lab
Bio


Pivotal Moment in her Career

Being recognized and awarded for her accomplishments as a woman setting an example in her organization for for reaching beyond what she had considered a limit.

Reflection: What She Would Do Differently

I would take more risks.


Kelli Crane, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Thomson Reuters
Bio

Pivotal Moment in her Career

When a woman at the company walked up to her and said "We've never had a senior technology leader who was a woman - ever."

What Kelli Looks for When Hiring

Grounded and balance between work and life. I look for a good technologist with good communication skills and the ability to collaborate in driving innovation. People will watch how you handle diversity more than how you handle success.

Reflection: What She Would Do Differently

Have the courage to do the right thing more often and be true to herself all of the time.



Romea Smith, Senior Vice President, CA Technologies, Support
Bio



Pivotal Moment in her Career

When she moved from Texas to Virginia with three children - a big personal and professional risk.

What Romea Looks for When Hiring

You have to want to learn. Someone who is capable without blinders on and who looks for different ways to solve problems. Learning from failure is key. [Dee McCrorey's "Collaborative Risktaking" workshop suggested 15 days to "lick your wounds" and then get back in the game].

Reflection: What She Would Do Differently

I would delegate more.


Panelist Career Tips

• You don't need to be the best at everything - it's about breadth and depth
  
• Love what you do and success will follow
• Crucial conversations: define governance upfront
• You need teams at home and at work. Delegate. You need a team to support you
• You have to make your own choices and that include personal and professional boundaries.
• Influencing skills are different for everyone - try different approaches, if one thing doesn't work, try something else
• Mentors help you when your more junior and when you're more senior you mentor others
• You can't wait for companies to come to you - you need to manage your own career
  

Digital Healthcare at Technology Crossroads

The complexity and costs associated with the current U.S. healthcare system, although screaming for standardization, cross-platform integration and extreme reinvention, probably won't happen overnight and not without a fight.

Panelists from Google, Intuit, Kaiser Permanente and Symantec shared their companies' immediate and longer range challenges of implementing technology solutions for the rapidly changing healthcare needs of consumers.

The big challenge is moving doctors and hospitals from paper-based systems to informatics and digital imaging of patient information. But change is imminent with the soaring costs of healthcare and with consumers pushing for more control of their personal health records (PHR).

Tammy Neely, Northwest and Hawaii BI Leader for Kaiser Permanente, spoke about the challenges of helping doctors learn how to use technology better and the benefits to everyone when they do. Storage challenges of electronic medical records notwithstanding--8 terabytes on 600+ systems--the benefits of distilling this information has resulted in a triple win for Kaiser: improved patient quality scores, cost savings of $100M and streamlined processes that now make "doctoring fun again".

Ongoing requests by consumers of its popular Quicken product led Intuit to develop Quicken Health, a product that helps users decipher "medical speak" and reconcile doctor and hospital bills along with the ease of paying online. "We wanted to empower consumers to monitor and manage their own health care costs," says Product Manager, Christina Banta, who made a career shift after a series of hospital volunteer jobs led her to see that the collection of patient data and backend systems didn't flow well for patients/customers.

According to Lisa Rom, Symantec Sr. Product Marketing Manager, 30 percent of the world's data by 2012 will be digital imaging. Symantec is looking to lower the cost of storage by moving digital imaging into the cloud instead of data centers, and thus passing the savings along to doctors and hospitals for medical research and patient improvements instead of storage costs.

Google's footprint into the world of healthcare comes via its Google Health site where patient control over individual data provides consumers with the ability to track their overall health and wellness. The site provides you with the means for aggregating your own information and monitoring the trends of your health over time.


So, Who Owns the Data?

Google's Shirley Gaw shared the challenges faced by the company in offering a service where patients don't always own their health information. "Your PHR is part of your Electronic Medical Health Record (EMHR), but in many states this health data is not owned by you. In certain states you can't get your own health records except through your doctors."

Security and privacy issues associated with PHR vs. EMHR requires a trust factor between physician and patient and between hospitals and health partners. Today, many doctors are wary about making decisions based on incomplete info, concerned that patients will be able to change digital data.

According to Neely at Kaiser Permanente, it's a fallacy that paper-based records are more secure, since paper records get faxed all over the place all the time. Symantec's Rom indicated that one of the top areas of identity theft is health related, which is why health transport and encryption of digital imaging files are critical.

Unfortunately, the level of understanding and sophistication of systems and security isn't there yet--doctors still take CDs home and store patient information on personal laptops. So, even though the technology is available the adoption is not.


Top of Mind

According to the panelists, this is what keeps their companies up at night:

Intuit: The ability to acquire the data, how to bring it together, and aggregating financial info.

Symantec: Medical imaging that isn't tagged with patient data and cannot be easily mapped to the patient.

Kaiser Permanente: The Baby Boom and obesity.

Google: Providing a service where consumers don't own their own health data.