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November 19, 2003
Lili Cheng and Microsoft's Wallop Project
There's an article this month in Microsoft Watch on Microsoft's new "Wallop" social networking software. In reading the article, I noticed that the project manager is a woman, Lili Cheng, who heads up Microsoft's Social Computing Group.
According to Cheng, Wallop evolved from an earlier Microsoft "virtual worlds" project called HutchWorld, which I first heard about a couple of years ago at Pop!Tech from Linda Stone--another woman who heads up a group at Microsoft Research.
Say what you will about the "evil empire" in Redmond, they seem to be doing a good job of hiring strong, talented women to do interesting work. (I wrote about another interesting woman at Microsoft, Bonnie Robertson, in my weblog back in May.)
Posted by Liz Lawley at 02:49 AM in People | Permalink
Comments
A few examples don't make the case. Female developers I know there have told me that Microsoft has the most hostile work
environment they've ever encountered.
Posted by: noone at Nov 19, 2003 9:35:53 AM
That's sad to hear. The two women mentioned above are both in Microsoft Research; don't know if the climate there is different.
They both also left Apple for Microsoft, which I find intriguing.
Posted by: Liz at Nov 19, 2003 9:45:04 AM
I saw this post with the images of attractive tech women after reading another blog just before it talking about pictures of attractive women, so I thought I'd comment, even though my thoughts are slightly off topic. Heath Row has this post on Fast Company Now today. In it he states that the company FrogPad only has pictures of women in its management directory. The men have no photos. He also wonders if this was a design decision.
Remember the ads with the female CEO of Marimba (I think it was) in the little black dress? And how about dicussions of Carly Fiorina's strategic use of her attractiveness?
So, does this marketing of women's images by high tech companies make sense?
Yes, of course it is important that more women in technology be recognized. But should it be a marketing strategy to highlight them (particularly the attractive ones)?
Is Microsoft doing this?
Posted by: Elizabeth at Nov 19, 2003 1:00:55 PM
The photos were taken from their MS bio pages; based on a quick look at the MS research directory it looks to me like the pages are identical for men and for women, headshot and all. Here's Marc Smith's, for example.
Posted by: Liz at Nov 19, 2003 3:05:23 PM
thanks Liz!
I've been at Microsoft for 8 years in research and for me it's been great wrt the women's issue. There are a lot of great women here shaping the direction of research. Check out Sue Dumais, Mary Czerwinski, Shelly Farnham, Jennifer Chayes on the research.microsoft.com web page--(and lots of others) doing great stuff here. (unfortunately I don't see any of us on the right side of the page, so we're likely not as saying active in these communities as we could be...)
Believe me, no one is marketing attractive women's images at Microsoft. ;-)
& have to credit MaryJo Foley for Microsoft Watch, a great woman reporter, who writes with Ziff-Davis (not Microsoft).
Posted by: Lili at Nov 19, 2003 3:49:34 PM
Thanks, Lili. Once blogrolling.com is allowing updates again, I'll add you and the women you mention to the sidebar. (Which is probably going to to need to go to a random x of names pretty soon, at the rate it's growing!)
It would be great to have some of you either blogging or participating on some of the weblogs already out there, so that we hear your voices more often.
Posted by: Liz at Nov 19, 2003 5:39:56 PM
I had quite a positive experience at Microsoft, compared to the rest of my short working career. Research was the best part of it, and group culture varied a lot within the company, but I had a good time in two other divisions.
It was usually the case that aggressive people with no outside lives got all the egoboo, but I rarely got pushback for combining that with being female. I did know of one group that seemingly combined the "cowboy programmer" cult with a religious belief that women should be sweet and non-cowboyish. That would have been a bad place for most women to work, especially since the product crashed and burned, which I thought just.
I even knew a woman promoted from administrative assistant straight into program management - someone actually noticed that she'd been doing the work, and she got the title. Not programmer-specific, but I thought it was unusually rational.
Posted by: clew at Nov 20, 2003 6:02:36 PM
The woman in the ads with the "little black dress" (very low-cut) was Katrina Garnett, CEO of CrossWorlds (which has been sold to IBM). She was also active in setting up a foundation which funded computer camps for girls.
I'll add another data point to the culture of women at Microsoft: I haven't been working there that long, but I've never seen women being treated differently from the men or heard of a case of unequal treatment. However, that also means that if the culture of a certain group is to be aggressive, then a woman (or man for that matter) who is more timid, needs to learn to speak up with confidence to gain the ear of her co-workers. I don't think anyone who is openly hostile towards only women would gain much respect from co-workers at any company. And at Microsoft you have the chance to network with other female developers, unlike the tiny companies I'm used to working at where there were only a couple of us, if any.
Posted by: Lilly Tao at Nov 24, 2003 4:24:40 AM
