E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSIt took a century for IBM, the male-dominated computer giant known for its blue-suited culture, to appoint a CEO who often wears a dress.
Last week's appointment of Virginia Rometty is both symbolic and potentially game-changing for the computer company and for an industry long plagued by a lack of women in both the rank and file and leadership.
“I think it’s great news and part of a long steady road to Damascus as far as women leading technology firms,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School who recently wrote about IBM's centennial for the Harvard Business Review.
While Hewlett-Packard recently appointed its second female chief executive in Meg Whitman, the appointment at IBM is “even a bigger deal," Koehn said.
“This is a big, important public bet the company’s making,” she said, “and it won’t go unnoticed.”
Jon Iwara / AFP - Getty Images
Virginia Rometty will take over as chief executive of IBM Jan. 1, 2012.
Koehn and others are hoping that others in the industry sit up and take notice fo the latest breakthrough in what is still very much a good old boys’ network.
“The cool thing about this particular appointment is that it’s very visible,” said Todd Thomas, associate professor of leadership at the DeVos Graduate School of Management at Northwood University in Midland, Mich., who writes a blog on leadership "I think it shows there might be some activity going on in large companies about identifying female talent in the leadership pool, and also a willingness to adapt to different leadership styles.”
Despite the appointment of Rometty, and others including Whitman and Xerox's Ursula Burn, women are still a tiny minority in technoogy leadership positions. Among Fortune 500 technology firms, only 11 percent of executives are women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
The lackluster figures reflect a shortage of women in lower-level tech jobs. Women hold 56 percent of all professional jobs in the US, but only 25 percent of IT jobs, the center reported. Women accounted for only 18 percent of undergraduate computing and information sciences degrees in 2009, down from 37 percent in 1985.
“While some of the stats for women going into the profession aren't great, the key is being able to highlight appointments like Rometty's for our younger generations, and leveraging them into learning experiences and opportunities for inspiration,” said Kate Brodock, executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University.
Clarke Murphy, global leader of the CEO and board services practice for executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, said he’s seeing a growing number of women as finalists for key executive positions at technology companies. “It’s an expectation today because there are so many great women executives in the ranks today."
So will Rometty’s ascension to IBM’s helm open the floodgates to more women in tech?
“It would be nice to think that having two or three women leading the big tech companies could be a tipping point,” said Paula King, dean of the School of Business and Leadership at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn. “But I don’t think so.”
“The pipeline needs to be full of women in engineering and women not dropping out of tech and physics in grammar school," she said. If that happens, she added, “there may be a tipping point.”
Paul Carroll, author of “Big Blue: The Unmaking of IBM” and partner at management consulting firm The Devil’s Advocate Group, doesn’t think Rometty’s appointment will lead to overnight change for the world of technology or IBM, but he does see it as an “unusual” move that will shake things up.
“In the late '80s and early' 90s, there was only one women who held a position of any real consequence at IBM,” he said. And even today, he pointed out, the executive team at IBM has only two women among a dozen members.
A Rometty tenure, he said, “is going to open up lots of opportunities for women at IBM.”
“IBM, like other companies, have this network where you hitch your wagon to a rising star and get pulled along with that person,” he explained. “It’s been tough for women because so many rising stars were men, but I have to believe she’s going to pull some people along and change the mind-set.”
Some believe all the tech-women-CEO fanfare will die down and leave women back where they were.
“Every so often it seems that there could be a breakthrough in the hiring tendencies, but, then, everything settles back to business as usual, particularly when the woman has a bad go of it at the helm, as with Yahoo and HP,” said Billie Blair, organizational psychologist and president/CEO of management consulting firm, Change Strategists Inc.
(Yahoo recently fired CEO Carol Bartz and HP’s Carly Firorina also was let go.)
But Carroll said one difference now is that two women -- Whitman and Rometty -- are now running two of the largest computer companies in the world.
“As the father of two daughters, I’m hoping we get to the point where this is no longer remarkable,” he added.
Related:
HP makes it official, appoints Meg Whitman
Leave a Comment:
It is always good to see a woman reach the higher echelons of management in the IT field. As someone who has spent the past 20+ years in IT, I worked my way up to the position of IT Director of an SMB a few years ago. Over my career I would have hired more women, but found few who possessed the skills we needed. It seems that when you do find women in this field they are almost always exceptional; otherwise they simply don't last.
We own some IBM stock, so I hope Rometty does well. The key for women and minorities is very strong education in engineering. A few years back, MIT and Cal Tech Poly had 0 black engineering students. I can't say how many there are today, but my sense is not very many. How can you fill a pipeline for advancement when you have so few qualified candidates.
One of the best things Whitman, Rometty and others can do is go on campuses and encourage women and minorities to puruse IT, engineering, Mathematics as majors.
We have too many communications and journalism majors and not enough engineering majors.
I have been working in IT for about ten years now, and here are my observations:
In the current company where I work, the other desktop support tech on my site is a lady.
In the last company I worked for, the general manager was a lady.
In the company before that, my manager, her manager, and at least half my coworkers in the IT department were ladies.
In the company before that, the other IT person on the site as well as our manager were ladies.
Also, my wife is an IT manager, and two out of the three people on her team are ladies.
OK, she's CEO now....but she still has to answer to the board of directors...which is most-likely all male. CEO of many of the large corporate giants are merely "puppets". Not to say that Rometty isn't capable, competitive, and ready to help IBM regain market share as well as increase share values and, of course, dividends.
Hopefully, she's at the helm for more than 2 years.
Board members will probably not complain as long as the quarterlies look good. They will /think/ that appointing a woman will mean they have an easier time of running the show, but they will probably find out quickly that this isn't always the case. That said you are right, that she will need to deal with the board as well, but the board isn't always involved in the day-to-day business operations as much as the CEO is. She will leave her mark on company operations regardless of what the board thinks or says.
um, excuse me...you think the board didn't have a hand in her selection? They already KNOW she's female (and they don't pick CEO's who are "puppets" since not a one of them could actually run the company).
Maybe "puppet" isn't the right word, but in many instances, "show Pony" and "Sarah Palin" come to mind... All show, no substance. I'm sure it's just more show to try and get her elected as a politician.
re the number of women in IT, apparently it's still a field where training/education still doesn't matter as much as how much time you spend on your own programming. For me, I have other things to do. I'm not going to "geek" at home in my own time, only when I'm at work getting paid for it. So there is beginning to be a lack of trained professionals when the jobs are expecting to be filled at an "entry-level" by people who build websites from the ground up and know several programming languages already because this is how they spend their free time. The one full-time job I had that was advertised as entry-level had no form of training, access to training materials, or mentoring. Other jobs I've had I worked in very close proximity to more experienced workers so it was easy and fast to ask questions during the process. Another friend who had a certificate in web design was moved up to networking and then they wanted her to manage the server, something she had no experience in. She was not willing to take on that responsibility without any training and left for another type of career. Also the setting (higher education) just cannot pay enough for these types of skills. They had a confidential info. server hack in one dept. where I worked, and just recently it came to light that hundreds of records including personal info. and SSNs had been available online for YEARS.
In addition, an admin. person told me they preferred to hire single men because the insurance was cheaper - blatantly illegal.
Doesn't matter. She'll continue the massive reductions in U.S. jobs that her predecessors started. She has no choice, or they'll fire her, too.
C'mon, fess up... you clicked on the link thinking you'd see some guy in glasses and a skirt, didn't you?
LOL - from the title, I thought the article was about all the male geeks I see wearing those olive drab kilts!
Do any of these "reporters" use spell check?
Unacceptable.
I wonder if she speaks Hindi?
I was disappointed that this article was about women leaders in technology and not about nerds who wear skirts. Very misleading.
What's with the tight collar and no tits - I'm getting mixed messages.
wrong board that's why. This one's for those of us over 12.
I thought this was an article about kilts.
My husband works for another prominent tech firm and received his 1st and only scolding two years back by a former manager (a female with about 20ish years working for IBM before moving to the current company) for referencing "the old boys club" in discussing the upcoming reorg. Saying something to the effect of "things aren't the way the used to be..people are valued for their contributions, not just gender.."
A couple months later she hung her head in shame announcing that her and my husband were being shipped off to the proverbial north pole (inspite of many significant contributions, saving the company tens of millions of dollars, and revelutionizing the way products are tested and inventoried) and that he was right about "...the boys club thing".
IBM? Are they still around?
Out on a Limb, as usual: I could not be prouder that she was hired into a CEO position. Good for her. However, I am dismayed to once again see the push for IT jobs that diminishes work done in the arts and humanities and social sciences and PUBLIC HEALTH. I know that many believe STEM is it, but we are losing valuable human skills in the social and communicative sciences. These things do matter, and what I for one would like to see is equal pay to the woman who runs the child abuse prevention center in east Brooklyn (figuratively speaking - she could just as well be in rural Iowa). Why the heck isn't she making 6 figures? I am dismayed at our priorities.
If there aren't women applying for entry level jobss, there won't be women working their way up to management. You can't walk out of college with a womens' studies degree and get hired to run a tech company.
Koehn and others are hoping that others in the industry sit up and take notice fo the latest breakthrough in what is still very much a good old boys’ network.
This is like arguing that since Obama got elected racism doesn't exist.
The terminology thrown-around in this article annoys me intensely. It's not a "plague" for there to be fewer women in executive positions in IT, or in any other professional arena, for that matter. Men get the bigger positions becuase on average they work more, harder, and make more sacrifices. If women were more like men...then there would be more of them in men's positions. Seriously, what's the big deal?