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Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came under fire for his response to a question regarding how women should ask for raises. At the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Nadella was asked what advice he would give women who don’t feel comfortable pressing their bosses for promotions or raises. “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” Nadella responded, adding that it is good karma and will come back. “That’s the kind of person that I want to trust, that I want to give more responsibility to,” he said.
Taking the initiative
So, how do Indian women, who have a growing presence in the tech and corporate sector, feel about Nadella’s perspective? Several women News India Times spoke to found his comments disheartening, demeaning and outdated. “It is not karma that will take you ahead, it’s you,” says Arati Mehendale, a chartered public accountant with ADP. Women have to be aggressive, demand what they deserve and also communicate their needs to the management, she notes, adding that women always want for someone to put a tiara on their head, quoting from Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In.”
Like Mehendale, many Indian-American women feel it is high time they step up and voice their opinions at their workplace. “It all boils down to responsibilities, initiatives, asking for what you deserve and pushing the management,” says Leena Sukumar, vice president of Marketing at mySkin Inc. A firm believer in equal work, equal pay, and equal opportunities, Sukumar believes women work as hard, or sometimes harder than men, but often fail to reap the benefits of their efforts.
Some also fear that this lack of aggressiveness or complacency is setting a trend, and it will get harder to break away from as time goes by. “Women cannot just sit back and rest on the laurels of a job well done, that will take them nowhere,” says Prachi Dwivedi of West Windsor, New Jersey. “Women have to do their homework, have to speak up for themselves and learn to be a bit pushy, a bit aggressive,” the mother of 8-year-old twin boys who worked in the financial and tech sector in New York City for over a decade, told News India Times.
Reena Gupta, CEO at Avankia and TargetRecruit told CRN, a news source for solution providers and the IT channel, that she was a bit surprised to hear Nadella’s remarks. “My firm belief is it doesn’t matter who the person is. Whether it’s a man or a woman, if they’re performing well and they deserve it, they should get a raise. Women themselves have to step up and say, ‘I think I deserve that. I think [my supervisors] need to be understanding what I’m really capable of.’ [Women] should not accept any kind of bias. If one women accepts it, it’s a trend. That should not be happening.”
Reflecting a Culture
Nadella’s comments, in spite of being distasteful and outdated, are reflective of attitudes of women in careers across the board, says Rucha Gokhale of Jersey City, New Jersey. Working women with families, often have to juggle between the two roles – a career woman and a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, etc., that somewhere down the line a guilt sets in, and she resorts to taking a low profile in her job, Gokhale says. “This attitude is reflective of our culture, something that has been imbibed in us,” the self-claimed “technology junkie” told News India Times. “I recall even someone like Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsi saying something on the lines of ‘When I’m home I’m not a CEO but a woman, a mother,’” she said.
There are other factors like the reason for working itself which also could play a significant role in their attitude at work. Some women could be working as a convenience and are not looking to grow in their career; some could be working out of compulsion and might not want to jeopardize their job by asking for a raise, says Chitra Deepesh, a project and development manager at IBM. “But the most important reason is that most women by nature are not career-oriented, so salary raise is the last thing on their mind,” the South Brunswick, New Jersey resident told News India Times.
Creating Work Life Balance
Deepesh raises a point which women across all industries face – creating a work life balance. While many take advantages of the infrastructure this country provides – day-care centers, groceries delivered at home, baby-sitting, etc., many succumb to family obligations and responsibilities, resorting to a low salary and a low job profile, while some like Dwivedi take time off work. “Women with children are the ones who want the flexibility to work remotely or at odd hours,” Deepesh says, adding, that more workplaces would change their policies, if men placed more value on these issues.
Some women also need to take time off their jobs to tend to young children or take care of other family obligations, and this sets them back in their career, making it harder to penetrate back in the job market. “A woman can seldom go back to the same position and salary bracket she was at after a long break, but it’s easier for a man,” says Gokhale, who’s currently on a hiatus from work to care for her 13-month-old daughter.
“Women in the work-force, and mainly the technical sector have to work extra harder to show that she is better than her peers,” says Kanchan Torvi, a Michigan-based Implementation Manager at ADP. Throw in a family, a husband, kids, their schedules, and other responsibilities in the mix, and that’s that much more hard work for her to prove her mettle. And if the job involves working long-hours or travel, it’s crazier, she says.
One of the main factor that goes against working women in general and Indian-American women in particular is the preconceived notions, says Kalika Sharma, senior consultant at Infrastructure Project Management at Booz Allen Hamilton in the Washington, D.C. area. “It is already assumed that a woman has to take care of her family and hence will not be as productive as her male counterparts,” she told News India Times. There are few women in the tech field to begin with Sharma says, and being in a minority ethnic group adds to the challenges.
Deepti Parmar, head of information systems at Credit Union of New Jersey, speaks on behalf of thousands of women, Indian-American or otherwise, when she says that a woman and a man should be treated the same way as both are expected to do the same amount of work. “The perception is that women have to take care of kids and home, and won’t be able be as productive for the company like a male employee,” she says. “That’s not true, because a woman can manage both home and work very well.”
Lack of Confidence
Nadella’s comments may have been directed at the subject of raises in general, implying that “karma” or “the system” rewards good work without recognizing the massive gaps that exist between men and women in the workplace. Though much has been said about the pay gap and the 23 percent difference in compensation between sexes, many women feel the most pervasive discrepancy between working men and women today is the confidence gap.
And according to Gokhale this lack of confidence comes across the most during appraisals. “There is a stark difference in which a man and woman deal with appraisals or reviews,” which are one of the most common ways in which an employee’s performance is evaluated for a pay raise and/or a promotion. “A man tends to look at an appraisal more objectively than a woman.” A man will argue and fight for what he feels he deserves, while a woman will meekly accept what she’s been told, and not raise it with the senior management, which is also more often than not, male-dominated, she notes.
Research has revealed that women are less likely to negotiate than their male counterparts. Men are eight times more likely than women to negotiate salary when taking a job, according to a study by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever for their 2007 book “Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation and Positive Strategies for Change.”
“Women are known to negotiate less, and once you start low, it’s very hard to rise up,” as you have set the norm, says Dwivedi.
However, disparity in salary is relative. While Torvi, who also manages hiring for the company, said there a team of men and women she recruited recently had the same starting salary. But, like company policies for their women employees, hiring trends also vary from company to company “Most of the policies offered by these companies look good on paper,” Sharma notes, but day to day behavior and attitudes regarding women employees, especially during promotions, still are archaic and debatable. “It has definitely gotten easier, but there’s a long way to go.”
Equal Treatment
How can a woman work in a company when she is aware that her male colleagues are making more, while she believes she should make more based on her productivity, questions Parmar. Many a times, a woman has no option to but watch her male colleagues grow in the company, or if she asks for raise and is denied, she has no option but quit. Something Gokhale has done in the past. “I’ve had to move jobs, because I felt I was not being treated at par to my male counterparts, both job-wise as well as through remuneration,” Gokhale said. One study found a 7.6 percent difference in salaries between male and female MBAs, because only 7 percent of women attempted to negotiate, while 57 percent of men did. Women in tech made $6,358 less than men in 2011, according to a recent Associated Press report.
It is a known fact that the information technology sector is a highly male-dominated field; a very few women work in the field. According to an American Association of University Women study based on 2011 U.S. Census Bureau data, women’s pay in many STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs still falls well behind that of men. For example, the median earnings for male computer and information systems managers in 2011 were just over $98,000, while their female counterparts were making around $86,000. According to a recent study by the American Institute for Economic Research, women in the computer technology industry earn an average of $6,358 a year less than men, factoring in education, age, region and occupation differences. And add in $11,274 to the equation if you are a mother, the survey says.
Of course, there are women at the top in the field – CEOs like HP’s Meg Whitman, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and IBM’s Ginni Rometty. But that’s a miniscule number compared to the many system administrators, programmers or managers, whose paychecks are still significantly less than those of their male counterparts.
Shifting the Culture
Women leaders like Sandberg, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code, are trying to bridge the male-female gap in technology and in computing fields. But Torvi feels, along with a shift of culture in the workplace, attitudes at home must change too. When home and child-care chores are equally divided between the husband the wife, there’s less stress on the woman to be a “superwoman” and magically finish everything. That, along with changing attitudes within companies to women and diversity in general, things will get much easier, she feels.
“Diversity is a huge asset for big companies,” she says, “it encourages out-of-the box thinking and different point of views,” and a lot of companies are noticing that. “Until we have gender parity in technology, women are going to continue to face sexism,” Saujani said in an email message to News India Times. That’s why at Girls Who Code we are empowering girls not only with tech skills, but leadership skills to be CEOs or start their own companies, she added. “We need to shift the culture.”
Girls Who Code aims to provide computer science education and exposure to 1 million young women by 2020. “We believe this is paramount to ensure the economic prosperity of women, families, and communities across the globe, and to equip citizens with the 21st century tools for innovation and social change,” according to the Girls Who Code website. “We believe that more girls exposed to computer science at a young age will lead to more women working in the technology and engineering fields.
Through her book “Lean In,” which she co-authored with television and film writer Nell Scovell, Sandberg, helps working women achieve their career goals. The book looks at the barriers preventing women from taking leadership roles in the workplace, barriers such as discrimination, blatant and subtle sexism and sexual harassment.
Indian-American women in the tech sector are hopeful that the culture shift happens, that the policies towards women employees change for the positive with more and more companies offering flexible hours and work from home options. Till then, many say they will rely on karma, as Nadella suggested, not for pay hikes, but for gathering strength and confidence to survive in a male-dominated industry.