Wired Women: The Good, Bad and Ugly for 2000
<br> -- I taped the e-mail to my computer: “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a jealous shrew, with a penchant for low-insight whining?” it demanded. “Do not reply to this e-mail. The last thing I want after reading your article is more uninspired complaining.”
His name was Steve Story and he was responding to a column I wrote about Claudia Schiffer’s Palm Pilot.
I get lots of e-mail — I drive my male readers crazy — but this one was a keeper. His message is a constant reminder that if I’m going to complain, I had better be inspired about it.
As we close out Y2K, I’ve taken Mr. Story’s advice to heart. With a minimum of whining, here’s a look at the good, bad and ugly with respect to women in high technology at the turn of the millennium:
It’s been 18 months since Carly Fiorina was named president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, making her the first woman to head a Dow Jones 30 company. She was an instantaneous icon for women’s progress, despite her protests to the contrary: “I hope that we are at a point that everyone has figured out that there is not a glass ceiling,” she said. “My gender is interesting, but really not the subject of the story here.” Unfortunately, Fiorina also became a target in November when HP shocked the markets by missing its projected quarterly earnings by nearly 15 percent.
Fiorina’s $69.4 million compensation package made her the first woman to crack the annual list of the Top 10 Silicon Valley moneymakers. But take her out of the mix, and Silicon Valley executive women earned 12 percent less this year than their male counterparts.
A University of Michigan study reported this month that high-tech companies with women executives earned more and performed better than those run by men. For rapidly growing IPO companies, the initial stock price, stock price growth, and growth in earnings over three years were higher when there were women executives on the management team. Even so, of the 767 best-paid executives in Silicon Valley this year, only 45 were women, a ratio of 16 men for every woman. And only four women held the posts of chairman or CEO compared with 175 men.
