On April 26, 2019, I participated in a speaker series at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, where I earned my BS EE/CS in the 70’s. They requested that I give advice to women engineering students regarding survival in a male-dominated field.
I started with a summary of my career, which I won’t include here. These were the notes I had prepared, but I didn’t read them verbatim, just spoke from them. Here were the 13 tips I presented:
1. Female engineers don’t need to “man up”
- Be yourself. Don’t change who you are or how you behave to be an engineer.
- Have a sense of humor, brush things off. If you take offense at every little thing, people remember. If it’s genuine harassment, deal with it – but mostly it’s not. People often say things they don’t realize are offensive, because no one has ever told them it was. Use this as an opportunity to educate, and make change.
- Story: I had a summer internship at a Naval base, in the Civilian Public Works office, where I was the only female engineer. Many people mistakenly assumed I was an admin when first seeing me in the engineering building, which I had to laugh off. In addition, there was no women’s restroom in that building, so I spent the summer running next door to the building housing the support staff.
- Story: In my first full-time job (HP), the Lab Manager would be speaking to the group and say “… guys…” — then turn to look at me and correct to “…guys and gal…” — I emphasized that they didn’t need to say “gal” and I considered “guy” to be non-gender specific.
2. It’s OK to not know everything
- Admit it when you don’t know something
- It’s impossible to know everything, but sometimes it’s easy to think that everyone else knows it all. You are not an imposter. It is incredibly unlikely that you got lucky over and over and over again. It’s much more likely that you got where you are through hard work and your accomplishments
- Don’t worry about seeming ignorant or uneducated. Try to solve problems yourself before asking for help – but know when the time expenditure of researching outweighs the benefits of self-discovery. If you’ve spent 2 hours struggling to find a solution to something that can be answered in 2 minutes by your colleague, go ahead and ask. A good method for questioning is to explain the problem, explain the steps you took to solve it (so far), and any hypotheses you may have. This shows initiative to problem-solve.
3. Stay persistent in your quest for improvement
- Don’t take it personally when told areas to improve on. When you become aware of deficits, make a plan to work on them. As you work on areas of improvement, ask for feedback to see if you’ve improved in the eyes of your teammates.
- Never give up. There may be days so difficult that you come home and eat a pint of ice cream and cry yourself to sleep. That is OK. Every day is a clean slate, and a chance to improve. Your manager hired you for a reason. You are a valued member of your team and they are there to help you.
4. Failure is part of success
- Say: “I made a mistake. Big whoop. Here’s my action plan to deal with it.”
- Embracing failure as a means to growth makes you stronger, more resilient, and more relatable.
- Build a trusted team that will give you constructive criticism and coach you through a failure.
5. Exude confidence: Act like it’s impossible to fail
- Yes, I just told you failure is part of success. But act like it’s impossible anyway. Fake it ‘til you make it.
- Confidence will help you get your first job, speak up in meetings, produce your best work, negotiate salaries, put yourself forward for promotions, be an influential leader and, most importantly, be happy.
- When you step out of your comfort zone, you push yourself, which helps develop confidence. Responsibility is a good thing. You might think “if this goes wrong, it’s my fault.” But then when it doesn’t, your confidence will grow!
- As long as you’re striving to be the best in your field — and are confident of your ability — people will respect you and listen to what you have to say.
6. Seek out mentors and role models
- That trusted team who will give you constructive criticism and coach you through a failure? That team includes your mentors.
- Don’t assume your role models and mentors must be female; you can learn from male colleagues too. I never had a female role model growing up, as there were so few women engineers, so I set out to be one during my career.
- Have different mentors for different reasons, it depends on how they can help you achieve your goals. For example, I had mentors at work, but also had a mentor when teaching a class at Ohlone College for 10 years – he was another instructor.
- See this article I wrote for the GoDaddy blog: The importance of female mentorship in the tech industry.
7. Get noticed – but in a good way
- “It’s not who you know; It’s not what you know; It’s who knows what you know”
- Make a name for yourself as a stellar contributor. You want your team to know you’re full of creative solutions. For example, volunteer to give a presentation that will help educate your colleagues.
- Start acting like a leader even if that’s not your formal title yet: think of leadership as a series of behaviors, rather than a role.
- Volunteer for company activities, it will help people know you in other departments.
- Story: I love extracurricular activities – in all of my corporate jobs, I was on teams that had nothing to do with my work but people got to know I was capable of planning, organizing, meeting commitments, working with others (e.g., recycling, ERT, corporate giving, social event committees). This Jewish girl was not afraid to dress up and be Santa’s Elf at the company holiday party for families & kids — and it let people know I was a good sport.
8. Honor your commitments
- Be known as someone who delivers as promised. When you commit to getting work done, you need to not only honor that commitment, but blow it out of the water. Every time.
- I always say “better to under-commit and over-deliver, than vice versa.”
9. Don’t underestimate the value of communication and people skills in the tech world
- Develop skills that help you connect, influence, and build relationships. Part of every job will be getting buy-in on ideas, or transferring knowledge to someone else.
- Problems are rarely solved by one person alone. Be someone who actively participates in discussions, who shares ideas, who listens to others, and shows an interest in their opinions.
- In resumes and interviews, show off your soft skills as well. Write and talk about examples of when you’ve developed key skills, including teamwork, communication, and the ability to build relationships. You could draw on examples from your degree, such as giving a group presentation; from your work experience, such as working with others to meet an important deadline; or from your extracurricular activities, such as playing for a sports team.
10. Do the scary thing
- Don’t be afraid to step up to new challenges even if you feel not quite ready for them. If something is offered by your boss/mentor/etc., they think you’re ready for it.
- Go after the scary opportunities, because those are the ones that will really stretch you. You can’t grow if you’re continually completing tasks with which you already have experience. When you relinquish an “easy” task, you now put yourself in a position to become a mentor to the co-worker who takes it on. Be known as someone not scared to tackle new challenges.
- Story: I was managing a Quality department, and the manager of IT went on a personal leave of absence for a few weeks. My boss (also a mentor) suggested I take on that role temporarily, as a good learning opportunity. That was definitely a “scary thing” for me. The IT manager never returned, I went on to manage the IT department for a couple of years. Had I not taken that position, I might not have been exposed to web design so early, as that was a brand new thing in those days, and the technical part of the company website was managed by IT (with content from marketing).
11. Know how to ask for what you need
- Ask for what you deserve at work. Women in their 20’s experience the largest pay gap, and male colleagues at the same level can be making up to 25-30% more than their female counterparts. Subsequent raises or offers are based on your current salary, so make sure you’re paid fairly early on.
- Instead of going to your boss and saying “I deserve a promotion” – be prepared to outline the positive impact you’ve had on the organization, such as increasing production, facilitating safer operations, building relationships with customers. You could also look for the win-win scenario: explain how advancing your place or role in the organization can benefit both you and the company.
- Practice the big asks: keep them under 3 minutes. Managers are busy people, get to the point, whether it’s a request or proposing a solution to a problem.
- Story: At the time I went on maternity leave (1986), I was managing a project that was 2 years into a 3-year development timeline. I was told the project would be taken away from me and given to someone else as I would be out for two months. I was able to find an example of another manager who had been out for 2 months on medical leave and he continued to manage from home (implication: discrimination lawsuit). I was then told that since I could not access the internal email from home, it would be too difficult. I insisted we find a way, and became the first person in the lab to have a dumb terminal and a modem at home so that I could call the work email server, have it call me back, and get connected. I continued to manage the project while on leave.
12. Uplift those around you
- Former Sec of State Madeleine Albright said: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” When we help each other, we all succeed. Mentoring offers a powerful tool for helping women in business lift each other up.
- Give credit where credit is due. If your colleagues delivers something amazing, be sure to let them know you saw it. Always have your team’s back. You’re part of a team, you need to rely on each other, trust each other, both inside and outside of the office. When you constantly uplift and help your colleagues, they will most likely return the favor. For example: give compliments on an accomplishment, or attend their presentation that might be off-site or after work.
13. And finally, remember that this too shall pass
- When things really suck, remember that this too shall pass.
- And when things are really great, remember that also this too shall pass. Which means you need to stay humble, and constantly work on improving, learning, and finding the next scary thing.