What I realized much later, paradoxically, is that by trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like I didn’t fit in.
Creating Our Own Culture
I started by reaching out more intentionally to other women in the company, seeking support for the way I wanted to be at the firm. The friend I leaned on most was Charlotte Guyman. Charlotte and I met about eight weeks into my time at Microsoft. I remember the day vividly because the day I met Charlotte was also the day that I met my future father-in-law. We were all at the American Bar Association Conference in San Francisco, where Microsoft had a trade booth, and Charlotte and I were both scheduled to be working there, demonstrating Microsoft Word.
She and I were in different work groups, but we were both told to figure out how Microsoft Word could break into the legal market, where our competition, Word Perfect, had a 95 percent market share. Charlotte was in a new group called channel marketing, and she was trying to market all our products to a given customer set, in this case the legal community. I, on the other hand, was the Word product manager trying to market Microsoft Word to any market. So Charlotte and I were coming at the same goal from two different directions. With some people, that could have turned competitive, but with Charlotte, it wasn’t that way at all. As soon as we realized we had this shared assignment, we opened up to each other: I’ll do this, you do that, and we’ll both do this third thing together. It worked perfectly because we both wanted the same result and we didn’t care about who got credit—we just wanted Microsoft to win.
I arrived at our trade booth first, all abuzz because I loved doing the demo for Word. Then Charlotte showed up, and we were all energy and excitement. I’ve heard that you never actually meet a great friend; you recognize her. That’s how it was with Charlotte. We were instant friends. We had a blast doing the demos, watching each other’s style, learning a ton. Later in the day we spotted Bill’s dad in the hall. He wasn’t hard to pick out; he’s six foot seven. He walked right up to me and I did the product demo for him. I was amazed at how lighthearted he was and how easy he was to talk to, how he made everyone around him comfortable. (Bill and I weren’t dating yet, so I didn’t know the significance of our meeting!)
Overall, I had a fantastic day. It always was that way with Charlotte. In retrospect, I realized that the core of my new effort to become comfortable at the firm was to try to work with everyone in the same way I worked with Charlotte. Arms and heart wide open.
(Charlotte not only wanted to work the same way I did; she had a striking way of critiquing the culture. She once said, “It’s not okay for women to cry at work, but it’s okay for men to YELL at work. Which is the more mature emotional response?”)
As I began to see how I might be myself in the Microsoft culture, I found a group of women who wanted to work the same way I did, and also some like-minded men. By far the most important guy friend of mine was John Neilson. I mentioned John earlier. He was one of my best friends in life, who would die before he turned 40. He and Emmy came with Bill and me on that first trip to Africa in 1993, and John and I responded to that trip in the same way, as we did to so many things. We were both very social people, we’d probably both be called “sensitive” by our colleagues, and we bonded through our efforts to be a part of the culture at Microsoft and also bring some empathy to the work. John was a vital support for me, and I hope I was the same to him. Years later, when I first heard the term “male ally” as a phrase for men who were passionate advocates for women, I thought, That was John.
Connecting with other women and creating our own culture had payoffs beyond anything I’d dreamed of. Charlotte has remained one of the closest friends of a lifetime. John and Emmy Neilson were best friends with Bill and me. Then Charlotte introduced me to Killian, who had just moved to Seattle from Washington, DC, and would found Recovery Café in 2003. Killian is deeply passionate about community and the spiritual life. Her faith tells her to include the excluded, and she brings that faith to life more than anyone else I’ve ever met. When she arrived, she encouraged the conversation the four of us were eager to have. “Okay, when you have more than you need at a material level, what’s next? Where do we go from here? Where do our gifts connect with a need in the world? How do we use our lives to build up our larger human family?”
Charlotte, Emmy, Killian, and I started jogging together every Monday morning as soon as we got our kids to school. Then we decided to add some friends, all women, and form a slightly larger group with a spiritual focus. There are nine of us, and we’ve been meeting on the second Wednesday of the month for almost twenty years now, reading books, taking trips, going on retreats, exploring ways of putting our faith into action. Our Monday jogging foursome is still intact, too, though we do more walking than jogging these days, and try not to dwell on what that might mean!
Every friend I made helped change the culture of the workplace for me, but if I had a breakthrough moment in becoming myself at Microsoft, it was when Patty Stonesifer became my boss and mentor and role model. (As I mentioned earlier, Patty was so trusted and respected by Bill and me that we asked her, as she was leaving Microsoft, if she would become the first CEO of our foundation, which she was for ten spectacular years.) Patty was seen as a star early on at Microsoft. She had her own style, and people flocked to work for her. Her group was a place where people came and wanted to stay because they felt very supported. We could be honest about what our strengths and weaknesses were, about the challenges of growing some new and difficult categories of business. Nobody knew the answers, and if we pretended we knew, we weren’t going to make any progress. We had to be willing to try stuff, kill things that didn’t work, and try something new. And we began to grow a strain of the Microsoft culture that was always there, but we gave it emphasis, and that was the ability to say “I was wrong.” It was amazing to be able to admit weaknesses and mistakes without worrying that they would be used against us.
Working for Patty, I began to develop a style that was really my own, and I stopped suppressing myself to fit in. That’s when I fully realized that I could be myself and be effective. The more I tried it, the more it worked. And it shocked me. As I moved up, and eventually was managing 1,700 people (the whole company was 1,400 people when I started and about 20,000 when I left in 1996), I was getting software developers from all over the company who’d been there for years, and people would say, “How did you get those stars to come work for you?” I got them because they wanted to work in the same way I did.
I found the guts to try it out because I saw it work for Patty, and that’s the power of a role model. She encouraged me to be true to my own style, even if she didn’t know she was having this effect on me. Without Patty, I never would have been able to accomplish the goals I set for myself—not then and not since.
In the midst of my reinvention, probably because life has a sense of humor, I became friends with the Stanford recruit who started the brash exchange with the VP during our orientation visit. One night when we were with a group of friends for dinner, I asked him, “Do you remember that time in the MBA orientation, where you had this all-out brawl with the VP? I couldn’t believe you did that. I know you now, and it just doesn’t seem like you.”
He turned completely red—embarrassed as he could be—and said, “I can’t believe you remember that. The truth is, I had an organizational behavior professor in business school who had just told me the week before that I wasn’t assertive enough and I should try to be bolder. So I was trying it out.”
That was a lesson for me. Men also face cultural obstacles in the workforce that keep them from being who they are. So anytime women can be ourselves at work, we’re improving the culture for both men and women.
That’s how I turned things around for myself at Microsoft—being myself and finding my voice with the help of peers, mentors, and role models. Being yourself sounds like a saccharine prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture. But it’s not as sweet as it sou
nds. It means not acting in a way that’s false just to fit in. It’s expressing your talents, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing your self-respect. That is power.
Careful, She’s Tougher Than You Think
If I had to summarize the lessons I learned at Microsoft, where I started work more than thirty years ago, it’s that I reported to a woman who supported my efforts to work in my own style in a culture that rewarded results, which is why I was able to get promoted and do well. If I had tried to do it on my own without colleagues who encouraged me and a boss who supported me, I would have failed. The backing I got at Microsoft a generation ago was something all women should have today. But even now, some women get the opposite. I want to tell you the story of one.
Before I do, I want to be open about something that concerns me. One of the challenges of writing my stories and telling other people’s stories is the risk that I might be seen to be suggesting some equivalence between my stories and theirs. I think the best way to manage that risk is to state flat out that the challenges of the people I highlight in this book far outstrip mine. That’s why they’re in the book. They’re heroes of mine. I’m certainly not equating my efforts to prosper in the Microsoft culture with the efforts of other women to survive and withstand the trials of their workplaces. For so many women in the workplace, “being yourself” is a much tougher challenge than what I faced at Microsoft.
Here’s a story from the world of technology that is far different from mine.
When Susan Fowler started her new job at Uber in 2016, her manager sent her a series of messages trying to talk her into having sex with him. As soon as she saw the messages, she thought that this guy had just gotten himself in trouble. She took screenshots of the conversation, reported him to HR—and learned that she was the one in trouble. HR and upper management told her that this guy “was a high performer,” it was his first offense (a lie), and Susan had a choice: She could switch to a new team or stay and expect a poor performance review from the guy she’d reported.
Susan had grown up in a rural community in Arizona, one of seven children of a stay-at-home mom and a preacher who sold payphones on weekdays. She was homeschooled, so at 16 she started cold-calling colleges and asking what she needed to do to get in. While working as a nanny and a stablehand, she found out how to take the ACT and SAT and submitted a list of books she’d read to Arizona State. They gave her a full scholarship.
Susan eventually transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy and to take more science classes—but administrators tried to keep her from taking physics because she’d had only sixth-grade-level math. She wrote a letter to the university president asking, “Didn’t you give a speech saying Penn is here to help us fulfill our dreams?” Susan won the support of the president and began teaching herself all the math she’d missed out on and then took graduate-level physics courses.
That’s the woman Uber hired. And some of her bosses expected to be able to abuse her and lie to her and suppress her efforts to speak up for herself, but it didn’t work out that way. Susan’s attitude, as she later told The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, was “No. You don’t get to do that.”
Susan transferred to another department, found a new role at Uber she loved, and started receiving perfect performance reviews. But then, because her new manager needed to keep some token women on his team, he began adding hidden negative performance reviews so Susan couldn’t get promoted out of his group. She asked about the negative reviews, and no one would explain them. The reviews not only kept her from pursuing the work she wanted, but they affected her bonus and take-home pay, and made her ineligible for Uber’s sponsorship in a Stanford graduate program she loved.
Susan began filing a report with HR every time she experienced something sexist. Eventually, her manager threatened to fire her for reporting incidents to HR. And Susan and other women endured gratuitous slights, like the company ordering leather jackets for all the male employees but not ordering them for the female employees because, they said, there were so few women at Uber that the company couldn’t get a volume discount.
Meanwhile, women were transferring out, and the percentage of women in Susan’s organization dropped from 25 percent to 6 percent. When she asked what was being done about the plunging number of women, she was told that the women of Uber needed “to step up and be better engineers.”
In one of her last meetings with HR, the rep asked Susan if she ever considered that maybe she was the problem.
When Susan decided to leave Uber, she had a job offer in a week. But after she left, she still faced a decision. Should she forget it or should she speak out? She knew that going public with sexual harassment charges could define people for the rest of their lives, and she worried about that. But she also knew many women at Uber who’d had similar experiences, and if she spoke out, she’d be speaking for them too.
Susan came down on the side of “No. You don’t get to do that.” She wrote a 3,000-word blog post on her year of being abused. The day she posted, it went viral. The next day, Uber hired former attorney general Eric Holder to investigate. After Holder submitted his report, Uber’s CEO was forced to resign, and twenty other people were fired. Soon other women in the tech sector began speaking out, and there were more firings and new policies. One headline said, SUSAN FOWLER’S UBER POST WAS THE FIRST SHOT IN A NEW WAR AGAINST SILICON VALLEY SEXISM.
A few months later, the war spread beyond tech and a few other industries when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke. Women from around the country shared stories of sexual harassment and abuse with the hashtag #MeToo. We adopted activist Tarana Burke’s phrase “Me Too”—which Tarana used in 2006 to build a community of sexual assault survivors—and took it viral. In just twenty-four hours, there were 12 million posts on Facebook alone.
At the end of 2017, Susan was on the cover of Time’s Person of the Year issue along with other prominent women of the #MeToo movement. The magazine called them the “Silence Breakers.”
The women who came forward and spoke up should be celebrated and their numbers expanded. But we also need to support women who are in blue-collar jobs and service-sector jobs, women who don’t have access to social media, whose abusers are not famous, whose stories aren’t interesting to reporters, and who live from paycheck to paycheck. What are their options for fighting back? How can we help them? Every woman who speaks up is a victory—but we need to find a way to make each victory matter to the women who still have no voice.
What Happened?
The #MeToo movement, and every woman and organization that contributes to it and emerges from it, is winning important victories for women and men. But it’s just a start. If we want to broaden and sustain these advances, we have to understand how they happened.
What happened? Why did change take so long, and why then did it come so suddenly? When women hear our own voices in another woman’s story, our courage grows, and one voice can become a chorus. When it’s “he said/she said,” the woman can’t win. But when it’s “he said/she said/she said/she said/she said/she said,” transparency has a chance, and light can flood the places where abusive behavior thrives.
In 2017, the offenders kept lying, but their defenders gave up. They couldn’t hold back the truth, and the dam broke. When women saw that more people were taking the side of the accusers over the abusers, the many stories that had been held inside came pouring out, and the abusers had to go.
When overdue change finally comes, it comes fast. But why did the abusers dominate for so long? Part of the answer is that when women are trying to decide whether we should stand up, we don’t know if others will stand with us. It often takes many women, arms linked, to inspire other women to speak.
Before I met Bill, I was in an unhealthy relationship. The guy encouraged me in some ways but held me back on purpose in others. He never wanted me to eclipse him. He didn’t see me as a woman with my own dreams, hopes, and gifts. He saw
me as someone who could play a useful role in his life, so there were certain ways he wanted me to be, and when I wasn’t that way he could be extraordinarily abusive. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I get so angry today when I see women being put down or kept in certain roles. I see myself in them.
When I started my relationship with him, I was young. There was no chance of my being myself or finding my voice at that point in my life. I was confused. I felt awful, but I didn’t understand why. There were enough moments of support to make me want to overlook the abuse and dismiss the feeling that I had to get out. When I look back, it’s clear to me that I had lost a lot of my voice and confidence, and it took me years to see what I had lost and get it back.
Even after it was over, I still didn’t really understand what had been happening until I came to have some healthy relationships. But I never fully grasped the sick power of that abusive relationship until years after it had ended, when I went to a YWCA fundraiser for a women’s and family shelter. A woman in a smart blue business suit stood at the podium and told her story, and that’s the first time I ever said to myself with full understanding, “Oh my gosh. That’s what was happening to me.”
I believe that women who’ve been abused may be quiet for a time, but we never stop looking for a moment when our words will make an impact. In 2017, we found our moment. But we need to do more than identify the abusers; we have to heal the unhealthy culture that supports them.
An abusive culture, to me, is any culture that needs to single out and exclude a group. It’s always a less productive culture because the organization’s energy is diverted from lifting people up to keeping people down. It’s like an autoimmune disease, where the body sees its own organs as threats and begins attacking them. One of the most common signs of an abusive culture is the false hierarchy that puts women below men. Actually, sometimes it’s worse than that—when women are not only below men in the hierarchy but are treated as objects.
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