Microsoft Women Worth Watching.

In the 25-plus years I’ve written about technology, I’ve interviewed fewer than 50 female Microsoft employees (by my rough estimate). In part, this is because there are less of them. Microsoft officials say women comprise 25 percent of the company’s total workforce. It’s also because many of the women who do work at Microsoft are in marketing, sales and support roles and aren’t among those who are “authorized” to talk to us press/blogger types.

There are a handful of women employees dotting Microsoft’s executive ranks, including two Senior Vice Presidents (Lisa Brummel,head of Human Resources, and Mich Matthews, head of the Central Marketing Group). But I wanted to meet some of the less-public techies — the engineers, product managers and programmers who work at Microsoft to find out how and why they’ve managed to buck the continuing trend of women not entering math/science careers. The women I’ve interviewed for this series have joined Microsoft via a wide variety of paths. Some knew since they were kids they wanted to be involved in technology. Others came to the Empire via a more circuitous route (master of fine arts in poetry, anyone?). Some are Microsoft lifers. Others are recent hires.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Betsy Aoki
Title: Senior Program Manager, Online Services Division

What’s Your Typical Day Like? “I have an evangelist’s travel schedule,” Aoki, just back from SXSW and Mix 10, says. She also monitors the Bing Twitter account and handles a variety of public relations incubation projects. Her overarching goal is “to try to help marketing understand social media.”

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? When Aoki was in the eight grade, her dad brought home a DEC computer and she “messed around with Random.h generation,” she recalls. But she also was really into English. “It might have been good to go for a CS (computer science) and English double major,” she concedes, but instead she went the English route and ultimately earned her Master’s of Fine Arts in Poetry. But her inner geek was always there, she says.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Vanessa Feliberti

Title: Software Development Lead, Exchange Server

What’s Your Typical Day Like? For the past three years, Feliberti has been working on the calendaring functionality in Exchange Server 2010. She currently manages seven people. While she does some delegating, she also does a lot of working on problems, 24 X 7.

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? “I remember the moment I knew I’d be in technology,” Feliberti recalls. She was being tutored in math (which she always had found easy) by a high-school student while in junior high. “He said computers were where the future was at,” she says. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she “put together the logic in computing with the problem solving,” Feliberti says. “I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do.”

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Margarita Naumova: Microsoft Women Worth Watching.

Title: SQL Server Consultant, Microsoft Consulting Services

What’s Your Typical Day Like? Lots of customer team meetings involving project delivery. She work both at big enterprise customer sites and in her home office. “I do more design, disaster recovery, SQL Server architectural work and performance optimization” than anything else, she says. “I usually play the role of project architect,” more than doing any coding, Naumova says, “so I often create teams of people comprised of customers and partners.”

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? “I do things I like and follow things with emotion,” says Naumova. Math was her favorite discipline in school, leading to a focus on technology and databases at the University of Economics in Varna, Bulgaria. Science, mathematics and analytical thinking “was natural for me,” she says.

Advice for women (and/or men) considering a career in technology? “Women can become successful in any sphere as long as they can overcome the restrictions in their minds. They need to focus on and create opportunities, not focus on the obstacles,” says Naumova. “There is a place for every person who likes challenges.”

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johnwillyums said:

Interesting article Jan. I wonder if there is less of a glass ceiling in IT industries?
On the one hand techy stuff is geeky and has a frustrated masculinity about it whilst on the other there is a sort of liberalistic/democratic sense to it-open source, do no evil, freedom of speech, freedom of information and so on.
Just a thought,John

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There are a handful of women employees dotting Microsoft’s executive ranks, including two Senior Vice Presidents (Lisa Brummel,head of Human Resources, and Mich Matthews, head of the Central Marketing Group)

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

Title: Product Unit Manager for Internet Information Services (IIS)

What’s Your Typical Day Like? She runs a team of 50 engineers who work across test, development and program management. Tomsen Bukovec’s day is a mix of meetings about products and meetings about and with people. Somewhere in the day, she tries to get 30 minutes a day outside, where she can often be founding jumping rope in a hidden corner (or indoors in a parking garage when it’s horrible outside) with her headphones on, she says. She finds time at the end of every day to reconnect with her husband and three young boys, she adds.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Lori Lamkin.

Title: Product Unit Manager, Team Foundation Server

What’s Your Typical Day Like? “From 9 to 5, I’m in meetings,” Lamkin says. She does different check-ins with her team, depending where they are in the product cycle. THey could be planning the next version of the product, working on a service pack or focusing on other deliverables. She also does a lot of customer briefings and events in blocks. Lamkin currently has 70 people reporting to her across the dev, test and product management spectrum.

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? Lamkin says she enjoyed math and science from an early age and knew “she wanted to go out and make an impact.” In high school, she already knew she had a passion for computers. She started out her University of Washington college career focused on becoming an electrical engineer, but ended up enjoying computer science more, so decided to major in math and minor in computer science. In college, she worked at Seattle City Light on a project to forecast power consumption.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Holly Hirzel

Title: Lead Producer for “1 vs. 100″, Xbox Live

What’s Your Typical Day Like? Depending on where the game is in the pipeline, Hirzel might be doing a variety of jobs. In early stages, she may be “communicating and collaborating” about schedules, business models, feature prioritization. During the development process, she spends more time communicating with devs, designers and testers. Later, she may be wearing her PR and marketing or technical support hats.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Betsy Speare

Title: Principal Program Manager Lead, Windows Server

What’s Your Typical Day Like? Speare’s day starts between 7 and 8 a.m., when she checks her e-mail in the kitchen while her daughter eats. She spends the rest of her day talking with people and doing all kinds of planning for the next version of Windows Server. She deals with the Server and Tools Business general managers, technology owners and individuals interacting with customers and partners. “It’s lots of e-mail and lots of meetings,” Speare says.

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? In high school, Speare was into computers. She took Apple IIe programming classes and was almost always the only girl, she says. “I was always the ‘person who knew how to work the computer’ in various job settings.

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Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Erin Chapple

Title: Group Program Manager, Management and Services, Windows Server

What’s Your Typical Day Like?
There’s no such thing as a “typical” day for Chapple. Depending on where the products on which she is working are in the cycle — planning, execution, ready to ship, etc. — she performs different functions and tasks. When it’s early on, she spends more time talking to customer; during shipping, she evaluates issues that arise and does a lot of triaging. Throughout, there are lots of meetings, meetings, meetings, she says.

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way?

In high school, Chapple enjoyed math and science and knew she wanted to go in that direction. She took a number of electronics, drafting and shop classes “because I liked problem-solving and building things,” she recalls. She decided she’d major in electrical engineering, as she had a lot of cousins in EE who showed her it could be fun, she says. She ended up getting her Bachelor’s in EE with an Environmental Engineering minor from the University of Waterloo, Canada — but still had an interest in and fondness for computer science.

A few months into her first EE job while in school, Chapple realized “it wasn’t what I thought it would be.” She says she was “too much of a people person” to spend her entire day focused on switches and routers. She had interned — not just once, but four times — at Microsoft while still in college. She had done stints on Outlook (”before it was even called Outlook,” she says) and Small Business Server. (She was awarded a patent for work she did during her first internship.)

In 1998, she was hired by Microsoft to work on the Small Business Server team and spent four years there working on the first four releases, first as an individual contributor, and later as a manager of a small team. She moved ot the Windows Server team to work on Group Policy and software updating. She then became a Group Program Manager, where she worked on the user experience and integration.

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Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Rebecca Norlander

Title: Partner Engineering Manager

What’s Your Typical Day Like? Currently, Norlander is between jobs at Microsoft and is considering what she wants to do next — at Microsoft (at least that’s the indication I’m getting). She also continues to work with Human Resources and others at the company on helping steer women at Microsoft into the key positions.

Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way? Norlander originally was thinking about being a biomedical engineer when she entered Boston University. (Her dad was an engineer and she loved logic, puzzles and math.) But computer science (CS) was the only class she liked. She ended up switching her major to CS. In 1991, when she graduated, the tech sector in Boston was in a recession. At an MIT job fair, Norlander met a Microsoft recruiter. Although she had never been to the West Coast, she got a “fly back” for an interview and ended up taking a job there.
(Norlander didn’t mention this during our conversation, but her husband Chief Experience Officer J Allard — whose whereabouts I wondered about earlier this week — also was recruited by Microsoft around the same time, and the pair ended up joining Microsoft together.)

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