Women Leaders Needed in MedTech, Design, Manufacturing - Join the ConversationWomen Leaders Needed in MedTech, Design, Manufacturing - Join the Conversation
Marissa Mayer was Google's first female engineer. Now, as the CEO at Yahoo, she is raising eyebrows for eliminating flexible telecommuting positions.Sheryl Sandberg's book on women in leadership, Lean In, is provoking supportive discussion groups -- as well as anti-Sanberg diatribes.There's no doubt women leaders are rare in the medical technology universe. But why? And what do we do? Or does it not really matter?
June 5, 2013
At MD&M East, we'll bring the cultural miasma on women and work home. We'd love you to join the conversation.
Here's some of the questions I'll be asking the panel of women in the industry -- Tuesday, June 18, 3-4 p.m. in the Presentation Theater.
Talk about an instance where you’ve seen other women “leaning back” – not speaking up in meetings, not seeking promotions, seeing all their success as dependent on others, etc. Give us examples of some of the ways women get in their own way.
Talk about a time in your career when you had to step up and do something that others found “unfeminine” or that took all your courage to do. Did it work out for you? What are the limits?
It seems that, in many modern workplaces, sexism expresses itself not as overt harassment but as assumptions about what people are and what they want. It’s more about how the culture is built than about conscious power. The example Sheryl Sandberg uses is how often she is asked “how she does it all” when no one asks Mark Zuckerberg that. Can you describe instances when people applied assumptions to you? Can you offer advice on making those cultural biases apparent to both men and women and what to do about them?
There is a section in Lean In where Sandberg talks about how reluctant she was to ask Facebook for more money when offered her job there. It took her husband and brother to talk her into negotiating at all. When she did, she purposefully couched it as a question she was asking because she was aware of the cultural biases against women asking for more cash. She did it for the “women,” not herself. Talk about times you’ve asked for a raise. Did it feel too manly? What do you think about the tactic of acknowledging prejudice and playing it consciously?
Of course, getting more women in to engineering and into top leadership positions isn’t just about individual women acting differently – and it’s not just about women at the top. For example, a recent study done at Rutgers found that women who had access to and took paid maternity leave were 40% less likely to need food stamps in the year following a child’s birth.” What company policies or programs have you seen be effective?
What role can men or other partners play?
“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder” – Is that true of your career?
Sometimes “leaning in” means leaning in to your home life or leaning in to a hobby. When has letting go of career been good for you?
Slaughter famously said women can’t have it all. Something does have to give. Sandberg countered that no one can have it all. Every decision puts one thing over another. How would you respond? Can women have it all?
What’s the one best piece of advice you have for women just starting their careers?
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