true partners in the business that they built, which was a fairly substantial rental property business. Dad was an attorney; mom ran the business. They were a really well-oiled machine. They were very clear about what they both did well and how they meshed together. As kids, we were ready-made labor in the business. That probably has influenced my choice of downtime activities. We grew up with this. I got to see really closely what my dad did for a living. I would go into the office on the weekends and help him transcribe things and also working in the rental properties doing renovations and cleanup. My sister and I were raised in this tight knit family atmosphere where hard work and being productive was one of the top values that we held.
Watching my mother work with various construction folks and property managers and builders, watching how she handled them and what a very sort of fine-tuned, respectful way she had dealing with people to elicit the best from them was a huge influence on me.
X: What career advice do you give to young women who want to work in tech?
BB: My advice to them is to get technical. I realize that these days even people who come out with liberal arts degrees have experience writing some degree of simple code because they probably encountered some computer science training and learned a little bit of HTML or something throughout grade school or high school and they’re digital natives for the most part.
But really understanding, almost to the level of the guts of your business, is very helpful. Maybe you’re in marketing and you’re on the brand communications side, or the sales side. The more you know about how the product is created, who creates the product, and what their team’s capacity is for executing, the better you’ll be able to match the messaging. The other thing is women are often thought to be soft and not technical so it’s a hedge against the doubters. It gives you power and the more knowledge you have, the more empowered you feel.
Stand your ground is the other thing I tell them. Because as far as we’ve come from an equality standpoint in tech, there’s still an enormous amount of gender discrimination. You have to not let the peanut gallery get you down. You need to stand up for yourself and be aware of your surroundings. If something feels off, you need to address it immediately.
There’s a lot of unconscious bias stuff that happens: consistently giving the women the lower review score, [or] women taking longer to get promoted, even though the quality of their work is as good or better than male counterparts. Those are things that you need to be conscious of, because if you suspect you’re not getting the promotion because you don’t have the right plumbing, then you need to do something to address the problem. Be aware. Don’t be afraid to leave a company to move to another company to move up the ladder. Sometimes you need to make the right lateral move in order to make the subsequent forward move.
