Quotes of the Day

NAME: Noni Allwood
COMPANY: Cisco
TITLE: Director of gender diversity
AGE: 50

Dealing With "Microinequities"

Allwood had an unusual role model in her own mother, who she says was the first woman doctor in El Salvador (her surname comes from an English grandfather). Allwood, too, would blaze a trail by becoming among the few women to major in engineering at the national university. When she raised her hand in class, a professor would tell her to go home and wash dishes. Newly divorced and toting a toddler, Allwood took an IT job in the U.S., where she says her accent, ethnicity and gender—even her complexion—proved major roadblocks. "Customers would say, 'I don't understand your English—let me talk to Eric,'" she says. "None of my competence counted because of who I was. If I were a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hispanic, though, I wonder how things would have been different."

Minority women in male-saturated professions like technology report frequent instances of subtle discrimination. "Microinequities" is what Allwood calls the small slights and blithe biases that alienate women like her: the inside jokes, the averted eyes, the overlooked suggestions. "They're the very small things that can make a person feel included or excluded in the work environment," she says. She retaliated by overcompensating, taking on ever bigger tasks, traveling, working day and night, until she ran the company's worldwide systems programs. Today she tries to change the equation by working on a program to introduce underprivileged girls to IT as Cisco's director of global gender diversity.

"We don't have a lot of role models in the workplace," says Allwood, "people we can point to when we're 20 and say, hey, I can be like that. It's a challenge."

—Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

NAME: Sheryl Battles
COMPANY: Pitney Bowes
TITLE: Vice president of corporate communications
AGE: 47

African-American Women Executives Stay Deeply Involved In Sororities

Like many minority women who have fought their way to the upper ranks of corporate management, Battles is the product of a fiercely education-minded mother. But her mother, who worked as a teacher and a librarian, was just as passionate about community service. As a member of the sorority Delta Sigma Theta, she gave back all her life—and counseled her daughter from an early age to do so, too.

Black sororities differ from their white counterparts by emphasizing community service above all, says members, and by expecting participation to continue, if not grow, after leaving college. As a communications officer for mail and document company Pitney Bowes, Battles often pulls long hours. Still she spends up to 30 more hours a month on Delta activities.

"Delta Sigma Theta is a part of the way that I give back to the community," she says. "But I have found ways to serve the community through other organizations as well. For me, its all about trying to keep the doors of opportunity open that so many before me, made it possible for me to walk through, and to open new doors of opportunity for my daughter's generation and those to follow."

Minority women feel uncomfortable bringing up their community service to employers, sensing tacit disapproval and persisting stereotypes. But Battles says Pitney Bowes not only knows about her sorority participation but lauds it. The company even sponsored a college scholarship fund of a local Delta chapter. "We are raising our profile in the diverse community," says Battles.

—Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

NAME: Irish Brown
COMPANY: Lehman Brothers
TITLE: Senior vice president of diversity lateral recruiting
AGE: 35

Bringing Diversity to Wall Street

Irish Brown has had a charmed career. Propelled by education-focused parents and an MBA from Columbia University, she moved smoothly from Wall Street to Washington to corporate finance. Though she succeeded as an investment banker specializing in high-yield capital markets, Irish Brown, whose four grandparents emigrated from the Caribbean, noticed few faces like hers in the workplace. On Wall Street, "diversity has been an issue for a long time not just for people of color but women as well," she says. "Being a woman of color, you notice it from both angles."

It was when she took a job heading up business development at a minority-owned media company that she realized diversity in the workplace made a difference. Irish Brown, who was parenting her fiance's son, felt comfortable sharing her family situation with coworkers—comfortable enough even to ask to place the boy on her health plan. Extended families are a fact of life for more minority women than any other group, and "I felt it was something that was accepted there."

Earlier this year, Irish Brown accepted a job at Lehman Brothers, heading up the recruitment of experienced minority professionals. Her newly created position shows Wall Street is serious about beginning to tackle its lack of diversity, she says. "It's my opportunity to really implement change in an organization."

—Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

NAME: Laura Castro de Cortes
COMPANY: Commercial Federal Bank, Omaha
TITLE: Vice president and director of Latino banking
AGE: 42

Latina Executive Uses Numbers To Prove Her Worth

Laura Castro de Cortes doesn't deny that her ethnicity and background—she is a Mexican-American who was born in the U.S. but raised in a Mexican border town—helped her to segue from years of working in nonprofits and education to a career as a consultant on Latino marketing.

But when she was hired by a regional bank to help develop its Latino clientele, she felt the need to prove that her ethnicity alone did not win her the job. "You kind of feel the need to let people know I got here on my own, not out of any quota," she says. "I knew how to sell that loan to Latinos and no one else knew that and I felt comfort in that. I knew my area."

She also felt the need to prove that Latino marketing was a worthwhile pursuit. "It was hard to prove my case and point. There was no past history" at the bank of targeting Hispanic customers, she says. Castro de Cortes made her case by talking about potential profits to be made from the growing Latino market. "All of a sudden, things changed," she says. "They saw what my area of expertise could do for them. I had the numbers and the potential money to be made. That always, always did the trick."

Castro de Cortes' department was eliminated after the bank was acquired by another bank. She is leaving her job in December, and hoping to land a similar job at another bank soon.

—Betsy Rubiner

NAME: Shernaz Daver
TITLE: Technology Marketing Consultant
CLIENTS: Motorola, Netflix, Openwave, Baidu
AGE: 41

"You Look Different. You Act Different...You Can't Change That"

Being a minority woman and a foreigner in corporate America is a "double whammy," says Shernaz Daver. Raised in Bombay and educated at Stanford and Harvard, the 41-year-old high-tech marketing consultant struggled against stereotypes to gain access to boardrooms and executive offices at some of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies, including Sun Microsystems and Motorola.

In the late 1980s, Daver was one of the first Indian women to enter technology marketing. Neither black nor white, she grew accustomed to being stared at and judged differently, despite wearing Western clothes and speaking flawless English. Today, the mother of two is still in a rarefied position as just one of a handful of Indian female executives nationwide.

"Physically, you just look different," she says. "You act different. You have a different kind of presence. You can't change that. There's no way you can automatically become a white woman or a white man, so you acknowledge the double whammy: that's what it is." That realistic approach combined with tenacity, flexibility and good humor helped advance her career. Becoming well versed in technical jargon like "floating-point processors," "DRAM," and "chip throughput," helped, too.

At Motorola, she was the only woman handling PR for the company's microprocessor unit. Later, at Sun Microsystems, Daver worked closely with Sun's COO Ed Zander and helped position and brand the Solaris product line. Next, she became vice president of corporate communications and investor relations at gamemaker 3DO.After that, she served as vice president of marketing and investor relations at search pioneer Inktomi, acquired by Yahoo. At Inktomi, Daver helped build the company's marketing group, brand identity, and guided the company's public offering and buyout.

As a foreigner who grew up without a television, one of Daver's biggest challenges was becoming fluent in U.S. culture and customs. So, to better relate to Americans, she spent countless hours watching re-runs of home-grown TV classics like "Leave It To Beaver," "Dallas," "Starsky and Hutch," "The Brady Bunch," and "Mash." From those shows, she learned about American language, slang, humor, and other pop-cultural references that she herself made use of to help break the ice and shoot the breeze with others in the dorms, and later, in corporate cafeterias.

"My goal has always been, if you can make everybody comfortable around you, with you, then you can kind of get a whole lot done," says Daver. Still, she knows she must always try harder. Perhaps that's why, despite achieving the so-called traditional trappings of success in American society, Daver says, "I haven't ever believed I've made it."

—Laura Locke

NAME: Vicki Ho
COMPANY: General Electric
TITLE: Chief operating officer for equipment services in China
AGE: 42

Working Against Stereotypes of Asian Women

Born in Taiwan, Ho was raised by a mother who shamed her family by taking a job as an insurance agent while Ho's father attended school. Hauling Ho and her brother on a moped to make sales calls, Ho's mother became the top agent—but quit her career to join her husband in Chicago. She encouraged her gifted daughter but chided her never to boast of her accomplishments. Ho entered the corporate world an unwitting embodiment of stereotypical Asian female behavior—"diminutive, submissive, that whole geisha thing you get tagged with."

Then she attended a workshop at GE organized by Deborah Elam, GE's newly appointed chief diversity officer. Elam, who is African-American, felt the lack of organized support for women of color in the upper ranks at GE, and put together what she called the Multicultural Women's Initiative—one aspect of which targets high-potential women like Ho for a weekend-long bootcamp. Ho networked with other GE executives who urged her to be more aggressive. It recently helped her win a tough, new assignment as chief operating officer for equipment services in China.

"I can't tell you how appreciative I am that she brought us on the radar screen," says Ho of Elam. "Companies don't look beyond minorities and women to look at minority women. Asians, for instance, may have kind of positive stereotypes that we work hard and we're smart. But Asian women are considered submissive and weak.

"As companies make inroads into being more inclusive, they need to go one step deeper. There's this wonderful labor pool that's untapped."

—Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

NAME: Donna James
COMPANY: Nationwide
TITLE: president of Nationwide Strategic Investments
AGE: 48

Even Successful Executives Confront Biases At Work

James has risen steadily during her 25 years at Nationwide, an insurance and financial services company based in Columbus, Ohio. But along the way, she's encountered biases in the form of offhand comments that are unintentionally insulting. "I know it's out there. I choose to believe it's borne out of ignorance and innocence rather than hatred," she says.

Instead of ignoring the comments, James tries to educate the colleague by explaining why she found it hurtful or insulting. "I may be someone's window into a culture or a world that they have no knowledge or understanding of," she says. "As wearying as it may become, I have to be ready to teach as much as I have to be ready to absorb and learn. You have to be ready to deal with it if you're going to be a pioneer."

She also was reluctant, especially early in her career, to let colleagues know that she gave birth to her son when she was 17 and unwed. "People are fascinated by this," she says, of her teen pregnancy. "The whole conversation changes overnight. I didn't want it to get in the way of my career. I didn't need that and my son didn't." Later, she became more comfortable sharing this personal detail at work. "It's an important part of who I am and the story I have to tell," she says. "I never saw it as a liability; it never stopped me from being the person I wanted to be."

—Betsy Rubiner

NAME: Melanie Robinson
COMPANY: BellSouth
TITLE: Senior Manager of Advertising
AGE: 37

Pulled in Different Directions

Like a lot of African-American females in today's corporate world, Melanie Robinson finds herself trying to walk a precarious line between her commitments to her job and those outside the workplace involving family and community.

Robinson is single with a younger sister who is married and expecting her first child and an ailing mother. As a result, she is often pulled in a number of different directions, while still keeping up with her own work and personal commitments.

Juggling it all is a considerable challenge for African-American women, Robinson says. All the more so given the pressures she and other black women feel to dress and act "an appropriate way" in a corporate world mostly dominated by white males.

"You always have to be very careful as an African-American woman not to do what comes naturally, which is to speak your mind," she said. "You have to always watch your words, which is hard to do."

—John Hollis

NAME: Jacqui Welch
COMPANY: Rock-Tenn
TITLE: Vice president of employee and organizational effectiveness
AGE: 35

Minority Executives Keep Corporations "Plugged In" To The Community

Welch has what some might call a full plate. She oversees hiring, training and performance management for the Norcross, Ga.-based packaging and recycled paperboard manufacturer's 10,000 employees. Add responsibility for employee and union relations, corporate communications and corporate citizenship and diversity for the $2.2 billion company.

But the job has its perks: it enables Welch to be "plugged into the community" by steering the company's philanthropy. Since Rock-Tenn is located in the Atlanta area, 58% of its giving goes to art-related non-profits, she says. Her challenge: guiding some dollars to minority arts groups. Getting minority employees to give to organizations they care about is one step, as the company can match the donation. Encouraging groups that don't traditionally appeal to minorities to make an effort is another; the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra recently asked Welch to help it devise a marketing plan to engage the minority community.

It's far from her only role, but it's one she treasures. "When I got the responsibility of the company's giving, it gave me the opportunity to put my own fingerprint on it," she says.

—Amy Bonesteel

• Nine who take on stereotypes to better the corporate world