Wonder Women in the Rude Boys' Paradise

Bill Gates is pissed. "You've studied it and studied it and decided that it's turning bits on and off! And it's a BRILLIANT INSIGHT! ... And then there's this relationship with Hewlett-Packard that we KEEP SCREWING UP! ... What about this bullshit thing with no definition!"

He's in a small, crowded conference room on the Microsoft campus with 20 young Microsofties gathered around an oblong table. Most are unkempt; some are unwashed; all are uncomfortable. As they sit around the table, stand along the walls on three sides of the room, or perch on a cabinet along one wall, most look at their chairman with outright fear, if they look at him at all.

The sour smell of sweaty terror fills the room. Through the acrid aroma of armpit, a few noteworthy figures stand out. There's a young man, skinny, pale, and hairy, wearing thick glasses and a khaki jacket -- a dead ringer for Animal, the Muppet drummer, but without the muscles. Another one has an unnaturally fleshy face that looms out of his long-sleeved white shirt and tight black jeans like a genie emerging from a stovepipe. Still another looks oddly like ... a woman.

A closer look reveals the fact that she is a woman. The only female in the room, she's a tiny Chinese immigrant, wearing a T-shirt and a cardigan sweater, and sitting just two chairs away from Gates. What makes her different from the others in the room is not only her sex, but also her courage: she's the only person not afraid to look at Gates as he goes ballistic.

One of the engineers stands at an overhead projector at the end of the room opposite Gates, puts in a slide, and gets exactly five words out of his mouth before Gates cuts him off with a string of obscenities. The hapless programmer's hands start to shake uncontrollably; he drops his stack of slides, picks them up, tries to insert another into the projector. This time it's upside down. He starts to talk again, but Gates cuts him off, shouting more obscenities at him. Finally he sits down and one of his more composed teammates takes a turn.

For the better part of an hour, this keeps up. Someone timidly offers Gates a proposition. Gates screams at him. Someone tries a rebuttal. Gates screams at him. The pattern is unbroken -- except twice. Each time, it is the young, soft-spoken Chinese woman who directs comments at Gates in mid-tirade. Both times, no one but Gates seems to understand her -- her voice is barely audible, and English appears to be her fourth language, after Chinese, C, and C++. Both times, her remarks seem to have a mildly calming effect on Gates.

The second time she speaks Gates listens intently, his gaze directed down at the table. He's silent for a long moment. Then he gives his victims an unqualified endorsement: "Okay," he says quietly, "this looks good. Go ahead" -- and abruptly ends the meeting. His prisoners flee, afraid he might suddenly change his mind and begin berating them again.

Later, Gates explains why he put on such a display only to let his employees proceed with a plan that had sent him into a rage. Some of his rationale is standard-issue Gates-speak: the project is "super-important," the discussion was preceded by "tons of e-mail," and the meeting only confirmed much of what he'd already known. Then he offers an unGatesian explanation. "Did you notice that girl?" he asks. "That Chinese girl? Mai Lin? Well, she was the smartest person in the room, and from the way she explained their strategy, I figured they knew what they were doing."

That episode dates back to 1991, when Microsoft was a rude boys' paradise, where interpersonal skills counted for nothing, personal hygiene even less, and the presence of women was barely tolerated. So it was not surprising that Gates would refer to his female employee as a "girl." What was surprising was that he would pay as much attention to a girl's brains as to a boy's.

Yet behind Gates's awkward explanation is the story of Microsoft's remarkable transformation -- from a towel-snapping boys' locker room where high-school high-jinx were the norm to a workplace where the future growth of the company rests in the hands of the women who run the Interactive Media Division. The importance of the transformation, however, goes well beyond the confines of the Microsoft campus. When computers, software, and other high-tech industries emerged as the future of the American economy a decade or so ago, the expectation was that, at last, women would get a fair shake in the workplace. Where the metal-bending economy of manufacturing had always shunned women as ill-suited for the factory's heavy lifting, the digital world was, by definition, mind over matter. At last meritocracy would replace the old boys' network.

It hasn't turned out that way. When the software business started to grow, the geeks were all guys. Nowhere was it more the case than at Microsoft in its early days, when the company suffered -- or, more accurately, enjoyed -- a reputation throughout the industry as a place that disdained women.