Wonder Women in the Rude Boys' Paradise

Microsoft Upgrades: Release 2.0

Microsoft's transformation began in the late 1980s, when Bill Gates recognized a coming crisis, a product of the company's phenomenal success: the business market for computing that had propelled Microsoft's growth was starting to mature. The company either had to find completely new markets for its software or watch its growth -- and with it the rise in its stock -- begin to level off. The answer was obvious: in May 1992, Gates set up a Multimedia Publishing Division, directing it to come up with CD-ROM titles so engaging that the home market would open up as Microsoft's next target of opportunity.

But CD-ROMs for the home are fundamentally different from word-processing and spreadsheet programs for companies; for one thing, they have a far greater aesthetic component. That meant that Microsoft had to recruit large numbers of artists, writers, and editors to collaborate with its engineers. Most of those new recruits were women. And so, from the beginning, Multimedia was a division apart from the rest of the company.

Later in 1992, in one of Microsoft's seemingly endless reorganizations, Multimedia was merged into a new Consumer Division, which moved into Building 10 on the then-22 building campus. Consumer took off, growing at 60% per year. It went from 50 employees in 1992 to 800 employees in 1996 -- when it morphed into the Interactive Media Division -- and from only 5 products shipped to 70 products shipped. The division also began to generate significant sales: $773 million in 1995 and a projected $911 million this year -- nearly one-sixth of the company's total 1996 revenues.

From the beginning, the division was dramatically different from the rest of the company. Gone were the hovels of the software engineers, with their darkened offices littered with empty soda cans and scattered computer parts. Instead there were clean, well-lit offices decorated with fine-art posters and occupied by young women with found-objects dangling from their ears. In the office of the protypical boy engineer there'd be a mangled Homer Simpson doll with a golf ball violently embedded in its face. In the girls' division, the desks would invariably display a framed picture of parents, boyfriend, husband, or baby.

By 1995, there was a critical mass at the then-Consumer Division and the word was out: Consumer was the place at Microsoft where it was easiest to balance work life and family life. "If you have a family," says Nicole Mitskog, a long-time Microsoft engineer, technical evangelist, and marketer, "Consumer is the place to work."

The burgeoning ranks of women had another effect: a counter-offensive launched by the women to insist on appropriate behavior in the workplace. An early protester against male insensitivity was Therese Stowell, an engineer who came to Microsoft in 1987 after graduating from Brown University, and who only recently left the company to lead a software development team at Sony Corporation. Arriving at Microsoft, Stowell, who cultivates a punkish appearance, including, at times, whitened hair and black fingernails, found herself one of only three female engineers in the Systems Division.

As soon as she settled in at Microsoft, working on the company's most important project at the time -- OS/2 -- Stowell confronted the company's environment. "I remember going into another developer's office pretty early on," she says, "and he had some kind of girlie calendar on the wall, and I told him I really didn't appreciate it. We got into it. He couldn't understand why it made me feel uncomfortable. He accused me of being intolerant. He was an unreasonable jerk. So after that, whenever something like that happened, I would just tell HR, and they would handle it."

Stowell also helped found an organization called Hoppers, named for Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, one of the pioneering women in computing. In an environment in which the few women scattered throughout the company felt isolated and estranged, Hoppers offered a network through which they could connect with one another and offer each other advice, comfort, and counsel.

Gradually the message began to get through: these women meant business. At the same time, the company itself began to heed some of the changing signals. Microsoft adopted a policy prohibiting using server space to store pornography; server space and other corporate resources were extended to support the Hoppers group. Early in 1993, the company launched a "diversity training" program, designed to teach some manners to the wild-at-heart rude boys. The goal of the sexual harassment sensitivity training program, says Human Resources Director Mike Murray, was to eliminate "locker room behavior that was laughed at when you were 17 years old, but that is inappropriate in a professional work environment."