Wonder Women in the Rude Boys' Paradise

Now at least once each year, every Microsoft employee attends seminars to discuss certain "scenarios" that involve a range of social and sexual issues from the simple -- whether or not a Microsoft male should hold the door open for a Microsoft female -- to the more complicated -- whether or not to ask about someone's sexual orientation, and how. The seminars, which last from two to three hours and cover five or six scenarios, are Microsoft's crash course in interpersonal relations for the socially challenged geeks.

Generally, the Microsoft culture promotes a rebellious image among its geeks. Trained to follow an unyielding digital logic, they adopt an attitude that suggests they answer only to a higher authority -- like math. No one can tell them how to decorate their offices or compel them to attend a stupid seminar on sexual harassment. But the threat of termination at Microsoft carries with it consequences more severe than at other companies. Being fired at Microsoft not only means loss of job, salary, and benefits, but also forfeiture of unimaginably enriching stock options. The threat makes the company's workforce -- for all of its apparent brashness, youthful irreverence, and aggressive informality -- remarkably docile. The males of Microsoft might grumble about the seminars, but they all attend.

The new political climate at Microsoft is responsible, in part, for the earnest confusion that governs the relations between the sexes as men and women fumble toward a common understanding of what is and what is not acceptable behavior. For example, when a young woman in the then-Consumer Division was about to get married, her coworkers, all female, hung a photograph of a male nude on the wall over her computer terminal. When the group's manager, also female, saw the full-frontal nude, she immediately declared, "That has to come down!"

Microsoft 96: Industry Standard

In a business where the name of the game is to own "the standard," the real test of Microsoft's treatment of women is to compare it with the industry standard -- which, to judge from the experiences of Microsoft's women when they venture off campus, verges on the Neanderthal. Deb Black, who was hired away from Bell Northern Research four years ago to lead testing on successive versions of Windows NT, still registers visible shock when she recalls a visit she made to a Ford Motor Company research lab, which was bidding against Microsoft for her services. "I had to walk into a lab," she says awkwardly, "where there was a poster on the door of a woman without many clothes on, with the doorknob positioned in a really weird way. And you had to open this door to go into the lab." She chose Microsoft over Ford.

While it is routine for women to be involved in key strategic initiatives for Microsoft, it is just as routine for them to be ignored or snubbed when they meet their male counterparts from other companies. Nicole Mitskog's story is typical of talented female engineers with a number of years at the company. Mitskog first started working for Microsoft as a student at Texas A & M, evangelizing for Microsoft FORTRAN in college engineering departments. In 1988 she went to work for the company as a systems engineer who could write and troubleshoot software for Microsoft's customers.

Mitskog went on to supervise teams of Windows engineers at Microsoft, to lead development of Multimedia Viewer, the company's first multimedia authoring program, to manage development of Microsoft Publisher, now one of its leading consumer titles, and to inaugurate Microsoft's now-extensive series of CD+ titles.

What sticks most in Mitskog's mind, however, when she looks back over her career, are the slights she has experienced outside of Microsoft. "I would always be taken for a secretary at first," she says. "All the meetings I went to with people from other companies were always exclusively male. You always had to know more than everyone else, be on top of everything." She remembers vividly a 1993 meeting with executives from Time Warner, who were exploring a joint venture with Microsoft. She'd been asked to explain Microsoft's multimedia authoring strategy. When the two groups convened for the meeting, the Time Warner representatives shook hands with everyone in the room -- except Mitskog. "When they got to me," she says, "they would just smile."

Currently the reigning senior technical woman at Microsoft is Cindy Kasin, who began working at the company 13 years ago as a test engineer and now heads a unit providing support to Windows developers from other companies. She is a blunt-speaking woman who sits behind a desk bearing the sign: "Wonder Woman Works Here." When she arrived at Microsoft, she was one among 800 employees; at the time, she says, there was little to indicate that her new employer was more enlightened than its competitors. Instead, Kasin maintains, growth pressures on Microsoft were so severe that the company had to find talent wherever it could; discrimination became a luxury it couldn't afford. Moreover, she says, male and female software engineers are more like each other than either is like the rest of the world; their shared difference is more of a bond than their sex is a barrier. "We never bothered with that stuff," she says of gender discrimination, "because we were all just nerds together."