Microsoft, Now With Fewer Women

1998 was a good year in Redmond. Netscape was squirming under Microsoft's heel, Windows 98 shipped in the year it was named after, and women accounted for 27% of the company. Twenty-seven percent was pretty good for a tech company in 1998, and that number was expected to grow as women continued to make inroads into careers previously dominated by men.

Fast forward eight years and that number has ballooned to 25%.

That's actually a loss, right? Furthermore, only 15% of Microsoft's executives are women. Ok, they lost one female Microsoft executive to the political sphere a few years ago, but 15% still sounds pretty low. What's going on here, Microsoft?

To be fair, this is all taken from Todd Bishop's P-I story and blog posts about the Microsoft DigiGirlz event, which is designed to recruit high school females to tech and Microsoft.

The idea is show the girls that "technology is cool," said camp organizer Emily McKeon, Microsoft's diversity marketing manager. "We want them to consider that a career in technology is not as boring as they expected."

(Aside to High School girls of Washington: A career in technology is not as boring as you expect. It's actually way more boring than that.)

They're working on it, though, right? They're having a camp and there's a position at the company called "diversity marketing manager" - What else can you do? Microsoft's getting a pass on this one until we have more information. Not so fast P-I! We didn't dismiss you. Sorry, but there are a few elements of the P-I article that we can't help but comment on. First the headline: "Microsoft camp shows technology is women's work, too." Since there's really no such thing as "men's work" in our vocabulary, we have to assume the P-I is indicating that women's work once included only domestic tasks like cooking, dishes and laundry, but has now grown to encompass technology as well.

And then there's this end note at the bottom of the article:

And opening the Tuesday session, Microsoft senior diversity consultant Mylene Padolina checked to see which girls had been keeping track of the employees they had met. She promised prizes for the longest lists.

"It pays to network," she said. "Keep that in mind."

The assumption being that men should get to work on those computer science degrees, and women should get to know as many people as possible.