JERUSALEM — Who says there are no women in high-tech? There are plenty of them, but you’ll rarely find them in the CEO’s office or running research and development.
Few head up venture capital funds or are investment bankers managing IPOs. Certainly the receptionist who greets you at XYZ.com or ABC Tech will be a young woman. But on the professional level, the great majority of Israeli high-tech women are in marketing, more specifically marketing communications, otherwise known as marcom.
By many estimates, maybe 90 to 95 percent of all the people in marcom are women and most of these are from English-speaking countries because fluent English is de rigueur.
Marketing is a critical function for all but seed-stage companies, but that’s not the viewpoint of many high-tech managers. In a world where engineers rule and financiers come a close second, marketing is seen as a “soft” profession and marcom, which doesn’t directly produce sales, the fluffiest of all. No surprise then, that despite the plethora of women in marketing, few rise to vice president of marketing.
So why do women find themselves locked into marketing and communications jobs?
For a start, because men don’t want to do it themselves.
“Marcom is a professional job, it isn’t secretarial or administrative, but it is still an area that gives support to other marketing functions in the company. We produce product literature and posters and organize trade shows, but this is all just to support other people in the company,” says one marcom manager from a semiconductor company in northern Israel. “Men don’t want to take on support-oriented positions.”
In the most desirable technology jobs, the old-boy network acts to exclude women. In Britain, the public school system breeds those early friendships and connections. In Israel it’s the army, in particular the elite engineering programs and intelligence units that count few woman among their ranks.
“A lot of people who reach positions of power in high-tech were in the same unit in the army,” says Natalie Corren, director of corporate communications at Nice Systems in Ra’anana. “It continues to have a big influence.”
A typical Israeli high-tech company is founded by two or three men who have served in the same army unit. In the first stage, as the startup develops, the founders naturally take all the top management jobs for themselves. Later as the company grows, managers tend to fill the jobs with other men who served in the same unit.
There are, however, other reasons at work here, most notably family. In any full-time job, working mothers face a dilemma about the amount of energy they can and want to put into a career. In high-tech, however, where the hours are long and arduous, the problem is even more pressing.
The marcom manager from northern Israel, who has three children ages 7, 14 and 17, says: “The hours are crazy. The U.S. doesn’t even wake up until 5 p.m. in the evening. I work late until 9 p.m. one night a week, but for many people every night is a late night.”
Susan Dubowsky-Nehab, the vice president for marketing and sales at Niks.com, an e-commerce company, admits that she leaves the house every day at 7:45 a.m. and most nights doesn’t return until 9:30 to 10 p.m., even though she has four children at home. “Not that many women are willing or able to do that,” she says.
Francine Haliva, another marcom manager in northern Israel, studied marketing at university and says she made a conscious decision not to try to climb the corporate ladder.
“You need to give 110 percent to succeed to higher levels and this is not an effort I want to go after at this point in my life. Maybe when my children are older.”
However, some women do want to break out of the mold but find it difficult.
One of the most fundamental reasons is that women in marcom tend not have an engineering background, and without this it is hard to move up to other jobs in the company.
Because of the nature of technology products, its difficult for a person without a technical education to rise in the ranks, even in the non-engineering side of the business.
“If I were working for a company that made pencils or furniture — something more consumer-oriented — then I could move up to V.P. of sales and marketing. But we sell chips to people who make the boards. It’s extremely technical,” says a marcom manager whose education was in the arts.
Despite difficulties, most of the women interviewed say they believe that with the right background and a willingness to put in the necessary hours, women can get to where they want to be in high-tech. Most women also believe that they make better managers than men, partly because they are used to juggling so many different elements in their lives.
“Women are more organized than men,” says a marcom manager in the semiconductor business. “They’re used to balancing a home, children and a job at the same time. A man goes to work and that’s all.”