Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: women, don't ask for a raise
Satya Nadella, the Microsoft chief executive officer, has said women don’t need to ask for a raise and should instead put their trust in the system – one that at technology companies is overwhelmingly male.
Nadella spoke on Thursday at an event for women in computing held in Phoenix. He was asked to give his advice to women who are uncomfortable requesting a raise.
“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” he answered. Not asking for raise, he added, was “good karma” that would help a boss realise the employee could be trusted and should have more responsibility.
His interviewer, Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College and a Microsoft director, told him she disagreed, drawing cheers from the audience. She suggested women do their homework on salary information and then practice how to ask with people they trust.
After getting blasted on Twitter for his remarks, Nadella tweeted: “Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias.”
I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.
But his comments at the event, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, underscored why many see technology companies as workplaces that are difficult to navigate or even unfriendly for women and minorities. Tech companies, particularly the engineering ranks, are overwhelmingly male, white and Asian.
Criticised for their lack of diversity, major companies say they are trying to address the problem with programmes such as employee training sessions and by participating in initiatives meant to introduce girls to coding.
Twenty-nine percent of Microsoft’s employees are women, according to figures the company has released this month. Its technical and engineering staff and its management are 17% female. That is roughly comparable to diversity data released by other big technology companies this year.
Explicit images sent via Snapchat have reportedly been leaked from a third-party app in an event being dubbed the “Snappening”.
Some 200,000 users of the app, many of whom are teenagers, have allegedly had their photos gathered by the third party over a number of years before the pictures were posted on a website.
The nickname “Snappening” is a nod to last month’s “Fappening”, in which nude pictures were stolen from the iCloud accounts of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Rita Ora and Kim Kardashian and posted online.
Snapchat allows users to share videos and images that disappear 10 seconds after being received, but it is possible to save the pictures by taking a screen grab in that time.
No images have been published and there is speculation that the leak could be a hoax but some reports said the leaked images were stored on the servers of a website called Snapsaved, where Snapchat users could save their screen grabs rather than keeping them on their device.
Snapchat said it was not the source of the leak and prohibited the use of third-party apps, which are created by separate developers as add-ons.
A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were allegedly victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive snaps – a practice that we expressly prohibit in our terms of use precisely because they compromise our users’ security.
“We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
The Snapchat app came under fire earlier this year after hackers published user names and phone numbers on a website.
Police and children’s charities have previously warned teenagers of the dangers of using the app to send explicit images.
Half of Snapchat’s 4.6 million users were between 13 and 17 and there is concern that many of the leaked images may be of children.
Google says it has received 18,304 requests from Britons asking it to remove information about their past under the EU's 'right to be forgotten' legislation.
The submissions came from more than 6,000 people who asked the search engine to erase links to more than 60,000 websites.
Altogether just over 145,000 requests have been made to Google by people across Europe wanting to improve their reputations.
That is an average of 1,000 a day since last May when the process began.
The controversial 'right to be forgotten' law covers the 28 countries in the EU, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
Altogether the submissions covered more than 497,000 web links, of which 42% - more than 200,000 - have been jettisoned.
Among all websites, Facebook's social network has had the most links erased so far - 3,332 - while Google's own YouTube video site has had nearly 2,400 removed.
Video:Google Desert Street View Launched
Even when blocked from Google's search results in Europe, however, content can still appear in listings posted in other parts of the world, including the US.
Under the new law EU citizens can request that links to "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" information be removed from Google search results.
In short, Google must remove articles if the impact on the individual’s privacy is greater than the public’s right to find it, the European Union Court of Justice found.
Video:Google Launches Delivery Drone
The legislation has been widely criticised for allowing murderers, rapists and paedophiles to bury information about their past and for undermining freedom of speech.
It followed a landmark case brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google's search results infringed his privacy.
Google has given examples of links which have been deleted including one to old article about the murder of a woman's husband in Italy. This was removed because the story mentioned the wife.
Video:Jimmy Wales: 'Don't Use Google'
The company says it has turned down requests from financial professionals seeking to remove links to material describing arrests or convictions for past misconduct.
It also rejected a demand from a "media professional" in the UK to erase four links to embarrassing content.
There are fears the whitewashing of search results could extend beyond the EU after a Japanese judge ruled Google should remove information that suggested a man once had ties to a criminal organisation.
A ROCKET, AND MAYBE A SPACE PLANE Xcor raised $14.2 million and is building its plane’s fuselage.
Vestaron makes an eco-friendly pesticide derived from spider venom. Bagaveev uses 3-D printers to make rocket engines for nanosatellites. Transatomic Power is developing a next-generation reactor that runs on nuclear waste.
They all have one thing in common: money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
After years of shying away from science, engineering and clean-technology start-ups, investors are beginning to take an interest in them again, raising hopes among entrepreneurs in those areas that a long slump is finally over. But these start-ups face intense pressure to prove that their science can turn a profit more quickly than hot tech companies like Snapchat and Uber.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
Joshua Kushner, the 29-year-old co-founder of Thrive Capital.DealBook: Venture Firm Thrive Capital Raises Another FundOCT. 6, 2014
Sam Waksal is now the chief of innovation at the biotechnology company Kadmon.DealBook: Sam Waksal’s New Biotech Venture Tests Investor ForgivenessSEPT. 25, 2014
DealBook: Salesforce.com to Set Up a Venture Capital FundSEPT. 8, 2014
A recent academic study looked at theater projects on Kickstarter, including one titled “Thanks For Playing: The Game Show Show!,” found that projects picked only by crowds were as likely to deliver on budget — and achieve commercial success and positive critical acclaim — as projects favored by experts.Bits Blog: Crowdfunding and Venture Funding: More Alike Than You ThinkAUG. 15, 2014
From left, Aydin Senkut, founder of Felicis Ventures, with general partners Sundeep Peechu and Renata Streit Quintini.DealBook: Venture Capitalists Coddle Entrepreneurs as RoyaltyAUG. 5, 2014
In August, the Founders Fund, which has backed social networks like Facebook and Yammer and the streaming-music service Spotify, announced a $2 million investment in Transatomic Power of Cambridge, Mass. Days earlier, Y Combinator, known for aiding web and mobile-app start-ups like the social news site Reddit and the game maker Omgpop, took part in a $1.5 million early investment in Helion Energy, which is developing an engine powered by nuclear fusion.
NUCLEAR POWER, NO WASTE Leslie Dewan of Transatomic, which is developing small reactors.
Credit
Mark Ostow for The New York Times
And last month, Google said it was buying Lift Labs, a San Francisco biotechnology start-up that makes a high-tech spoon for people with hand tremors.
“We’re trying to revolutionize pesticides,” said John Sorenson, a former genetics researcher and Vestaron’s chief executive, who for years struggled to find investors as he watched other start-ups, like Snapchat and Square, raise many millions of dollars. Vestaron finally closed its third round of financing last month. “Thankfully, venture funders are starting to invest again in real, hard-core science and innovation,” Mr. Sorenson said.
Over all, industrial and energy start-ups attracted $1.24 billion in venture capital financing in the first half of 2014, more than twice as much as in the period a year earlier, according to statistics from the National Venture Capital Association. Still, investment remains well below peaks reached in 2008, when industrial and energy start-ups attracted $4.64 billion.
Investment in biotechnology start-ups rose 26 percent in the first half of 2014, to $2.93 billion, from the period a year earlier and is on track to exceed the 2008 peak of $5.14 billion.
The investments are still dwarfed by the money pouring into other kinds of technology companies, especially those offering web and mobile services. Software start-ups attracted $11.2 billion in venture capital financing last year, 85 percent more than in 2008.
Investors partly feel betrayed by the billions of dollars they lost on the clean-tech boom and bust, when backers of solar panels, algae biofuels and futuristic batteries promised to change the world, but the companies mostly flopped. That experience has made investors wary of science-based start-ups with long development timelines in still nascent or heavily regulated markets.
Photo
GREEN PESTICIDE Vestaron’s product made from spider venom kills insects like rootworm larvae.
Credit
Adam Bird for The New York Times
But there is a growing feeling, investors say, that Silicon Valley has been avoiding the world’s more difficult problems, a sentiment captured by a Founders Fund motto: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
That unease is compounded by a sense that the field of consumer Internet companies has become impossibly crowded. To succeed, investors say, a company must break away from the pack.
“I’m just so interested in anything that gets me closer to an Iron Man suit,” said Adam Draper, the chief executive and founder of Boost VC. One of the companies that Boost has mentored or coached is Bagaveev, a start-up using 3-D printers to make rocket engines that launch nanosatellites, a type of satellite that may weigh as little as a couple of pounds, into orbit. “Social media’s already happened. V.C. funding is supposed to be about funding what comes next.”
Transatomic Power, founded in 2011 by nuclear scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is in the early stages of developing small-scale molten-salt reactors that could generate reliable, clean energy without creating nuclear waste. The technology is from the 1960s, but Transatomic Power is developing new designs, using its financing to run tests on materials and models. The start-up would need far more funding, or a partner, to start building the reactors.
“The world needs a source of stable, cheap electricity, and a new approach to nuclear power would seem like an obvious solution,” said Leslie Dewan, a co-founder and the chief executive of Transatomic Power. “But it’s tricky getting $300 million from investors,” she said. “Maybe we need to build an iPhone app.”
Vestaron, a pesticide company started in 2001, has similarly lofty goals in agriculture and food, a specialty basking in newfound attention from Silicon Valley. Vestaron says its spider-venom insecticide controls beetles, caterpillars and other pests without harming other animals. The insecticide, the company says, reduces agriculture’s environmental footprint, makes work safer for agricultural laborers and overcomes the resistance pests have built up to other pesticides over the years.
John Sorenson, chief of Vestaron, which hopes to reduce farming’s environmental footprint and improve safety.
Credit
Adam Bird for The New York Times
This year, the Environmental Protection Agency approved the active ingredient Vestaron derives from the venom, giving the start-up the go-ahead to sell its pesticide commercially to vegetable and greenhouse farmers in 2015. Vestaron, which has a target of $1 million in sales in the first year, will use the latest round of financing to introduce its products to farmers, and eventually to home and garden uses, Mr. Sorenson, Vestaron’s chief, said.
But even when science start-ups attract money, they are pressured from the beginning to think about profit.
For Xcor Aerospace in Mojave, Calif., that meant putting aside its long-term goals of building suborbital space planes and focusing instead on developing rocket-engine igniters to sell to NASA and aerospace companies. With a steady stream of income, Xcor was able to put the engine on the back of an experimental aircraft to test its space plane concept. After raising $14.2 million in May through the Space Angels Network, a group of angel investors in the aerospace field, Xcor is finally putting together its plane’s fuselage.
“They knew that you couldn’t come and ask for a billion dollars to build a space plane,” said Chad Anderson, a managing director for the Space Angels Network. “So what they started with was the smallest component they could make that had commercial value.”
Bagaveev can only dream of that kind of money. It raised just $535,000 in seed funding in April from a group of investors to develop reusable launchers that can send a satellite weighing up to 22 pounds into space — a technology that Nadir Bagaveyev, the company’s founder and chief executive, says will help open outer space to small companies that cannot afford multimillion-dollar satellites.
“We’re like the UPS of space,” Mr. Bagaveyev said. “You bring it to us, and we promise to bring it up within a week to a month.”
Bagaveev will use the seed money, Mr. Bagaveyev said, to try to prove that his idea has potential. The start-up is planning its first test launch at the end of the year, and Mr. Bagaveyev hopes that will help the company attract more investment.
“We’ll show what we’re capable of, and then we’ll be back for more investment,” he said. “I think investors are bored with investing in another messaging app. And our idea is crazy enough that it might just work.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Hispanics, Asians and blacks are not getting equal pay for equal work in the high-tech industry.
That's the finding of new research that shows Hispanics earn $16,353 a year less on average than their colleagues who are not Hispanic.
In the same high-skilled positions such as computer programmers and software developers, Asians make $8,146 less than whites and blacks $3,656 less than whites, according to the report from the American Institute for Economic Research.
"What this tells us is that race and ethnicity matter, and they matter a lot," said Nicole Kreisberg, the senior research analyst who conducted the research. "Simply increasing diversity is not enough. We also have to talk about money."
The study takes into account education, occupation, age, geography, gender, citizenship status, marital status and children in the home.
Recently released numbers from some of the largest and most powerful high-tech companies show blacks and Hispanics are largely absent and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley.
Even when blacks and Hispanics land jobs in high tech, they are often passed over for promotions and pay raises.
Raquel Vélez, 29, is a senior software developer at npm, an open-source software company. She says she made a point of working at top universities such as Caltech and MIT to burnish her credentials.
She's not surprised that research shows that Hispanics earn less in high tech.
"Not only because I am Hispanic but because I'm female, I have had to work four times as hard as most of the folks in the industry," Vélez said.
The culprit? Unconscious bias, says Freada Kapor Klein, co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact.
"At every point in the hiring process hidden bias trickles in," Klein said. "A drop at the stage of reviewing names on résumés, a few more drops at the stage of different gender and race styles of presentation during interviews and a steadier stream when it comes to who is expected to negotiate their salary and who isn't."
Silicon Valley companies say they are taking a close look at issues such as pay equity.
"We are regularly looking at our diversity metrics so that we can understand the current situation, target problem areas to address and have a baseline to track the results of change," said Janet Van Huysse,Twitter's vice president of diversity and inclusion. "We are becoming more transparent with our employee data, open in dialogue throughout the company and rigorous in our recruiting, hiring and promotion practices."
Historically, researchers have focused on the gender pay gap in Corporate America.
"There's this big narrative in the women's movement: 78 cents on the dollar. Everyone knows what that means. It's less talked about when it comes to race," said Laura Weidman Powers, co-founder and CEO of Code2040, a non-profit that nurtures black and Hispanic tech talent.
"It's a question of value and seeing value in these populations. And when it comes to hiring and paying people, value translates into dollars," Powers said.
Puzzling to researcher Kreisberg is the pay gap for Asians, who are generally well represented in the rank and file — if not the leadership — of technology companies.
One of the causes may be rooted in gender and cultural differences: how comfortable people feel negotiating salary, says Klein.
White managers may also respond differently to people of color when they negotiate a starting salary or a pay raise, she said.
This is something of a paradox for an industry that prides itself on being a meritocracy where anyone with smarts, ambition and hard work can make it, regardless of gender, race, nationality or class.
Emilio Castilla, an associate professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has conducted extensive research on merit-based practices and the culture of meritocracy.
His research has found that managers in organizations that promote meritocracy actually show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in rewarding merit-based bonuses and promotions.
"The lesson is not that companies shouldn't adopt merit-based practices but that the pursuit of meritocracy is more difficult than it first appears. If not designed and implemented carefully, merit-based practices may trigger bias against women and ethnic minorities," Castilla said. "Perhaps implicit in companies and industries that pride themselves on being meritocratic is the presumption that they are fair and that they provide great workplace opportunities. However, because merit-based practices are ultimately implemented by managers, there are hidden risks."
Silicon Valley can take steps to close the pay gap, Castilla said.
He recently studied a large private company where he found that women, ethnic minorities and employees not born in the U.S. received lower bonuses than white men with the same performance evaluations, working in the same job and in the same unit for the same manager.
Castilla helped the company put in place new organizational procedures to increase accountability and transparency in the performance reward system.
"My recent field study illustrates that companies can successfully adopt organizational procedures to achieve and ensure meritocracy for all employees, regardless of their demographics," he said.
