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A L S O_ T O D A Y
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BEAUTY AND THE GEEKS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
It was, perhaps, just a matter of time before she was dressed down for this; the charge that a woman's success flows only from her sex appeal is a classic form of sexism. But who turned Polese into that sex symbol in the first place? Was the role her own creation or that of the media? If you ask Polese, or just about any other woman in the valley, they point the finger of blame squarely at the voracious media machine. The technology press is dominated by relatively mundane stories of geeky guys and their complex technologies. Impressive as these technologies and executives might be, they aren't inherently sexy. So the standards for "sex appeal" in the industry are relatively low: The tasteful Red Herring cover of Polese was certainly no more daring than many glowing covers featuring Jobs or Bill Gates, but it was still tagged as "CEO Porn" by Michelle Quinn of the San Jose Mercury News. "It is a bit of a double standard. As a female CEO, you need to be careful of that," muses Melanie Warner, the author of the Fortune article. "It's not an equal playing ground, and you are going to be perceived as playing up your sexuality regardless of whether you are intending to do that or not." Did Fortune push to play up Polese's sexuality in its photos? Polese would not comment. Warner says, "I knew the photographs were going to be alarming, after I'd seen them. I thought about whether I should argue to tone it down, but I didn't." But she adds that Polese is ultimately responsible for how she appeared: "If you're trying to control your image and you think there's been too much focus on you as a glamour queen, why come for a five-hour photo shoot with clothes and sunglasses and let them shovel makeup on you?" Kim Polese isn't the only woman in the industry who has noticed that the media devotes an inordinate amount of space to musing over her appearance. Explains Heidi Roizen, "One of the things you notice is that when you're interviewed or profiled, you are almost always physically described. It's odd -- all of that kind of attention is irrelevant to my performance. But I admit that back in my day, I got a few magazine covers that probably my company size didn't merit." She adds, "What did I think about that? Well, hell, if it helped my company and it was in good taste, why not?" But Roizen will probably never be able to lose the former cheerleader tag, just as Polese hasn't been able to shake the "former dancer" moniker. Venture capitalist Ann Winblad will always be remembered as the diminutive "former girlfriend of Bill Gates," despite her own achievements. After a series of controversial CrossWorlds ads featured her posing in a cocktail dress, Katrina Garnett will always be seen as the cleavage queen. And even technology pundit Esther Dyson will probably always be notorious for the fact that she isn't typically feminine: Entire magazine articles (like a feature in Metropolis) have been dedicated to the shocking mess that is her office, and countless articles have felt the need to play up the fact the she only wears mail-order jeans. Both readers and writers love these kinds of details --- and why not? They add much-needed color to otherwise dry profiles. Unfortunately, many women feel that these are the only details that get reported about them. "What's wrong is not that Katrina Garnett dresses up and Dyson doesn't dress up. What's wrong is that the media pays so much attention to that," says Dina Bitton. "It's just different criteria being applied, and I think that women are still searching for the right way -- do you try to be completely unfeminine, or flaunt your femininity?" Sometimes the media doesn't fall for the lure of a sex-appeal angle but instead falls into the simpler "woman does something" trap -- it runs with the old gee-whiz story that lauds women for the simple fact that they are women. Forbes, for example, ran a cover story teasingly titled "The New Valley Girls"; Fortune does the "The 50 Most Powerful Women" issue (which recently ranked Lucent executive Carly Fiorini at No. 1, above Oprah Winfrey). Executives in the online "women space" -- such as Marleen McDaniel, CEO of Women.com; Candice Carpenter, CEO of iVillage; or Geraldine Laybourne, CEO of Oxygen -- command impressive reams of clips based on this story approach, which often seems to satisfy feminist-oriented writers and editors who aim to promote women's achievements. Much of this kind of coverage shows up in mainstream magazines like Business Week, Fortune, GQ and Vanity Fair, which are now clamoring for technology stories. Most of these magazines, not surprisingly, are more interested in a story about a unique woman in a competitive industry than a story examining the details of a complex technology that's meaningless to most of their readers. "The technology media has become this monster," says Alan Deutschman, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who covers technology for both Vanity Fair and Esquire. "Now that all the general interest publications can't get enough of technology, there's a tremendous demand for technology stories. In general interest publications, you have to make it sexy; the technology is hard to describe and editors are afraid you'll lose part of the audience. So it will gravitate to the simplistic and exploitable." Certainly, the attention is flattering, inspiring for future would-be female CEOs -- and the pieces are important progress reports on the status of women in industry -- but it also means that those women are neatly boxed into the role of "woman executive." "Everyone in the magazine business has an interest in promoting a young, attractive female executive and putting her on the cover," explains Jason Pontin, editor of the Red Herring. "The publisher, perhaps, wants to increase the female demographic for ad sales. The editor wants a new, sexy story. The circulation manager wants to boost newsstand sales. And the reporter, through personal interest and political conviction, would like to write about an inspiring women leader. That's what happened to Kim. Then there was a backlash against her. The pity is that when magazines were satisfying those interests, and then later when they wrote so meanly about her, they lost sight of the fact that Marimba is a real company with real products and real sales, and that Kim is an effective executive." Anita Borg says she would like to see just a few stories that focus on a woman's business skills or technical prowess, instead of the fact that she's a woman: "You don't hear about women who are inventing stuff. The whole point of my institute is expanded visions of the future of the industry. I've only had one article that mentioned that at all." Her press clippings bear out the charge -- although she has been featured in prominent publications like Business Week ("Why Women Are So Invisible in Technology"), Internet World ("Women Use Web to Crack the Glass Ceiling") and the Los Angeles Times ("Gender Gap Goes High Tech"), most stories only passingly discuss the engineering achievements of her years in research and development. Instead, they play her up as a woman who is bucking the patriarchy.
N E X T_P A G E .|. Can female executives take control of their media image? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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Kim Polese's case is unique. Not only is she younger than many of the
female executives in the industry -- she's 37 -- but she's single. Fresh
off the Java team at Sun in 1996, and backed by powerhouse venture
capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, her start-up company, Marimba,
was quickly caught in the tidal wave of hype around