Coaching Series: What Tech Women Really Want

Google Tech Talks January, 30 2008 ABSTRACT Many technical women face surprising and similar challenges, which are often unspoken and self-imposed. I will present observations and suggestions around the impostor syndrome, feelings of isolation, tendencies to over-analyze, excessive humility, and reluctance to negotiate. I will also present "best advice" offered by women engineers for women engineers, which is taken from an article that I submitted to IEEE's new Women in Engineering magazine. Speaker: Sue Dorward Sue named her company Sudo Coaching LLC, after the Linux command for performing as superuser. Through coaching, she helps develop tomorrow's technology leaders. Sue trained as an Organizational and Executive Coach at New York University and she earned an MS in Computer Science from Princeton University. As an engineer and later a technology vice president, she led technical teams and projects for online media companies CNET, iVillage, and Hearst Interactive and for pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer and Johnson & Johnson. As a lecturer and researcher, Sue served on the Computer Science Department faculties at Drew University and Smith College, performed research at Bell Laboratories, and was awarded a doctoral fellowship by the National Science Foundation. Sue writes articles for the IEEE's Engineering Management Society newsletter and geekleaders.com. She also has contributed to books on the foundations of coaching and technical project management.