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NAME: Noni Allwood COMPANY: Cisco TITLE: Director of gender diversity...
...Allwood had an unusual role model in her own mother, who she says was the first woman doctor in El Salvador (her surname comes from an English grandfather). Allwood, too, would blaze a trail by becoming among the few women to major in engineering at the national university. When she raised her hand in class, a professor would tell her to go home and wash dishes. Newly divorced and toting a toddler, Allwood took an IT job in the U.S., where she says her accent, ethnicity and gender-even her complexion-proved major roadblocks. "Customers would...
...Minority women in male-saturated professions like technology report frequent instances of subtle discrimination. "Microinequities" is what Allwood calls the small slights and blithe biases that alienate women like her: the inside jokes, the averted eyes, the overlooked suggestions. "They're the very small things that can make a person feel included or excluded in the work environment," she says. She retaliated by overcompensating, taking on ever bigger tasks, traveling, working day and night, until she ran the company's worldwide systems programs. Today she tries to change the equation by working on a program to introduce underprivileged girls...
...have a lot of role models in the workplace," says Allwood, "people we can point to when we're 20 and say, hey, I can be like that. It's a challenge...
...Noni Allwood, 50, has struggled with stereotyping against women and minorities in the field of high technology ever since she immigrated from El Salvador in 1982. She terms the small slights that alienate women like her--the inside jokes, the averted eyes, the overlooked suggestions--microinequities. She worked mightily to rise to director of European strategy at Cisco Systems but recently abandoned that role to become director of global gender diversity. Through a program called Girls Get IT, Cisco is trying to rally interest in technology careers among girls by funding workshops at urban schools and in poorer countries around...