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A L S O_ T O D A Y 21st Log For sale: One wizard and 2 million pieces of gold   T A B L E__T A L K What's the dream operating system for cruising the Internet? It's another Mac vs. Windows go-round in the 21st area of Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     ____________________ Technology news from Price drops, Net transforming PC industry ____________________   R E C E N T L Y Amazon vs. the ants By Scott Rosenberg Sure, David can beat Goliath on the Web -- if he's got a New York Times columnist in his corner (03/10/99) How can they patent that? By Peter Wayner The torrent of patents for e-commerce schemes raises new questions about an old-fashioned system (03/09/99) Fortress Microsoft By Tony Seideman Redmond's scorched-earth spin strategy has turned into a PR nightmare (03/08/99) Let's Get This Straight: By Scott Rosenberg Why hasn't the software industry given us more tools to get our lives in order? (03/05/99) Gathering of the Linux tribes By Andrew Leonard Hackers and suits eye each other warily amid LinuxWorld hoopla (03/04/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

Beauty and the geeks FEMALE TECHNOLOGY EXECS FACE CRUEL CHOICES ABOUT SELLING THEIR OWN SEX APPEAL. - - - - - - - - - - BY JANELLE BROWN Ask a roomful of female executives about their experiences working in male-dominated Silicon Valley and every one will have a litany of grievances. Anita Borg, president of the Institute for Women and Technology, says she is constantly battling "the assumption that women don't know what they're talking about." Dina Bitton, CEO of Integrated Data Systems, cites surveys that show that while women start nearly 30 percent of all companies in Silicon Valley, they receive only 1.6 percent of the funding. There's the tale of former ASK Computers CEO Sandy Kurtzig, who was told to trim her long fingernails before taking her company public so investors would take her seriously. And many women can share the experience of Ellen Hancock, the formidable CEO of Exodus, who says she is resigned to hearing the address "Gentlemen and Ellen" at meetings in which she is the sole woman in the room. But the one common complaint of prominent women in Silicon Valley is that, while they are trying to develop and promote exciting new technologies, the media remains obsessively and single-mindedly focused on their looks and their gender. A case in point: the March 1 Fortune magazine, which included a scathing feature on Kim Polese, CEO of Marimba. Headlined "The Beauty of Hype: A Cautionary Tale of Silicon Valley," the article accused Polese of building up a "glamour queen" image -- posing in Anne Klein ads and intentionally becoming "a geek sex symbol who's more famous than her company" in order to distract attention from a not-so-glitzy product. Although the article made salient points about the power of hype, it also infuriated many women in Silicon Valley, who felt that Polese had been unfairly maligned as a media vixen. Sylvia Paull, founder of the women-in-computing networking group GraceNet, says the article outraged GraceNet's members: "Many of the women feel that had an attractive man used his good looks to pump up the valuation of a company -- as Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs do -- they would not have been under this kind of media backlash. It smacks of hostility toward women who have made it in a field once reserved for men alone, and the more attractive the female, the stronger the hostility." The most egregious aspect of the Fortune feature wasn't the article's text but its accompanying art: While the author criticized Polese for posing for "glamorous close-up [photos] with her face softly lit and airbrushed, eyes beaming up at the camera," Fortune decorated the article with a series of its own glamorous close-up photos of Polese, dolled-up and beaming at the camera. Apparently, Fortune wanted to criticize a woman for using her sex appeal and capitalize on that sex appeal at the same time -- to have its cheesecake and knock it, too. This is the conundrum that faces many female executives in Silicon Valley, where women CEOs are a rare species and young, attractive female CEOs are even rarer. Because they are anomalies, they are both visible and spotlighted by the media; the attention is, of course, both flattering and good publicity -- but it also tends to shift the focus away from their work. As Polese puts it, "Unfortunately, a woman CEO often has a greater challenge in getting the press to focus on what she's talking about and what she's doing than a man does. The press definitely has a tendency to want to focus on the novelty of the fact that this is a woman in a CEO role. They often can't get past that to listen to what she's saying." As a result, all across the industry, female executives like Polese, Hancock, Katrina Garnett (CEO of CrossWorlds Software) and Heidi Roizen (consultant and former CEO of T/Maker) are deciding whether they simply have to endure the scrutiny -- or whether they can control it for their own benefit. As Roizen puts it, "As a CEO, one of the things you try to do is stand out from your competition. There are relatively few female CEOs in this industry, so you will be noticed." What you do with that attention, she says, is what counts. N E X T_P A G E .|. Polese -- eligible bachelorette for the Valley's estrogen-deprived geeks   ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.