The Glass Hammer is proud to celebrate women in technology with a week of profiles of women at the top of the tech field. Make sure to check out our upcoming event Women in IT: Staying Technical and Getting to the Top.

By Elizabeth Harrin (London)

Isabelle Jenkins took a computerised careers test at university. The results told her to join the army or become a management consultant.

“In retrospect, management consultancy would have been a sensible choice,” she says, “but no one explained what it was. The job counselling I got at university was terrible.”

Today, Jenkins is a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the Financial Services Consulting business – not exactly where she thought she’d be when she was job hunting after graduation, but a job she loves. “When you peel them back, seventy per cent of consulting business problems involve technology,” she explains. “You need to have a technology focus to solve problems.”

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By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Linda Carlisle is a straight-talker. This daughter of Texas and partner at White and Case rapidly acknowledges the challenges facing women in her industry.

“In a law firm—back when I started and even today still—you have very few women mentors. You don’t want to be a mother or girlfriend to people: you want to be a colleague, a top partner and a trusted advisor. You want to be respected for what you can bring to the table. But you are also different from many of the people whom you are working with. You’ll very seldom walk into a room and be in the majority. You learn, over time, to handle that with wit and humor and a strong hand.”

An undergrad biology and chemistry major at the University of Texas at Austin, Carlisle believed she would follow her father and brother into a career in pharmacology. Two years later, she decided that she no longer wanted to go that route, and felt her only option was to teach. She married and, upon graduation, she and her husband moved from Austin to Pennsylvania, intending to pursue a career in academia.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“Taking risks is not the way I looked at things. I thought of them as opportunities,” explains Niloufar Molavi, PricewaterhouseCoopers‘ Chief Diversity Officer, when describing her career progression. “You have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone.”

Having worked for PwC for nearly 20 years, Molavi has seized upon many opportunities. She began her career as a tax associate in PwC’s Houston office in 1991, and was admitted to the partnership in 2001, working in the firm’s energy tax practice. In 2006, she assumed the leadership role for PwC’s national energy tax practice.

Throughout her career at PwC, and particularly for the last several years, Molavi has championed diversity in the firm’s Houston office. Her efforts grabbed the attention of Bob Moritz, PwC’s chairman and senior partner, who last summer asked Molavi to take on a larger, national role leading diversity and inclusion initiatives as the firm’s CDO.

What most excites her about the new role is the one-to-one connection she is able to make with PwC’s people. “One of the things I’ve always loved about being a professional accountant is the ability to connect with people,” says Molavi. “Everything is about making sure we are building a much more inclusive organization. We want to make sure our people understand and are comfortable working and interacting with people who are different from them. It’s been a lot of fun so far.”

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By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Technically, Massachusetts is in very close proximity to the bright lights and big city that is New York, but the small town of Hadley, where Elaine Sarsynski, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MassMutual International and Executive Vice President and head of MassMutual’s Retirement Services business, called her home couldn’t have felt farther away. Sarsynski is currently the top ranked female executive at the company and was recently named one of the Top 15 Women in Business by PINK Magazine. But her attraction to business and her early understanding of its most basic concepts actually came as a result of working on her parent’s 60-acre vegetable farm.

“Working on the farm exposed me to the business side of things very early on,” Sarsynski said. “I can remember being a little kid and listening to my parents discuss things like venture capital, wholesale, and investment strategies at the dinner table and I soaked it all up. My mother was actually an astute business woman and was always thinking of clever ways to grow the business and make it profitable. I decided early on that I wanted to be a business woman, too, but I didn’t know it would ever actually take me off the farm.”

Sarsynski’s big chance came when she was just a junior at Smith College majoring in economics. One day, MassMutual came to her campus offering “a Day at MassMutual” to young women interested in the financial services industry. The young college student was eventually chosen to participate in the visit to corporate headquarters and upon making her entrance to MassMutual’s beautiful building, Sarsynski immediately knew she wanted to work at the company someday.

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