Intrepid Woman: Robin Morgan, Co-Founder Women’s Media Center and Host of “Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan” Radio Show

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robin_morganBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

“Despite all of the myths of women’s competitiveness, we know how to stick together,” said Robin Morgan. To Morgan, this is one of the things that make women so special. “Solidarity is not just an abstraction to women,” she continued, “it’s a practical reality, day in and day out.” It is this unique element, according to Morgan, that keeps the women’s movement going strong in the 21st century.

Morgan stated, “I am extremely proud of the fact that I have had the opportunity to be a political activist in what is the most important social and political movement on the planet, at this point in history.”

Forging Her Own Path in Activism

Morgan explained, “I had been active in the antiwar movement and in the Civil Rights movement during the sixties and seventies, and like many young women I assumed we were all fighting for equality for everyone. I thought we were going to march with our brothers, arm-in-arm, toward this great revolutionary transformation– only to find that it didn’t include women.”

She continued, “Women were expected to make coffee, not policy. It was a complete mirror image of the patriarchy we were supposed to be fighting.” This realization was a radicalizing experience for Morgan, and influenced her involvement in founding the first feminist caucus in the Civil Rights organization SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), together with now-Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Morgan and women in other feminist caucuses of New Left groups faced staunch opposition from men, who pelted them with tomatoes, eggs, and even rocks when they tried to speak in meetings. This backlash was a major catalyst for Morgan’s decision to distance herself from what she came to refer to as the “male left.”

Another key moment for Morgan occurred in 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was being held in Chicago, and was expected to draw (and did) a significant amount of protest activity from radical groups. Instead of joining these protests, Morgan had already decided to organize what would become a historical protest at the annual Miss America Pageant. Here, during this nationally televised event, Morgan and other members of New York Radical Women brought attention to the Women’s Movement by outwardly protesting against symbols of female oppression.

In her final public display of separation from the male left, Morgan published a piece in an underground newspaper, entitled, “Goodbye to All That,” in which she named popular male leaders of the left and called them out for their degradation of women being no different than men of the odious right. “Being a writer, first and foremost, the pen was my most powerful tool. Depending on how you look at it, this piece became very famous–or infamous,” said Morgan.

“That shut the door,” she recalled. From here, Morgan went on to publish Sisterhood Is Powerful, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed books of the 20th century. Many people credit this collection of women’s essays with starting contemporary American feminism.

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Thought Leader: Suzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard

Suzanne PenavićSuzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard encourages women to recognize the generosity of the network around them, and to actively reach out and make themselves available to it. “Networking played a big part in making my shift into diversity, inclusion, and engagement successful,” said Penavić. “That is one thing I wish I had realized earlier in my career.”

Penavić graduated from Cornell University in 1987 with a degree in Developmental Psychology. “From a career path perspective I think I followed a pretty nontraditional path,” said Penavić. This is because instead of choosing a career related to her college major, Penavić accepted a job at JP Morgan on Wall St. She said, “I caught the tail end of the Wall Street Eighties boom and I joined JP Morgan the summer before the crash.”

Career Path in Finance and Tech

Although Penavić’s time as a banker was short-lived, she was first introduced to technology, as it relates to financial services, when the entire FX back office at JP Morgan was being replaced.

“I was in charge of the Payment Investigations portion of the project,” explained Penavić, “and after that I ended up running the middle and back offices of the derivatives operations. It was the early nineties, and it was definitely the Wild West when it came to swaps and options, but it was booming. I found myself having to put these very complex synthetic instruments into an infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it.”

It was at this juncture that Penavić decided that banking wasn’t the best professional fit for her and made a swift career change when she accepted a job with a privately held software company called Microbank. Penavić recalled, “There was forty five people at the company, software was a fairly new concept at the time, and my parents thought I was crazy for leaving my job on Wall St.” She continued, “It was an opportunity I did not foresee, but it had a huge influence on my career path.”

“I essentially grew up with Microbank,” said Penavić, “As the company matured, we started a client services organization separate from development, built out proper professional services delivery capabilities, and then took it to the next level by implementing a product management and strategy function, which I was in charge of.”

Microbank was eventually acquired by Sungard, where Penavić now serves as the Director of Employee Engagement after working in several senior level product management roles in the Financial Services division. Currently, Penavić is really excited about the work she is doing to build out SunGard’s corporate social responsibility, community investment, and employee volunteerism policies and programs. “It is such a huge lever for engagement,” explained Penavić.

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Voice of Experience: Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies

susan_lawson_amexBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

For Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies, her career path in technology wasn’t exactly linear, in that she did not major in technology nor pursue a career in tech directly after school. However, when she decided that technology was the industry in which she wanted to establish her career, she returned to school to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science. Susan explained, “I went into the aerospace industry to build flight simulation artificial intelligence systems.”

Susan leveraged the power of networking when she made her move to American Express. “I was based in Houston at the time, and established a great professional relationship with a person in my company working on artificial intelligence in Phoenix,” she said.

She continued, “He moved to American Express where they were building a new team to develop expert systems. He thought of me, recommended me and recruited me to work for American Express.”

Career at American Express

Susan came to American Express to work on expert systems and eventually transitioned into the Advanced Technology Group within the company. “We were focused on exploring new technologies being developed at the time that American Express could really benefit from. This was at the time that the World Wide Web was just getting started, so there were a lot of opportunities in that space,” said Susan.

Since the technology was so dynamic and critical for American Express’ business, the company created a separate group, as an extension of the Advanced Technology Group which became the Internet Development Group. Susan joined the web group and began developing secure internet capabilities globally for American Express.

“I have spent the majority of my career in the interactive and digital domain, which of course has expanded into mobile technologies and other interesting areas,” said Susan.

She is especially proud of the work she did early in her career supporting the international businesses of American Express. “Getting these markets established with secure websites for cardmembers was a breakthrough for American Express, and I love it when the work I do makes a big difference for the company. It’s exciting and very rewarding,” said Susan.

According to Susan, another highlight in her career was co-leading the complete re-architecture of American Express’ website, which supports millions of cardmembers every day. “This was a huge team, leadership, and technical endeavor that was extremely successful,” explained Susan.

Currently, in addition to research and development of new interactive and payment capabilities, Susan is spending a lot of time advancing collaborative development methodologies at American Express.

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Voice of Experience: Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies

deb_danielsonBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies is committed to making sure that future generations of women in technology have access to the opportunities that will help them advance their career.

This is why she is actively involved in a number of programs at CA Technologies to promote the advancement of women. Danielson said, “I was tasked, along with three other women, to develop a Women in Technology organization within CA to create a forum for networking within the community. This group also provides a foundation for mentoring.” She continued, “It started out as a grass roots organization that has become formalized over the last year.”

Career Path

Danielson started her career in technology as a software developer for Applied Data Research. “The first fifteen years of my career were pretty straightforward,” said Danielson, “I had increasing responsibilities in engineering and then entered management for ADR and Computer Associates, which acquired ADR around 1988.”

During that fifteen year period of her career, Danielson spent a lot of time focusing in integrated development environments creating technologies that would improve the developer experience. “We did a lot of interesting work in introducing multimedia into the developer experience, which was new and exciting technology at the time in the mid-eighties,” recalled Danielson.

After fifteen years of concentrating on the developer experience, Danielson switched gears when she began to think more about the quality of the end user experience. “We needed to rethink our end user experience,” explained Danielson, “So I ended up bringing user centric design and usability into the organization. It was critical to implement a sense of continuity across all of our products since our end users were becoming more generalized and less specialized.”

This focus on improving the end user experience associated with CA’s products led Danielson into a series of roles overseeing the coming together of technology designed to create a broader solution applicable across all of the unique products offered by CA. “For a couple of years, I helped transform CA from a company that delivered point products to a company that delivers integrated solutions that are consistent with one another,” explained Danielson.

CA’s executive management team then introduced the idea of building an organization within the company that would create a stronger and more dynamic technical community, according to Danielson. “I was appointed as one of the charter members of this think tank whose purpose was to push the boundaries within CA and leveraging the scope of the technical talent we had within the organization,” said Danielson.

She continued, “After a couple of months, we formally structured the think tank and I was elected the first president of the Council for Technical Excellence, which was responsible for developing a creative and innovative technical community, and bring our innovation and organic exploration to a next level.”

According to Danielson, the Council for Technical Excellence set the tone for the strategic transformation that has taken place at CA Technologies over the last five to eight years. She added, “One of the key roles I have been able to play within the organization is to take a look at the forces within the ecosystem, identify factors placing stress on that system, and develop a strategy for where the organization needs to be going.”

For the last couple of years, Danielson has been working on mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy at CA, mostly focusing on bringing inorganic innovation into CA. “I look at technology from startup organizations and other companies and make an assessment about the value of that technology. This is hugely rewarding because it allows us to accelerate the impact that we have on the business.”

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Voice of Experience: Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters

jane_moranBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters has been working in Information Technology in the finance sector for the last 25 years, but it is not where she started out. “After college I became a business analyst for a venture capital firm where I learned that my skill set was better suited to networking our office. I became known as the go-to person who could fix any PC or server,” recalled Moran.

The president of the company, who Moran had the opportunity to work with directly, recognized her ability and sponsored her to take computer science classes. This set the foundation for Moran’s career in tech as she went on to earn her MBA with a focus on IT from Boston University. Moran then went on to work for a consulting firm, where she spent five years developing portfolio management and trading platforms for financial institutions.

“I consulted for about eleven years, but when I was pregnant with my second child, I couldn’t continue to travel for work as much. I ended on a consulting assignment for a small dotcom firm in Boston and they actually offered me a CIO position, which I accepted since it was based in Boston,” explained Moran.

The company was eventually acquired by Thomson Financial in 2004. “In 2005, I became the Global CIO of Thomson Financial, which was a two billion dollar company at the time,” said Moran.

In 2008, Moran’s career advancement continued when she became the Global CIO of the Markets division for the Thomson Corporation, which had recently acquired Reuters. Moran said, “In 2010 the company centralized all of IT, and that is when I became the Global CIO for Thomson Reuters.”

Moran added that she graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and full intentions of entering the legal field. “You don’t need a technical degree to be technical,” explained Moran. “You just need to enjoy what you do. That’s the most important thing.”

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Voice of Experience: Mary Byron, Global Head of Technology for the Federation, Goldman Sachs

Mary ByronRegarding her career path in technology, Mary Byron notes that it was more of a serendipitous accident as opposed to a calculated plan.

“I didn’t study technology in school, but I was very lucky to have a job in college doing general office work,” said Byron. “One of the tasks was backing up the Word Processing system. They needed someone who could manage pretty basic technology functions and I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this kind of work right around the time personal computing and networking was starting to be widely developed.”

She continued, “As it turns out, I loved technology and I was skilled at it. So I never looked back after starting down that path.”

Career Path in Technology

Throughout her career with Goldman Sachs, Byron has had the opportunity to lead the implementation of many new technologies for the company, including building out the IP network for the firm in the nineties. “I was fortunate that as the Internet really took off, so did all the technologies that supported it and the need for companies to adopt those technologies,” explained Byron.

Byron recalled, “We didn’t even have email when I started at the firm, and every division ran its own technology. In 1994, the company decided to streamline all of the individual IT departments into one centralized division. For seven years we worked on converging eleven different email systems into one uniform system.”

In the early 2000s Byron became the Co-head of Goldman’s technology infrastructure, which included all data centers, networks, computing platforms, operating systems, databases, and help desks.

In 2005, Byron was chosen to be the CIO for Goldman’s Asia business, where she spent six years. “It was exciting to be part of this growth market,” said Byron, “as we were establishing our business in China and India, which are both countries with very different levels of technical prowess and technology adoption.”

During this time, Byron worked on establishing good governance and best practices for the technology division. Organizing this aspect of the business and showing people how to think about technological investments in commercial terms is something that Byron is extremely proud of. She said, “Moving these ideas forward so that they became institutionally recognized as the way we address technology has been very rewarding.”

Byron stated, “I think of all technology as an evolution. In the past, one of the projects I worked on was our first implementation of grid computing, which was the precursor to the cloud. Now, we are working a lot on dynamic computing and the automation of infrastructure, which are things that we identified a need for ten years ago and now have the technology to implement.”

The grid computing project, which Byron referred to as the compute farm, is one project that stands out to her as being one of her most exciting professional achievements. She explained, “When we first started, we anticipated one or two thousand computing engines running on the grid. Now we have tens of thousands computers running on it.”

This dynamic nature of technology and applying technology to solve problems are two things that make Byron excited about the work she currently does in her role as Global Head of Technology for the Federation. “We are spending a lot of time right now working on big data and data governance,” said Byron.

She continued, “Sometimes our best technological ideas are not really about the technology at all, but how we can leverage the technology to make our business bigger and better.”

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Voice of Experience: Celine Herweijer, Partner, Sustainability, PwC UK

rceline_herwejer_pwcBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“In terms of being a leader – I didn’t think about it too much early on,” began Dr Celine Herweijer, Partner in PwC’s Sustainability practice. “I’ve always known that I wanted to spend my life working on issues I feel passionate about, and that I enjoyed being around people and building consensus for change. I guess I’ve really grown organically from that. I’ve met role models along the way who inspired me to keep reaching for the stars.”

In 2012, Herweijer became one of PwC’s youngest partners. Her career had taken her from academia, to the UN, the NGO space and then to the private sector leading a consulting practice before she joined PwC. Despite her diverse work experience, she has been driven by a singular passion – to change the way people, companies, and governments approach sustainability.

She explained, “For my generation, this is an issue we grew up with. We were one of the first to hear regularly in our classrooms and on the news about the stresses we were putting on our planet. I had clarity early on that I wanted to take personal responsibility to influence change.”

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Voice of Experience: Jun Wei, Managing Partner, Hogan Lovells, Beijing

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jun_weiWelcome to The Glass Hammer’s Spotlight on Asia Week. We’ll be featuring profiles of successful business women working in Asia all week long!

By Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Jun Wei, Managing Partner, Hogan Lovells is a stunning example of someone who has overcome adversity early in her life to become a successful lawyer, role model, and champion of women’s advancement in law.

When Wei was young, she was fortunate enough to live a privileged life as the daughter of parents who worked for the central government. But this came to a sudden end when the Cultural Revolution took place in China and Wei’s family was kicked out of Beijing. At this time, she was separated from both of her parents for a couple of years while her father went into custody and her mother was sentenced to work on a remote countryside.

With her unwavering optimism, Wei was able to find the silver lining for herself in all of the struggle and hardship her family endured. Wei explained, “The good part is that after the Cultural Revolution ended, China started to open its doors.” She continued, “I was one of the few fortunate young people, and only one of two females, who could attend the graduate school of Beijing University Law School. My classmates were all men who were at least ten to fifteen years older than me.”

At the undergraduate law school level, the female representation was much higher at 25-30 percent. Wei explained that unlike the United States, law school in China is both undergraduate and graduate school. The first law degree you earn is LLB and the second degree is LLM. When the Cultural Revolution ended, both schools opened at the same time and Wei was admitted at the graduate level.

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Voice of Experience: Siew Choo Ng, Senior Vice President, Head of Global Network Partnerships, Asia, American Express

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWelcome to The Glass Hammer’s Spotlight on Asia Week. We’ll be featuring profiles of successful business women working in Asia all week long!

By Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Siew Choo Ng, Senior Vice President, Head of Global Network Partnerships, Asia, American Express based in Singapore, has held many different positions and worked in many different markets during her 20+ year career with American Express.

By gaining all of these valuable business perspectives, Ng has been able to successfully apply her knowledge and experience in her new role as Head of Global Network Partnerships in Asia . “One of the benefits of working in so many different businesses and markets is the ability to network and adapt,” said Ng.

Ng has successfully navigated the company’s different businesses, but there is one thing that she has learned throughout her career that she wishes she knew when she was first starting out. “It is important to know how to manage your boss,” remarked Ng. “He or she is the one who can be your sponsor and help you with your career. Often times you are competing for their time and sponsorship with your other team members, so it helps to distinguish yourself from the pack.”

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Voice of Experience: Wei Hopeman, Managing Director and Head of Asia, Citi Ventures, Shanghai

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wei_hopeman_smWelcome to The Glass Hammer’s Spotlight on Asia Week. We’ll be featuring profiles of successful business women working in Asia all week long!

By Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Wei Hopeman, Managing Director and Head of Asia for Citi Ventures, stresses the importance of taking risks, embracing the unknown, and cultivating strong relationships in business. Hopeman joined Citi Ventures in 2010 to lead activities in Asia, which is the venture investing and innovation arm of Citi. “We act as the eyes and ears that identify new technologies to bring into Citi to help our company stay ahead of the competition,” said Hopeman.

Career Path

When she first started out in the in financial industry, Hopeman worked as a buyside analyst on the Asian portfolio of a Los Angeles based firm. “The Asian portfolio was about one billion dollars. I was asked if I wanted to move to Hong Kong to help set up the Asian office for the firm,” recalled Hopeman. “I jumped at the opportunity, which was such an amazing experience for someone my age.”

After successfully establishing the Hong Kong office for her firm, Hopeman decided to take a detour from the traditional career path in finance when she received a phone call from a friend about joining a new real estate start-up. “I knew nothing about real estate or running a start-up, but I saw it as a great opportunity,” said Hopeman. “We started in a 10×10 windowless office, raised capital, hired a staff, and developed a business plan. Eventually we grew from just two people to having offices in Hong Kong, Japan, and China.”

Although it was somewhat of a departure from her career in finance, Hopeman values the time she spent growing her start-up. “Even though this experience happened early on in my professional life, it played a huge role in how I viewed the rest of my career. It taught me that you shouldn’t be intimidated by things you don’t know because you can always figure it out if you are smart and hard-working.”

After successfully fulfilling her goals as an entrepreneur, Wei returned to the financial services industry and spent a couple of years working for an Investment Banking and Private Equity firm whose primary focus was helping European multinational companies complete strategic acquisitions in Asian markets. Always looking for the next opportunity, Hopeman decided that it was time for her to expand her industry knowledge by attending business school at Stanford.

“In business school I caught the technology bug and fell in love with the Bay area,” Hopeman said. She continued, “I became a technology investment banker and spent the next eight years learning about emerging technologies and helping technology companies with strategic initiatives.” During this time Hopeman was presented with another opportunity to relocate to Asia and help her firm establish an office in this market.

In her current role with Citi Ventures, Hopeman spends a lot of time thinking about ways to keep Citi one step ahead of the competition. “We are facing some non-traditional competitors in our industry right now like Google, Amazon, and Alibaba who are creating customer centric and data driven financial services with the end user in mind. This makes us think about new ways of conducting our traditional business and how to enhance the customer experience with new technologies and capabilities.”

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