By Heather Chapman (New York City)
Jennifer Flaa is a very busy woman. You might think that being the CEO of Vettana, a software quality assurance (SQA) company she founded twelve years ago, would be enough to keep her occupied. But, for this woman, it’s not. She has started a second company, teaches at the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center, and has written a book. Oh, and in her spare time Jennifer sings in a rock band she started a few years ago.
Despite the passion she has for technology—Jennifer was a Technology Management student at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC)—this field wasn’t Jennifer’s first love. That was music. Jennifer says she sang throughout high school in choirs and musicals, played three different instruments, and was her high school band’s drum major and conductor. Still, despite how much she lived for music, Jennifer says that she consciously did not focus on that when she went to college. “I consciously turned the music switch off when I went to college and started an engineering curriculum. I loved music but did not want to be a ‘starving artist’. ”
After graduating, Jennifer went on to work at NASA, writing and researching test cases for an experiment that was conducted via space shuttles. It was her experiences there at NASA that led Jennifer to eventually leave and move to the Bay Area, working for several startups. It wasn’t until after she burned out working for various startups, spending all her time and energy there—literally sleeping under her desk at times—that she went back to music. Jennifer took two years off from her professional career and spent her time singing with a local garage band, belting out blues tunes, and performing for six months in a local musical, where she played four different characters. But then, as Jennifer says, “she did it again,” starting Vettanna and “deep ended into work again, shutting off the music valve that majorly fed my soul.”
It took a divorce for Jennifer to actually stop and take a look at how she was living her, realizing only then that she wasn’t doing what really made her happy. “That’s when I started singing again and sought out a rock vocal coach that would help me develop a professional quality sound.” She also became the manager of a friend’s band, teaching herself about the music industry from the inside. She took the knowledge that she learned from that experience and started her own band, Urban Fiction, with her friend, Francois Didier Bouvet. Planning only on singing the songs that other artists had written, the suggestion by her coach to write her own songs took Jennifer completely by surprise. Hesitant at first, Jennifer disregarded his suggestion, but her coach didn’t stop there. “He told me to come back next week with not one but four songs…and I did. Of course they were crap. But we worked with them and he really taught me the [song-writing] craft. I write the melodies and lyrics and Didier Bouvet [her partner in the band] adds the groove and the awesome guitar!”
Jennifer says that she still struggles to find an acceptable balance in her life. “I work best in bursts and still ‘deep end’ into tasks, looking up and [realizing] it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still on a roll! It’s not a long-term strategy but it’s actually fun and rewarding to do from time to time. The truth is, the balancing is a process. I haven’t figured out yet if ‘having a balanced life’ means that the ‘balance’ happens each day or in a week, or in a month or over the year!”
Balancing act notwithstanding, Jennifer is always on top of her life and priorities by forming a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. Then, she says, she “take[s] it and get geeky with it. I write a plan, map out what it will take to get from here to there, how long and what the tasks are along the way.” By prioritizing her tasks and taking things one-step at a time, Jennifer says, “by the end of the year I find I’ve accomplished quite a bit.”
Jennifer has found that since she’s again made music a priority in her life, she’s much happier. “The singing is my passion and I get so much juice, happiness, and energy from playing in that sandbox that it really feeds my soul and gives me energy for other things.”
Jennifer has a website, with links to her four different blogs, and she’s also on LinkedIn and Twitter, where she can be reached at any time.
Wall Street … Or What?
News“Wall Street…Or What?” is a 5-session program for Wall Street women who have reached the Vice President level or above, and are looking for help as they plan their next career move. To ensure that all participants are coming at the question of “what’s next” with current perspectives, returning professionals must have left the investment world within the last three years.
This workshop will be a combination of high-level support group and structured executive coaching-giving like-minded women the opportunity to explore options and gain job search momentum and accountability through collective resources, ideas and perspectives.
Each session will be led by Sharon Dauk, an executive coach who trained at the highly regarded Columbia University coaching program. Sharon is one of you: she has nearly 20 years of diverse professional experience as an investor, board member, financial advisor and business executive with a variety of small to mid-sized companies. An alumna of both the Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley corporate finance departments, she earned an MBA from Cornell. A major focus of her coaching practice is working with professionals transitioning both into and out of the financial services industry. Learn more about Sharon at www.sharondauk.com.
Workshop sessions will be held on five consecutive Tuesday nights, beginning on February 24th, 6:30 to 8:30pm. The other workshop dates are March 3rd, 10th, 17th and 24th. As you consider if you would like to participate, be sure that you are available on all five dates: there are no partial fees or refunds if you are unable to attend on one or more dates.
For further information please contact Kathryn Sollmann.
WEC NY Presented Panel on Corporate Boards
Pipeline, What's OnContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
On Tuesday, February 10th in New York City, the Women’s Executive Circle of New York presented “Tips For Landing That Boardroom Post: An Insider’s View.” The panel to encourage and inform women on how to get on corporate boards featured:
The panel was moderated by Nicole Sebastian, Heidrick & Struggles, an associate in the Corporate Boards practice group. Read more
School Visiting Professorial Fellow Lecture – Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women
NewsSpeakers
DescriptionWomen are conspicuous by their relative absence at the most prominent levels of science, medicine, business, law, and academia. Women are sparsely represented on the editorial boards of leading journals and on the steering committees of professional organizations. Women are thinly represented among full professors at major universities. Why?
Valian’s explanation of women’s slow advancement in the professions details how and why women are disadvantaged and men advantaged – even though all the participants sincerely hold egalitarian and meritocratic attitudes. Valian reviews experimental data that demonstrate that gender schemas produce subtle overvaluations of men and undervaluations of women, by both men and women. As a result of many small examples of differential valuation, men are able to accumulate advantage more quickly than women.
Valian includes remedies, what institutions and individuals can do to achieve genuinely fair organizations that make full use of everyone’s talents.
The Lecture will be followed by a drink reception.
To view the poster, please click here.
Women Lawyers May Be At Risk During the Recession
NewsOn February 12, 2009, just a few days before Valentine’s Day, the legal industry experienced what some have labeled “Black Thursday” – more than 700 jobs were cut at major law firms that day with another 400 confirmed the next day by Am Law Daily. Anyone who still doubts the legal profession is feeling the recession, can glance at the sobering layoff statistics committed to keeping a focus on those who are “in, or refugees from BigLaw.”
So, who exactly are the refugees? As the New York Times reported earlier this month, 82 percent of the job losses in the overall labor market have been experienced by men, who are heavily represented in impacted industries like manufacturing and construction. In order to determine whether a similar trend is developing in law, we chatted with several experts in the employment and human resources field. Their observations highlight the possibility that women lawyers may actually be the ones more at risk during the recession.At first glance, the layoffs in the legal field mirror those in the overall labor market.
Read more
Mover and Shaker: Maria Weaver Watson, Director of Strategic Marketing, Interactive One
Movers and ShakersAs Director of Strategic Marketing at Interactive One, Maria Weaver Watson is responsible for leading all consumer and trade marketing and public relations for a company that provides the #1 online platform for a broad swath of the African American community. Watson is also the great-great grand daughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who has continued her family legacy by giving back to the community through an active involvement on boards and organizations including Standup for Kids, iMentor and Council of Urban Professionals.
Watson’s work at Interactive One, which serves more than 9 million users, is delicately connected to her community involvement. In fact, these two aspects of Watson’s accomplished life are openly inter-related. When Watson considered joining Interactive One, she found herself attracted to the company’s mission to serve the African American community through online content and social media. Today, she feels very strongly about her role at Interactive One, explaining “I’m actually making a difference to the community, and that is personally rewarding.”
Read more
In Case You Missed It: News Round-Up
NewsIn case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:
Mergers and Acquisition
Read more
Businesswomen in India
Breaking the Glass CeilingFour Indian women are listed among the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women – two are in government, one is a self-made biotech powerhouse, and the other, Indra Nooyi, is the US-based CEO of Pepsico. Conspicuously missing are the women of India’s corporate sector.
In 1991, in an effort to combat widespread poverty, India undertook serious economic reforms, eschewing market controls and opening its economy to the world. The resulting multinational corporation mass entry into the market allowed women to enter and excel in non-traditional (i.e., not teaching or nursing), corporate professions and in banking and IT in particular.
While significant progress has been made for women in the Indian corporate world, there is a long way to go. According to a Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) source, only a handful of women sit on the boards of the 4,864 companies listed: currently only 4.9% of the 12,741 directors on the boards of these companies are women and, out of the top 100 companies listed on the BSE, only 34.7% of the directors are women.
As in most other countries, one reason for the comparatively low number of women at the top of corporations is the difficulty balancing work obligations with home obligations. In India, this is a particularly challenging issue as women are still primarily responsible for children and the home (including their in-law’s home life), whether or not they work outside the home.
The good news is that there are a handful of successful Indian businesswomen – women like Naina Lal Kidwai, Chief Executive Officer of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation India branches; Hewlett Packard’s Managing Director Neelam Dhawan; and Jayashree Vallal from Cisco Systems, among others. These are the women who are paving the way for a new generation of businesswomen, breaking free of traditional roles and cracking India’s corporate glass ceiling.
Opportunities for training and mentoring by these successful businesswomen will pave the way into the next decade, inspiring the next generation of young women. The role of women in top positions will continue to increase as their input and ideas are tapped to ensure the continued success of India’s economic future.
Passions: Singing in a Rock Band
PassionsJennifer Flaa is a very busy woman. You might think that being the CEO of Vettana, a software quality assurance (SQA) company she founded twelve years ago, would be enough to keep her occupied. But, for this woman, it’s not. She has started a second company, teaches at the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center, and has written a book. Oh, and in her spare time Jennifer sings in a rock band she started a few years ago.
Despite the passion she has for technology—Jennifer was a Technology Management student at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC)—this field wasn’t Jennifer’s first love. That was music. Jennifer says she sang throughout high school in choirs and musicals, played three different instruments, and was her high school band’s drum major and conductor. Still, despite how much she lived for music, Jennifer says that she consciously did not focus on that when she went to college. “I consciously turned the music switch off when I went to college and started an engineering curriculum. I loved music but did not want to be a ‘starving artist’. ”
After graduating, Jennifer went on to work at NASA, writing and researching test cases for an experiment that was conducted via space shuttles. It was her experiences there at NASA that led Jennifer to eventually leave and move to the Bay Area, working for several startups. It wasn’t until after she burned out working for various startups, spending all her time and energy there—literally sleeping under her desk at times—that she went back to music. Jennifer took two years off from her professional career and spent her time singing with a local garage band, belting out blues tunes, and performing for six months in a local musical, where she played four different characters. But then, as Jennifer says, “she did it again,” starting Vettanna and “deep ended into work again, shutting off the music valve that majorly fed my soul.”
It took a divorce for Jennifer to actually stop and take a look at how she was living her, realizing only then that she wasn’t doing what really made her happy. “That’s when I started singing again and sought out a rock vocal coach that would help me develop a professional quality sound.” She also became the manager of a friend’s band, teaching herself about the music industry from the inside. She took the knowledge that she learned from that experience and started her own band, Urban Fiction, with her friend, Francois Didier Bouvet. Planning only on singing the songs that other artists had written, the suggestion by her coach to write her own songs took Jennifer completely by surprise. Hesitant at first, Jennifer disregarded his suggestion, but her coach didn’t stop there. “He told me to come back next week with not one but four songs…and I did. Of course they were crap. But we worked with them and he really taught me the [song-writing] craft. I write the melodies and lyrics and Didier Bouvet [her partner in the band] adds the groove and the awesome guitar!”
Jennifer says that she still struggles to find an acceptable balance in her life. “I work best in bursts and still ‘deep end’ into tasks, looking up and [realizing] it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still on a roll! It’s not a long-term strategy but it’s actually fun and rewarding to do from time to time. The truth is, the balancing is a process. I haven’t figured out yet if ‘having a balanced life’ means that the ‘balance’ happens each day or in a week, or in a month or over the year!”
Balancing act notwithstanding, Jennifer is always on top of her life and priorities by forming a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. Then, she says, she “take[s] it and get geeky with it. I write a plan, map out what it will take to get from here to there, how long and what the tasks are along the way.” By prioritizing her tasks and taking things one-step at a time, Jennifer says, “by the end of the year I find I’ve accomplished quite a bit.”
Jennifer has found that since she’s again made music a priority in her life, she’s much happier. “The singing is my passion and I get so much juice, happiness, and energy from playing in that sandbox that it really feeds my soul and gives me energy for other things.”
Jennifer has a website, with links to her four different blogs, and she’s also on LinkedIn and Twitter, where she can be reached at any time.
Women as Global Consumers WITI San Diego Regional Network Event
NewsWITI San Diego presents:
Women as Global Consumers – Women are driving new Consumer Trends, Business Models and Technologies in the Communications and Entertainment Industry
Globalization has changed the face of the world, making us all into global consumers and giving us access to instant information. This has deeply affected women’s lives. For several years now, instant communication between continents and the spread of free trade have paved the way for a rise of a global consumer culture. Women aged 18 and over accounted for over 110 million consumers in both the US and Western Europe in 2005.
Space is limited; we encourage pre-registration to guarantee admission.
Take me directly to the registration form.
All registrations must be received by Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Board’s Eye View: African-American Women on Fortune 500 Corporate Boards
Movers and Shakersby Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
As we reported last week, there are still significant barriers to African-American women rising in Corporate America’s ranks. Women of color—like many women—suffer from a lack of strong or existing strategic networks and work/life balance demands. Additionally, they are hampered by a lack of opportunity—the Catalyst Census of Women on Boards of December 2008 showed that the number of women in general and women of color in particular remained stagnant—and by inaccurate perceptions of African-American women’s capabilities.
Of the 471 companies surveyed, nearly one-fifth had at least one African-American woman on the board. Of the 15.2 percent of directorships held by women at Fortune 500 companies, only 3.2 percent are held by women of color.
If the truth expressed in past Catalyst studies—that the more women on corporate boards, the more likely there will be women in upper management of the organization—holds true for other under-represented groups, the following extraordinary African American women who sit on corporate boards will, by their presence and accomplishments, help create a climate conducive to including other women of color in the C-suite.
Read more