Tech giant Intel wants to hire women, and lots of them. Intel vice-president,

Corkwoman Margaret Burgraff, tells how she’s going to do it

TanglewoodAn exclusive extract of Dermot Bolger’s searing new novel

lifT, sculpT and ToneGive your wardrobe a facelift with exquisite Irish millinery

The wind in The willowsExplore Ireland by ‘Blueway’, a new set of water trails

May 17 2015

Magazine

Theyear of the

woman

long read

12 Magazine May 17 2015 The Sunday Business Post

Margaret Burgraff (far right) is a top boardroom figure at Intel, one of the largest tech companies in the world

Tech’s new Breed

As Intel designates 2015 the year of ‘Women in Intel’, one of the technology giant’s newest vice-presidents, Cork-born Margaret Burgraff, talks about picking potatoes, making it in Silicon Valley, Facebook, inclusivity in the workplace, and ‘having it all’

Words: Fiona NessPicture: Chip Holley

You’d expect a vice-pres-ident of Intel to know a thing or two about tech security. In the com-pany’s Leixlip factory, security against intel-lectual property theft is at Willie Wonka levels. No one knows what goes on inside the labs;

the workers themselves don’t know the compo-nents of what they’re producing. Which is why I’m surprised that when googling one of Intel’s newest vice-presidents, Cork woman Margaret Burgraff, her entire Facebook life pops up for all the world to see.

There’s Margaret at the country club, Margaret at the Louvre, Margaret with her adorably impish boys, Margaret with her close girlfriends, Margaret with Champagne. There’s Margaret mountainbik-ing, Margaret yoga posing, Margaret with her Irish mammy, Margaret with her American husband – on a mountaintop – at sunset. There’s Margaret looking more fresh, beautiful and fashionable than she appears in any corporate photoshoot. But most of all, there’s Margaret looking really, really happy. Her hometown of Los Gatos is America’s 33rd wealthiest city.

“It’s not that I was snooping,” I venture sheep-ishly on a late-night conference call to Intel’s Los Gatos plant in California’s Silicon Valley. “But your Facebook doesn’t have any privacy settings on it, and there was little else available in the way of research material . . .”

A conference call isn’t the best place for reading

someone’s reaction to a statement, but from the stilted silence, I’d say the Facebook stalking has Burgraff, a self-confessed “Energiser bunny”, a little surprised.

“A lot of senior people keep their personal life very private . . . but I feel that’s not being true to myself,” Burgraff says.

“I am one of six children, my mother is one of eight and my father was one of 12, and I’m the only one of my family to have emigrated. So Face-book is my lazy way of keeping my whole family involved in my life,” she says, fully rejoining the conversation.

“I’ve been advised by people to limit what I post, but I do love life, I have lots of girlfriends, I also work with my girlfriends’ network, I don’t feel I have to hide it. I was up at 5am dealing with my kids throwing up on the bed, and they are here with me right now in this conversation. I am a whole person. Women – everyone – in the workplace should know that it’s okay to be a whole person.”

Apart from sparking a severe case of Facebook

envy, Burgraff’s posts put to bed the continuing debate over whether a woman can ‘have it all’. She can, but to do this she has to, as Burgraff says, “make her own circumstances”; especially when she aims to ‘have it all’ as a woman in technology.

Burgraff’s employer, the computer chip man-ufacturer Intel, knows this, which is why the technology giant has designated 2015 the year of ‘Women in Intel’. The company is this year pump-ing $300 million into a new hiring and retention strategy, the goal of which is to ensure that by 2020, Intel’s workforce fully reflects the racial and sexual make-up of the population. “We want to become industry leader for inclusion diversity,” Burgraff says.

Intel has quite a way to go to achieve this parity. Its US workforce is currently 24 per cent female, with women making up a scant 19 per cent of all technical staff. Only 18 per cent of workers at management level internationally are women.

However, in the first four months of 2015, 41 per cent of new hires at the company were wom-en and underrepresented minorities – increased from 32 per cent last year, according to a report in Silicone Republic. In the same period, 33 per cent of hires at senior level were women, up from 19 per cent in 2014.

Commenting on the figures, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said: “I am not going to fool you. This is hard work. This isn’t rocket science. It’s harder . . . We are trying to do inside a corporation what society has tried to do for years.”

In the pursuit of Intel’s goal, Burgraff says, “BK [Krzanich] is serious about becoming the industry leader, so nothing is off the table.”

Does this mean that Intel will follow Apple and Facebook down the route of paying for egg freezing for female employees, a move that would allow women to delay parenting and so keep them in employment? Burgraff confirms the subject is under discussion.

“The head of HR has already had the conversation with me about the phi-losophy of it. I personally find it too intrusive. I don’t want my workplace involved in my fertility. I personally find something nasty about that,” Burgraff says.

“Any employee programmes have to be inclusive of males and females. Paying for birth control? I will take that as one of my med-ical benefits. But fertility treatment? Personally, I don’t want to be having conversations with my management about that.”

For someone who is so emphatically ‘part of the conversation’ at Intel, it’s in-teresting to witness Burgraff stride confidently off-mes-sage on the egg freezing issue. Perhaps vice-president sta-tus comes with the clear-ance to start your own ‘conversation’, or perhaps it’s just the Cork in her that makes her so de-

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Tech’s new Breed

14 Magazine May 17 2015 The Sunday Business Post

lightfully self-assured and engaging; in a word – poised.

* * *

Burgraff began her career in technology after graduat-ing with a degree in com-puter science and econom-ics from University College

Cork. In 1994, she took a job in Apple in Cork, which was then a company on the verge of obscurity.

Family and friends advised her against taking up Steve Jobs’s offer to move to the US to work on the launch of his new iMac (“Apple didn’t have a lot of money, and people were say-ing, what are you doing?”). She told them it would only be a year and, if it didn’t work out, she could always come back. It did, and she didn’t.

By May 2014, Burgraff had charged through Silicon Valley to become vice-president of Intel’s mobile and communications group (she will define Intel’s role in the Internet of Things). She is one of seven Irish people to achieve VP status at the company. Fellow Cork woman Ann Kelleher is a corporate vice-presi-dent. Burgraff says she hopes to follow Kelleher’s lead.

For now, the Cork woman’s seat at the top table gives her a direct role in Intel’s “inclusion diversity” strat-egy, as it aims to build a “pipeline” of female engineers and computer scientists. She actively supports the hiring and retention of more women at the company, and endorses pro-grammes to support more positive representation within the technology and gaming industries.

“Unfortunately, women have been underrepresented in technology, and a lot of times you feel very isolated when you’re the only woman in a staff group,” she says. “Women have to prove that we have a right to a seat at the table, over and over again, and eventually it’s very off-putting. Technical males just don’t have to go through the same scrutiny.

“There are interruptions when a woman is speaking – it’s much easier to speak over her; I’ve seen this mul-tiple times. Or you find a man getting credit for an idea for a woman had, just because he repeated it, or because the manager in the room hears it just

because it’s from a man’s voice. I have experienced this myself.

“We’re on a fast treadmill working in technology, and it’s getting faster and faster, and keeping up on that treadmill is difficult. Women need to grasp the mindset needed.”

Or, as another well-known wom-an in tech might say, lean in?

“Many of the things [Sheryl Sand-berg] observed in Lean In – women deliberately putting themselves in the last row of seats at a conference – I have for sure seen that,” Burgraff says. “Or if the admin is not in the room, they grab the notepad and start taking notes for everyone, even though they are a senior director. I point out, ‘you make yourself look really junior if you start making the notes’.”

It could be interpreted as feminist invective, but Burgraff blindsides that label by being a warm, inclusive and

friendly interviewee. “I’m glad Sheryl wrote the book

because it made the conversation [about women’s place in the work-place] public. People are saying, what does Sheryl know, she was born with a silver spoon . . . but I think the mes-sage in her book is great. I have a very different story, but I can empathise.”

✽ ✽ ✽

Burgraff’s very different story began in Berrings National School, Co, Cork, where there were 100 pu-pils in the primary school

and “five of them were in my family”.Her father had bought a farm in

Berrings during a property bubble in 1972. The bubble burst, and he had to seek work in a local dairy, rising at 4am every morning to work while her mother tended the children and the farm. “He came home at noon every day to spend time with us, be-cause he knew my mother only had so much patience,” Burgraff says. “It was a protected upbringing, but I had to work hard.”

She spent her summers picking potatoes with her siblings, but says she “never felt bounded by the farm”.

“When you’re seven years old and you’re looking at the dirt in your fingernails, and doing a process of elimination of what you don’t want to do when you grow up . . . you’re looking at cars going past your gate and thinking you want to go where

they’re going.“When I started working in Apple,

the fact I was in a nice clean office with air conditioning and heating meant that it didn’t feel like work. But nowadays it does feel like work. My brain feels stressed at the end of the day.” Yoga, running, and cycling in the mountains with her boys keep body and soul together.

Burgraff credits her mother with inspiring a strong work ethic in her. “Working hard is not an issue. Lots of times, I haven’t been the smart-est or most attractive person in the room, but I knew I could work harder than anyone in the room, and that’s a powerful tool.”

Speaking softly in a slightly brittle American accent, she sounds as if she is constantly smiling. And as we talk, her pace quickens as the ups and downs of Cork infiltrate her clipped California-speak. She exclaims that talking to someone from home is “bringing out the Cork in me”, and because I like her and want her to like me, I don’t point out that it’s actually a Scottish accent she’s listening to.

The fact is, women warm to Bur-graff, despite her own admission that in some ways she is “more like some of the men I have worked with in the past 20 years”.

Her Intel mentees adore her and women throng to her for advice at conferences. A lot of her appeal is that she’s not afraid to be female and the smartest person in the room.

“Some of the inauthentic things we

From top: Burgraff at work in Intel; pictured with her family on her Communion day; and with her husband and two sons in California

FROM PAGE 13

MARGARET BURGRAFF‘WOMEN HAVE TO PROVE THAT WE HAVE A RIGHT TO A SEAT AT THE TABLE, OVER AND OVER AGAIN’

as females have had to do working in tech . . . for example, it was clear to me when I started working in Apple that to be considered an engineer, I had to dress in khaki pants and a shirt and look geeky, and I fell for that.

“So, for the first five years of my career, that’s how I dressed. One day, I woke up and I was looking at the nice dresses and purses in my wardrobe, and I thought, you know an engineer can dress like that too. Since I started dressing that way in Intel, more and more girls have started to bring out their nice clothes to go to work.

“Now that we have at least open conversations about diversity, we can explore that,” Burgraff says. “When I started my career first, there wasn’t an open conversation about it. There was a uniform that stated that the geeki-er you looked, the smarter you were considered. Perception was reality.”

She tells the story of when, at the beginning of her career at Apple, she was “running the Intel chip transition”. That the task was “extremely intense” is an understatement; it drove her to complete burnout.

“Luckily, I just went to the spa,” Bur-graff says. The phrase is jarringly in-congruous with the image constructed of a person who had just assimilated Apple’s entire platform line with Intel technology.

“My hands were just hanging out limply, while someone was doing my nails. I needed to take that day. That time you feel you do need that day in the spa – I say, take that day. Do not compromise your health [for your job].”

The need for the odd emergency spa visit aside, Burgraff believes that the reason why women in particular leave their engineering careers early is a little more complex than their in-ability to lean in. “We have no problem attracting talent initially, but for some reason, women leave – and we do not believe they are leaving just to have babies,” she says. Part of the reason, she adds, is that ‘engineer’ is not a gender-neutral word.

“The stereotypical image of an engi-neer has turned women off engineer-ing. Up until 1984, computer science courses were 34 per cent female, but then the numbers began to dip. At exactly the same time, the PC started to take off. And the PC was marketed towards men.”

This masculinisation of technology continues apace today, Burgraff says, and therefore continues to alienate women working in that area.

“Look at the psychology of what’s going on at the different tech trade shows – it’s a very uncomfortable en-vironment to go into if you’re a wom-an. The ‘booth babes’ [models who are used to promote the gadgets on display] are part of the issue. They are not a threat to me as person, but 95 per cent of the attendees are males who have been titillated all day by these booth babes. At the end of the day, they turn to [fellow female attendees] who they think they actually have a shot at . . . it’s not a safe environment. Saying tech is sexy is an insult to both men and women.”

Another reason why Intel fails to retain female staff, Burgraff believes, is that “people like to hire people like themselves”. So, for example, if you

have mostly white males in position of power, the pool of new hires is more likely to be more white males.

“I also have to challenge my own biases,” says Burgraff, who is known for putting together female-friendly teams. l“I grew up playing camogie, I like being around women, so I hire them when I have the opportunity. But I have to ensure I allow space for the best candidate to win, to make sure that the initial candidacy reach-out isn’t just a lot of Margarets.”

Acknowledging that Intel has a long way to go to achieve gender parity, Burgraff says the company is “keeping a very firm eye on [hiring retention rates] because we are starting from behind. We realise we have a gap, so for a short while we will have a bias towards women while hiring, in order to make up for the sins of the past”.

However, not everyone at the cor-poration is cheerleading for ‘Women in Intel’ - and not all of those dissenters are men.

“Because the conversation is so loud right now, some women feel: ‘The only only reason I’m on this team is because I’m a woman, so I want off this team’. I have to get back to those women to say: ‘Of course it’s not. You’ve been at Intel for 15 years and you’ve had to work damn hard to get to where you’re at’.

“The women coming in today won’t find it easier to progress; what we’re ensuring is that each male manager won’t automatically be going to the bench of their friends when recruiting.

We can’t allow the peo-ple who are concerned about the initiative to continue the problem,” Burgraff says, acknowl-edging that many male employees have jumped in quickly to become part of the solution.

So far, so altruistic; yet achieving ‘diversity inclusion’ is also essential for Intel’s bottom line. In a re-cent report on Advancing Diversity in Technology, the company stated: “The people who buy consumer electronics come from all walks of life, so it only makes sense that the people creating consumer electronics should too.” Or, rather, how do you make products that appeal to women or black people or Hispanic people, if no one on your staff understands what these sections of the population want?

“The more diverse your staff is, the more diverse the mindset is that’s coming to the table with ideas,” Bur-graff says. “Personally, for me [Intel’s diversity strategy] is not just about equality in the workplace – I really hope we move that conversation to equality in the homeplace. In my sit-uation, my husband is a stay-at-home dad, and I would say there is far more discrimination against him as a father in the homeplace, than I have as a woman at work.”

✽ ✽ ✽

While encouraging all her female men-tees to develop a ‘five-year plan’, Burgraff’s own

five-year plan centres heavily around making family time count. “When we talk about freezing eggs . . . I’d love if I could freeze my two boys [aged 11 and 8] where they are right now, so that when I’m on top of my career,

I can come back . . . I want to make the time I am with them special, and make it count.

“Because I have been so busy and my husband stays at home, in the next five years I want to circle him back into it. The kids will grow up and . . . at the end of the day, if I have the most fabulous career ever and I lose them, then I lose everything.”

Despite being “super-excited” about her new role in Intel and effusive about her boys, there are some fac-ets of Burgraff’s life she’ll never be able to alter, through any amount of planning – such as the loneliness of the immigrant culture.

“When my dad was dying of bone cancer, I wasn’t able to be there. I visit-ed three times in the last year of his life. I wasn’t there. My family were my life growing up, and yet my children don’t get to see their children. You miss the human connections, so there is a sac-rifice. But then again, I have all of the shoes and dresses I could ever want . . . If only I could have my cousins in my closet with me, the way we spent all our time in there as kids!” She gives a girlish shriek.

“Happy Irish woman,” Burgraff gurgles without pause, when asked to describe herself in three words. No conversation needed.

Margaret Burgraff is a keynote speaker at Swipe Summit, The Sunday Business Post’s 360 digital strategy summit, on May 28. See swipesummit.com for booking details; @swipe360; #summitsummit

The Sunday Business Post May 17 2015 Magazine 15

Clockwise from right: Burgraff at an Intel meeting; making a recruitment video; and during a company visit to South Africa

Margaret burgraff‘I knew I could work harder than anyone In the rooM, and that’s a powerful tool’