Melinda Gates one piece of advice for young women in computer science

Melinda Gates one piece of advice for young women in computer scienceMelinda Gates one piece of advice for young women in computer scienceWhen businesswoman and philanthropist Melinda Gates was fresh out of college in the 1980s, she had just gotten zu sich dream tech job at Microsoft and thought she had it all figured out. But she soon realized that being a woman in a male-dominated field with all-male managers meant having no role models on how she should manage. The more aggressive, less collaborative management style of her male peers wasnt working. It got so bad that she even considered quitting.I thought that in buchen to succeed, Id need to act more like them. But when I tried it, I hated it, Gates wrote in her opinion editorial for Fortune on Tuesday about what advice she would give women college graduates in computer science.It wasnt until she learned how to manage in a way that felt authentic to herself that her career started changing for the better.It turned out there was room for my leadership style, too. Nothing made me prouder than when colleagues started asking to be reassigned to my team, Gates wrote. Learning how to be true to yourselfis the one piece of advice she emphasized to new grads.Be true to yourselfLearning your strengths and weaknesses and managing thediscomfort of that discovery process is advice Gates has talked about before. Its what she also told Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in 2016 about whatshe wish she had known on her first day at Microsoft You have to get uncomfortable getting comfortable.(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)0 if (d.getElementById(id)) return js = d.createElement(s) js.id = id js.src = https//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.jsxfbml=1version=v3.1 fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs)(document, script, facebook-jssdk))I thought I was going to leave after two years until I just decided, well, maybe, Ill try being myself, Gates told Sandberg about her time at Microsoft. I started to lear n to be myself, and the more I did that andjust leanedinto it, as uncomfortable as it wasyou build that muscle.In her op-ed, Gates recognized that being yourself as a woman in computer science isnt easy when no one looks like you, citing the gender gap of being the only woman in a room full of brogrammers as a problem. The lack of diversity in technology careers is a problem with far-reaching consequences that persists to this day. Recently, the Labor Department announced that itsinvestigating Google over an extreme gender pay gap and a female Facebook engineer alleged that women engineers at Facebook face more scrutiny over their code than men.The world needs less samenessBut despite ansicht uphill battles, Gates said she was writing this editorial to keep women encouraged about computer science as a viable career path where you can make an outsized impact on the world.If you ever find yourself feeling out of place, I hope youll bear in mind that the last thing tech needs is more p eople who look and think the same, Gates concludedin her op-ed. Innovation requires new insights and new perspectives- and thats exactly what you have to offer.