Update: Satya Backtracks
After opprobrium rained down from the sky following his comments regarding how women should approach asking for a raise, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella quickly released a memo to Microsoft employees — it was released to the public as well — backtracking on his remarks.
Here it is in full:
It remains to be seen if his retraction will dampen criticism.
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Today at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hit the skids after Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd — an institution known for its prominence in STEM fields — asked him how young women should ask for a raise.
Nadella replied that not asking for a raise can in fact be “one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back because somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to. And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up.”
His remarks came across as disjointed, odd, out of place, and wrong: Why tell women to accept lower pay in the short-term for the promise of the system correcting itself later, when that same system has proven that it will act unfairly?
Reaction to his comments on the raise matter were immediately negative:
The Microsoft leader later followed up with a clarifying tweet.
Klawe preceded her question with a story about her recent attendance at the Most Powerful Women Summit, where between 25 and 33 percent of the audience, by her estimate, indicated that they had never asked for a raise. In the United States, women ask for raises less frequently than men, leading to lower starting salaries for many young women that can persist throughout their careers.
Earlier in the discussion, Nadella listed a number of Microsoft leaders who are women — heads of its HR, business development, its CFO, etc. — and the CEO said that he “absolutely expects [one of the women] one of these days to be sitting in this chair,” the implication being that Microsoft will have a female CEO in the future.
It’s fair to say that even if his comments were merely poorly constructed word-salad that failed to convey his actual feelings, Nadella still alienated some women. Needless to say, this is a pretty large unforced error for Nadella. And if his comments were indicative of his actual views on the matter, they reflect poorly on the company he runs and, possibly, its culture. Let’s hope he returns to Redmond with a redoubled drive to further the cause of women in technology.
Here’s the exchange (Transcript via Microsoft):
