What Happened to Women in Product?

I was once chatting with a group of senior women in product about how we got our start in the industry. We all joined the technology industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Surprisingly, many of us began our Product Management (PM) careers at companies with very gender-balanced teams. Now, however, most of us work on teams that are much less so. Something changed in the intervening years that caused women to gradually disappear from the industry. This made me wonder: how exactly did we lose this ground?  

Today I lead the Facebook App Commerce team, which includes both Product Management and Engineering. I have also led recruiting for Facebook's Product Management team for the past six years. When I started in Product Management at PayPal in 2002, our team was a fifty-fifty balance of men and women.

Years later, the industry looked completely different, and women were vastly outnumbered by men. This is the story of why a generation of women never got their start in Product Management, and how one small decision unintentionally changed our industry. 

Small change, big impact 

In the early to mid-2000s, Product Management at tech companies had almost the same number of men and women. When I spoke with PMs from the early days of eBay, PayPal, Travelocity, and Yahoo, most confirmed that their teams were nearly gender balanced at this time. During one period at PayPal, all of the PM Directors reporting directly to VP of Product Amy Klement were women.

But something changed during the mid-2000s, when Google emerged as a strong training ground for Product Managers. A former Google PM shared how, around 2004, the company changed its requirements for PMs. “Google had a series of meetings with current and former engineers to understand what they thought could be improved,” they explained. “One of the big pieces of feedback was PMs were 'not technical enough' or 'too businessy'. The solution they came up with was to filter down to technical PMs, [with] the requirement that they have a degree in computer science — or in a related field like electrical engineering.” 

In 2005, women only earned about one in five CS degrees in the US, and that trend continues to this day. I believe that the new technical requirement changed the pool of potential PMs to one which was heavily male dominated and thus unintentionally led to the industry moving away from gender balanced teams.   

On top of this, churn in tech is much higher for women. According to a 2008 Harvard Business School study, 41 percent of women leave a decade after starting in tech, compared to 17 percent of men. If women don’t get a strong start in Product, and leave tech at higher rates, how will we get back to a gender parity again?

This trend of requiring PMs to have technical degrees spread throughout the industry. Even women who had successful Product Management careers at other companies could no longer change companies as PMs, and instead took on other roles. Here are a few stories from women who experienced this: 

• Katherine Woo, Head of AirBnB Open Homes, previously worked as a PM at Facebook, leading Social Good efforts. Prior to that, she led major Product teams at PayPal and eBay. “I interviewed for a Product role [at another company], but I kept getting asked technical questions. I actually stopped and said, 'You guys know I'm not technical, right? If you're looking for someone technical then you shouldn't be interviewing me.' And the interviewer replied, 'Well at least you're self-aware.' It was not a great experience, and I could see some people being discouraged from pursuing PM after that.”
• April Underwood, CEO of Local Laboratory and the former Chief Product Officer of Slack, had a similar story. She was initially an Engineer at Travelocity before becoming a PM there, where the team was gender balanced. However, she later joined Google - not as a PM, but as a Partner Technology Manager - because she lacked a CS degree, despite having coded previously. “PMs need to be able to drive change via influence and they need to exhibit strong leadership qualities,” she told me. “It's a role which is hard to define clearly, and for which it can be hard to evaluate the likelihood of success, so as a safety net I believe hiring managers are subconsciously inclined to resort to pattern matching and hiring candidates who 'look like them'.”
• Sandra Liu Huang joined Google in 2004 as a Product Marketing Manager before being invited into a Product role. In 2008, she joined Facebook as a PMM, and again was only later invited into Product. She went on to become Head of Product at Quora and is now Head of Education, VP Product at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “Having made the transition from product marketing to product management twice,” she told me, “the listed PM technical requirements can seem black and white. [They] often deter women from exploring whether they are actually well-qualified for the job.”
• Sabrina Ellis was a PM at Yahoo from 2001 to 2009, and she is now VP of Product Management at Google. “Yahoo was much closer to a 50-50 gender split,” she said. “You got people from very different backgrounds back then.” She went on to explain that it was during the dot com boom when everyone graduating from business schools was welcomed into tech. That changed after the bust, and the addition of the technical requirement dissuaded potential PMs. "Until just a few years ago, Google put PMs through highly technical interviews, and even asked coding questions. They have since recognized that this could limit the diversity of the potential PM pool and have adjusted the interview process to make it more flexible."
• Ha Nguyen was an early PM at eBay. After graduating from Harvard Business School, she interviewed to work at eBay, not knowing what Product Management was. “PMs at eBay came from different backgrounds. There were lots of women leaders including Shripriya Mahesh, Judy Kirkpatrick, and Anne Raimondi,” she told me. This technical requirement ended up affecting her own application choices. “I never even looked at Google because they require a technical degree,” she said. “When a CS degree is highly preferred or required, women will self-select out.” Today, Ha is a Partner at Spero Ventures, where she helps start-ups build great teams and encourages them to focus on diversity, especially in the product ranks.
• Naomi Gleit joined Facebook in 2005, and today she's the second most tenured employee at the company. She started in Marketing, but she aspired to be a Product Manager. Because of the technical requirement, Facebook was reluctant to convert her to a PM role. After some time sitting with the Product team, she was invited in as the first non-technical PM. Today she is the Vice President of Product, where she leads Facebook's Growth, Integrity and Social Good products, including both Product Management and Engineering. “I didn't think I could be a PM because I had no experience,” she confessed. “But because there was so much to do and so few people, I started helping out wherever and however I could — then they made me an offer.”

Despite these women’s deep experience and proven track records, this change in requirement pushed many of them into other roles. Other women who didn’t have a CS degree or a technical background were dissuaded from entering the field. Years later, our industry recognized that many successful PMs didn’t have a CS degree and gradually dropped the requirement, but this small change has had lasting ramifications that continue to this day. 

What’s a degree worth?

I led several PM teams at PayPal and eBay, but joined Facebook in 2009 as a Product Marketing Manager. Because I had studied Civil Engineering instead of CS, I didn’t meet the bar for PM, despite many years of experience in the role. A year and half later, I joined the PM team. When I attended my first PM meeting, I was surprised to learn there were only 3 other women in the room. 

A couple years later, I started working with the then-Director of Product Recruiting, Ruta Singh, and VP of Product Management, Chris Cox on how we could improve PM recruiting. One of our first areas of focus was what we needed to do to encourage more women to pursue the role.  

After reviewing the recruiting funnel for hiring, we focused on removing potential barriers to women applying. The first to go was the CS degree requirement, because several of our strongest PMs already on the team didn't have technical degrees. We later dropped the technical interview when we realized that even having those types of questions dissuaded qualified candidates from applying. This positively impacted the pipeline, but more needed to be done.

We then turned our attention to the interview process. Facebook had interview roles called Futurist, Logician, Guru, Designer and Emcee. Each one of these roles assessed specific skills we sought in PMs. However, we found that only three sets of skills were correlated with long-term success. So we changed our interviews to only include those areas and renamed them: Leadership + Drive, Product Sense, and Execution. This improved the signal we got from the interviews and reduced the stress on interviewees who were being tested on areas that were unrelated to long term expectations of the role. 

Even with these adjustments, perception changed slowly. I met with many great PMs who were reluctant to apply because they didn't have a CS degree, or were worried there were too few women PMs at the company.  

Getting back to half

Even after years of investment, we were still striving to reach the gender equity that existed among tech PMs 20 years ago. More needed to be done.

Facebook, like many companies, only hired experienced PMs. This meant that to even apply, candidates had to have two to four years of prior experience. This illustrated another problem: each improvement to our diversity numbers came at the expense of other companies since we all drew from the same limited pool of experienced female PMs. Many of the women who joined the industry, like me, stumbled into Product. In fact, according to a 2020 Women in Product survey, only seven percent of PMs start with Product Management as their first job. One-third of participants saw their jobs evolve into PM, and another third became interested while they were working in different fields. Without a clear career path, getting that first job is a big hurdle, and a barrier for many women trying to break into the field.

To address this, Facebook built and then expanded its Rotational Product Manager (RPM) program. This 18-month experience for early-career professionals brings in PMs for three rotations on three products across the company. It requires no prior experience of any type and no technical background. 

This has unlocked a pool of talent we had not previously been able to tap. We started Facebook’s RPM program in 2011 with a handful of hires. Since then, the program has grown ten-fold, and it’s been a critical component to increasing overall PM diversity in the industry. Over the last several years, the RPM classes are substantially more diverse than the industry as a whole. This year alone we’ve received several thousands of applications from people of many different backgrounds. There is clear interest from those who otherwise might never have had a chance to enter our field.

Progress requires continued investment 

I wish we could say that progress was straight up and to the right, but it required continued investment and monitoring. We initially focused on women in PM, but we also saw the need to grow the number of other underrepresented minorities as well. While this was not a zero sum game, we had to remain vigilant to ensure we were allocating our resources strategically as well as equitably. After some trial and error, we have been able to continue to diversify the pool of people we draw from.  

One year we looked at the data and the men were overrepresented in our senior hiring from what we’d expect based on market availability. We made three key changes to address this issue: 

1. Implementing a Diverse Slate Approach for key roles helped us draw from a larger pool of candidates. 
2. Maintaining a list of strong candidates, male and female, whom we met and hoped would join the company someday. When new roles opened, our recruiters asked hiring managers to consider broadening the roles, so that those on the key hire list could be considered. 
3. Reviewing the candidate packets of the people we interviewed that year. This allowed us to proactively make improvements to our process.

The result? Once these changes were implemented, approximately half of our next cohort of senior Product hires were women. 

Inclusion outperforms

Why make all this effort? Simple: diverse teams perform better. 

A 2009 study in the American Sociological Review found that teams with people of different genders and races produced better results. In another study, teams with varied educational backgrounds outperformed those that were significant. 

These are some of the reasons that a group of us in the industry helped to create Women in Product, a nonprofit championing women in PM roles. We work to not only bring more women into the field, but to help them reach its executive levels.  

I often hear people in the tech industry say, “I would hire more diverse teams, but I don’t want to lower the bar.” My reply to that is, “If you say that, you are bad at statistics.” If you are selecting the best people for the job and have a fixed number of roles, having a larger and more diverse pool to choose from allows you to hire better people. Rather than lowering the bar, as the industry moved away from the technical degree and interviews, we broadened the group of candidates available to us and thus the quality of the people in Product.  

Diverse people and experiences help us all build and lead more effectively. They broaden the ways we see and solve problems, ensuring we understand the world's challenges from all angles. To grow our discipline and build tomorrow’s products for the diverse community we want to serve, the tech industry needs people from every kind of background at every level - including women. 

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What happened to women in Product is that one small change evolved the industry for a generation. But the story does not have to end here. We have a chance to make the industry more inclusive of different voices, but we can only make this change if we work together. Had the world remained the same as it was for the group of PayPal PMs from 2004 pictured above, Women in Product would likely not exist.  

Let’s work toward a day when this organization will no longer be necessary. Until then, there is work to be done. I hope you will all join me on this journey.