Women in Technology: Rony Ross, Panorama Software (Interview)
Filed under: Business Intelligence, IT management, Information Technology, Science, Uncategorized
Rony Ross
There is an ongoing discussion in Israel about women in the sciences and technology and the conditions women find themselves in in the field. The discussion was renewed by the Jerusalem Post in October 2009 after Israel’s Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize in chemistry when it published a piece on the difficulties of receiving research grants and getting a fair salary in Israel. Shortly thereafter I continued my series on women in tech with a post about some of the unique challenges that women face in Israel.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Rony Ross, the founder and current chairwoman of Panorama Software, a business intelligence software company. Ross was born and raised in Israel and overcame challenges as a female entrepreneur to grow Panorama into the successful company that it is today.
Around what age did you become interested in technology?
I excelled in mathematics as a teenager, and shortly thereafter got interested in computer software. I studied Mathematics and Computer Science for my B. Sc and M.S degrees. While working on my Masters dissertation at the Weizmann Institute of Science, my professor, Amir Pnueli (winner of the Turing Award), offered me to join the software development department of one of the first hi-tech companies in Israel – SciTex. I went to visit the SciTex facility, and what I saw was so amazing and compelling that I could not believe someone was going to pay me in order to work in something that looked to be so much fun.
How did you get into the field?
I worked in Software Development, got my MBA degree in parallel, and moved to senior IT management positions. It was only after 40 that I became an entrepreneur and started my own business. A couple of years later, while working on other projects, we hit upon the idea of developing a product in the Business Intelligence field. This product developed into Panorama – a very compelling offering in the online analytical processing (OLAP) side of the Business Intelligence domain. We sold the product successfully to over 50 of the Israeli Fortune 100 companies in under 2 years. Then we met with Microsoft and they loved the product so much they offered to buy the company after the first 3 hours of the meeting. This became the first classic “exit” of an Israeli software company selling to a US software giant.
What obstacles have you faced as a female founder of a company?
When I was developing my first product I tried to raise capital from venture capitalists and failed. I had a very competitive product in a growing field, with established, paying customers who could testify to the value proposition, with a good business plan, etc. I tried practically all the VCs who were in business at the time – and failed with all of them. I believe that this failure is largely due to the fact that I am a woman entrepreneur. A guy with the same credential would have succeeded. (Of course, this impediment became a blessing when I sold the technology to Microsoft and had no VC to share the income with…)
In recent years, have you seen more or less women going into technology?
When I studied Mathematics, almost half the students were women. There were a lot of women in IT in the period that preceded the PC’s. However, with the outbreak of the early home PC’s , there was a distinct advantage to youngsters with affinity to technical skills (even manual technical skills), and I find that young girls are less interested in disassembling and assembling technical kits. So for many years girls felt “excluded” from the Computer Science field, and opted for other careers. Still, many found their way eventually into hi tech in various positions – but very few made it to the top. However, in recent years I’ve seen a surge of young female entrepreneurs, especially in the Internet arena, which is a very promising sign.
What do you think can be done to get more women in Israel in technology?
Education, education, education. The key is to raise the awareness of girls from an early age about the advantages of making a career in technology fields. These are top paying jobs, and women should target them.
What is keeping women out of technology in Israel?
Filed under: Industry pulse, New Ideas, Science, Uncategorized, Web2.0, technology
Earlier this year I posted an entry about the lack of women in technology that included some of the famous women who contributed to technology and some of the causes that prevent women from studying fields related to technology or having a career in technology and connected all this to Israel.
I’ve been waiting for a good time to post the follow up, and was going to post it back in June after Roi Carthy of TechCrunch mentioned, but didn’t cover, the question in his post about three of Israel’s most-promising female entrepreneurs and then again last month after Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, thus becoming the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first woman since 1964 to win one in chemistry, but wasn’t able to either of those times.
Fortunately, Boris’s post “What is keeping women out of technology?“ on The Next Web today has given me another opportunity to post this. He suggests that considering the 50/50 male/female attendance he recently saw at a networking event and the 44% women who read The Next Web but how few of them comment, fewer women are in tech compared to men because women miss important phone calls and never bring their business cards with them.
These are interesting points that can perhaps take women out of technology but they are not the main factors. How many of the women at the networking event or who read The Next Web are actually on the tech side of technology and not just the marketing or journalism side? How many of them have backgrounds in science, math, computers or engineering?
The problem is that women first need to be interested in technology and pursue that path. Even if they are interested in math, science, technology when they are younger, women face a lot of social pressures as they grow older that challenge their pursuit and ultimately result in many abandoning these areas.
In her dissertation “Women in the Land of Milk, Honey and Hi-Technology: The Israeli Case,” Ronit Kark takes an in-depth look at Israeli society and the underlying dynamics that are preventing more women from going into technology, engineering and science in Israel.
The reasons that Kark gives for why women are being kept out of technology in Israel include: the high school education and military service of women, familialism and motherhood in Israel and the role of the Hebrew language.
Taking this further, based on my first post and Boris’s, while Boris is planning to teach his two daughters PHP when they are old enough, he should also make sure that they gain the self-confidence to go along with those skills. Real encouragement is also one of the things we can all do to get more women in technology.
Note: Major thanks to Guy Tessler of the American Israel Chamber of Commerce in the Southeast Region who pointed out Kark’s study to me.
Ada Yonath wins Nobel Prize in chemistry
Congratulations to Ada Yonath who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for her research on ribosomes, which has allowed her to identify how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
She is one of only four women to ever win the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the first to since 1964. She is one of nine Israelis to have won a Nobel Prize and the first Israeli woman to do so.
The win is a bit unexpected (by me) as in recent days most of the media’s attention was on Yakir Aharonov, the Israeli physicist who was seen as the likely choice for the Nobel Prize in physics.
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