Diane Bryant – Chief Information Officer for Intel

Twenty years as an engineer propelled Diane Bryant to success as an executive at one of the biggest hi-tech leaders in the world.

By Taylor Mallory

Diane Bryant, chief information officer for Intel, says she “fell into” engineering, a career she enjoyed for 20 years before accepting the general management role. Bryant, who had been strong in math and science classes as a teenager, went into engineering when a classmate told her engineers commanded the highest salaries with a bachelor’s degree. “As a poor college student, $30,000 (and it’s much more now) sounded really good,” she explains.

Which is why she wants to see more women enter her profession. “When I graduated in 1985, 37 percent of all computer science grads were women. In 2008, that number was 18 percent,” explains Bryant. “That’s very disturbing since computers and information technology are the foundation of everything we do now.”

She talks to PINK about her mission to attract more young girls to engineering – and how men and women think about technology differently.

PINK: Why is it a business imperative for technology companies to attract more women?
Diane Bryant: We invent and innovate to solve problems of real people – who are as likely to be women as men. Technology has become extremely customized – the number of devices and the shapes, colors, uses and sizes of them. To effectively develop products targeted for your market, you need to have those people represented in your organization.

PINK: How do we attract more women to this profession?
D.B.: You must look at the entire pipeline. That starts early when girls are deciding whether to take computer science or art as electives. It’s an issue of how well schools are making classes more interesting for women. If you look at advanced placement computer science classes, 18 percent of students are women. Girls aren’t even taking the courses! Intel trains teachers so they can articulate this value to young women. Because technology is such a dynamic environment, there has to be continuous focus on educating teachers. I’m on the board of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, whose whole charter is to grow this population.

PINK: How do women and men think about technology differently?
D.B.: Women embrace it. I laugh at my father-in-law, who says he’ll never use a computer. You can’t help but use a computer at the ATM or grocery store. Technology is the way you learn and advance and connect today. All of it is about collaboration. Women are leading in the adoption of social networking. Women are 56 percent of the population on Facebook. Men see technology for technology’s sake. Women see it for value it can bring. It’s the application that’s valuable.

PINK: To what do you attribute your professional success?
D.B.: I joined the company as an engineer and stayed technical, building a strong foundation. Most companies want to try to get women straight into management because we’re good at it. Our current CEO, who wasn’t CEO at the time, told me to get into the business part of the company. But I didn’t want that. I worked in engineering for 20 years, both as a hands-on engineer and as a manager of the engineering teams, before I became general manager of the server group. When I did become an executive, I had developed a good, gut intuition. I’ve seen it before, knew how it worked and knew the right answers. People who come in with engineering degrees and get straight into management don’t get that. And I stayed inside a single organization and worked my way up over time. When you do that, you’re so much more valuable to your company due to your depth of knowledge about how that organization gets results. A lot of people hop from one organization to another. It’s interesting for the employee but your value to company is not as great.

PINK: How is the economy affecting your area of the business?
D.B.: As the economy has hedged, consumer spending and enterprise spending have both been down, [First-quarter revenues were down 26 percent from the first quarter in 2008]. So we certainly saw the impact. But our CEO announced in our quarterly earnings calls that we believe PC sales have bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns. We are ready to start growing again.  We circumvented what a lot of companies are going through. In 2006-2007, we went through efficiency practices – looked at all the areas of the business and our spending. Through that, we reduced headcount by about 25,000 people. Going into the recession, we were a strong, lean, cost-effective corporation, so we haven’t had to come up with a new strategy – just continue to drive down product costs, be more efficient through information technology and maintain our margins. We’re going after new markets in handheld devices. Your car even has microprocessors in it, so we got into that business – and other embedded processors and consumer electronics.

PINK: How do you balance life and work?
D.B.: I have two children, ages 10 and 12. My husband is very entrepreneurial and goes from one start-up venture to another, so he has a very demanding career as well. It’s a continuous prioritization of time, my most precious commodity. The weekends belong to my children. I don’t work, and very rarely travel, on weekends. I make the most of that time. And I believe (like the Hillary Clinton book) that it takes a village. We have a very flexible nanny and neighbors who are willing to drop what they’re doing to help out if I get in a pinch. Through that community, we get it all done. One recent weekend, for instance, I had my son’s flag-football game in the morning, then my daughter’s softball game, then a Cub Scouts’ event in the evening and then a swim party for neighborhood kids the next day. But I’m a very high-energy person, and being with my kids relaxes me. When I’m with them, I don’t think about work, don’t try to solve problems. I just hang with them. I turn off work on Friday and turn it back on Monday – and in between is fun time with them.