She’s a powerful Calgary business dynamo with a one-two punch of a message to Calgary women who want to succeed in a male-dominated information technology world.
Don’t sweat it, sister — be the best you can be, and forget about the gender thing.
Jennifer McNeill knows of what she speaks. She’s the president of Cipher Systems — A Cedar Group Company, a Calgary-based software solutions and services provider. Cipher was named the fastest growing company in Alberta earlier this year by Alberta Venture magazine and McNeill has been recognized by Chatelaine Magazine as one of the top 100 female entrepreneurs in Canada.
But she isn’t the type to simply perch in a patch of lavender laurels. She wants to give something back to young Calgary women who may be considering careers in IT, and her best advice comes from her own hard-won experience in building a successful company in an overwhelmingly male industry.
“What you’re trying to achieve is to be smarter and better than everyone, not just the men,” McNeill told a recent chapter meeting of Wired Women Society in Calgary. “Be the best that you can be, and that doesn’t have anything to do with your gender, it has to do with your strengths.”
The technical side of IT has more to do with a person’s ability to understand and love logic, than their gender, she added. Yet women are frequently branded by men, or sometimes even other women, as too “emotional” for high-tech careers.
“Too emotional? That one really gets me going,” McNeill growls good-naturedly. “Yeah, we’re emotional. But that’s why we’re so good . . . and I’ve had guys cry their eyes out in my office, too.
“Some women may be more emotional than others, but you take that passion and channel it into something you can really love. And you can grow to love IT.”
Cipher Systems Ltd. began 22 years ago as a small programming business. In 1987, McNeill moved to Calgary from Montgomery, Ala., and became the company’s VP of marketing, moving on to take the helm as co-owner and president in 1995. The company was acquired this past summer by Cedar Group U.S. Inc. of Haverhill, Mass., a member of the London Cedar Group PLC which provides enterprise and software solutions for mid-sized companies throughout North America and Europe.
McNeill has also been recognized as a pioneer in building public awareness about Y2K-related business problems. She speaks frankly about her personal experience, including an early, abusive relationship, after which she went back to university in Alabama with a new drive to succeed.
“My first relationship was a very bad one. I was physically hit for years,” she says. “Getting through that, surviving that, I was fortunate enough to have a real strong character and get through it and go on with life,” she says. “If you think your self-esteem is bad, wait until somebody you care about more than anything in the world tells you that you’re crap, and treats you like that for years and years.”
McNeill didn’t emerge from the relationship as a man-hater. Rather, she tackled the challenges of getting her degree in computer sciences and math and her love of writing code and launched herself into the IT world.
Today, the Calgary mother of four admits she gets a little rankled when her teenage daughter comes home with a guidance counsellor’s advice to skip the tough math stream in high school “because you can still get into college with applied math.”
“They had to peel me off the ceiling,” she says. “Do you think they would have said that to a boy?”
Women in an IT career must realize that not everything will be fair, she warns, and need to be prepared to work within the parameters. “We may not always like them, we may not think they’re fair, we may think it should be different and everything should be equal. But it’s not.”
A report by Statistics Canada shows there are 70,000 Canadian women who are programmers, but less than 10 per cent of them have reached the senior executive level. Instead of drawing attention to the inequalities, McNeill urges: “Blend in. Do a good job. Be the best you can be.
“The more we see ourselves as people working together, the more men will respect us in our positions.”
