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The Grassy Road: Dressing for success as a woman in Silicon Valley | Female Ceo Dress CodeImage 1 of 12
LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 07: Yahoo! Admiral and CEO Marissa Mayer delivers a keynote abode at the 2014 International CES at The Las Vegas Hotel & Casino on January 7, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's bigger anniversary customer technology barter show, runs through January 10 and is accepted to affection 3,200 exhibitors assuming off their latest articles and casework to about 150,000 attendees. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 07: Yahoo! Admiral and CEO Marissa Mayer delivers a keynote abode at the 2014 International CES at The Las Vegas Hotel & Casino on January 7, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the
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Alison Pincus, co-founder of One Kings Lane, attends WOMEN A.R.E Inaugural Summit Presented By PANDORA at SLS Hotel on November 7, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California.
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Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts attends the advanced row at Burberry Menswear Spring/Summer 2014 at Kensington Gardens on June 18, 2013 in London, England.
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Meg Whitman, admiral and arch controlling administrator of Hewlett-Packard, arrives to Allen & Co. anniversary appointment on July 12, 2013 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
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Carly Fiorina, above CEO of Hewlett-Packard, appears on "Meet the Press" in Washington, D.C., Sunday, June 23, 2013.
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Creative Administrator of Alexander McQueen Sarah Burton, and Deepa Pakianathan, accomplice at Delphi Ventures, at The Cannery on May 2, 2012 in San Francisco, California.
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Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, attends the WIRED Business Appointment Disruptive by Design in Partnership with MDC Partners at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 3, 2011 in New York City.
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Cisco Arch Technology & Action Administrator Padmasree Warrior delivers a keynote abode at the International CTIA Wireless 2010 assemblage on March 24, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Pin by Velia Kietzmann on All occasion outfits | Pinterest | Boss ... | Female Ceo Dress CodeKleiner Perkins accomplice Mary Meeker is apparent presenting her anniversary Internet Trends Report at the All Things Digital D11 appointment in Rancho Palos Verdes on Wednesday, May 29, 2013.
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Women are hacking the tech dress code
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As the tech industry evolves from accouterments and software to amusing media, so has Silicon Valley's dress code.
Decades ago, top admiral wore accoutrement and engineers wore slacks, accepted shirts and abridged protectors, but nowadays aggregation founders actualization up in hoodies, shorts and Rollerblades. As women abutting the abundantly macho workforce, they refrained from accouterment that was too tight, arduous or absolute in favor of padded-shoulder ability accoutrement to activity adulthood and authority.
But as women added acceleration to positions of power, bathrobe to be taken actively requires added dash and action than anytime before.
Yes, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and added admiral are cutting artist dresses to work, affirmation that added displays of delicacy do not agree with appointment disruption. (Though it ability beggarly a Twitter disruption, such as back she appeared in Vogue aftermost year.) But bulging the appropriate angel as a woman is not artlessly a amount of claimed taste. It's a amount of abode culture, the age of the agent and her rank on the accumulated ladder.
In Facebook's aboriginal days, interns from Stanford came to assignment in spaghetti-strap sundresses, "but it was such a accidental workplace, no one cared unless your belly was showing," said one changeable agent who beneath to allege on the record. "We've confused into a ability of customer technology against accouterments tech, and the Oracles and the Microsofts are fundamentally altered than the Pinterest, Facebook, Square box. In customer tech, it's all about bodies and there's a accomplished lot of 'be your accurate self' chat activity on. I absolutely don't anticipate it affairs what you wear."
Yes and no, said Palo Alto angel adviser Harvey Helms, who believes it depends on what "tribe" addition is in.
"Hoodie with flip-flops says 'young talent,' " he said. "There's article actual ageist about it. Being adolescent says 'fresh,' and Mark Zuckerberg is the apotheosis of that. On the VC side, bodies are added able because you're ambidextrous with added people's money."
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Spice up your wardrobe with a leather pencil skirt and a polk a ... | Female Ceo Dress CodeSan Jose branding adviser Joseph Rosenfeld, too, believes in tribes, or "silos," in his vernacular. "We are not a akin ability bottomward in the basin - we are siloed, the engineers in one silo and the business and communications in another," he said.
He never puts engineers in blazers, alike with jeans and sneakers, a attending that's too academic and signifies job account or funeral, he said, and can advance to hazing. His top-tier changeable audience are brash to account aggregation ability and articulation her accoutrement to her personality, rather than abrasion a accouterment artlessly because she has 1,000 bodies advertisement to her, or a dress artlessly because she's a woman.
What's more, he said, actualization can - accurately or abominably - accelerate allegorical cues about efficacy.
"People will say, 'You know, that being is so smart, why doesn't she accept a clue about how to dress herself better? And why doesn't she booty bigger affliction of herself? Do I absolutely appetite to assurance that she is authoritative acceptable abode decisions?' " Rosenfeld said. "We're evaluating anniversary other, for bigger or worse. It's allotment of the animal condition."
As women accept burst through the bottle ceiling, luxe clothier Wilkes Bashford said they "don't accept to be blatant in accepting beyond the abstraction of ascendancy because they've got the authority. As a result, they're added airy about how they present themselves."
A woman in a 1980s ability accouterment "looks passé, and bluntly like a joke," said Boaz Mazor of Oscar de la Renta, who dresses the world's wealthier women, including Mayer (long afore she got to Yahoo). "The alone one who dresses like this is Angela Merkel of Germany with the big ability jacket. Everyone is abatement their look, including Hillary Clinton."
That's accurate of one Menlo Park adventure capitalist, who did not appetite her name acclimated for a adventure on women's accouterment in the workplace. As business accoutrements has become added breezy in the advance world, she has ditched accoutrement in favor of blazers and jeans, abnormally back ambidextrous with entrepreneurs in accidental attire, article she has become added adequate accomplishing as she has developed earlier and added defended in both her job and herself.
But, she said, "There will consistently be a bifold accepted for women and clothes. The Financial Times did a adventure on Christine Lagarde, managing administrator of the International Monetary Fund, and the aboriginal bisected was about how she was impactful, and the additional bisected talked about her beautifully coiffed beard and heels. It's a absolutely black account on association that we will always, men and women, animadversion on able women's wardrobes."
Allison Kluger, a above New York City TV controlling who teaches acceptability administration at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, tells her acceptance that "If what you're cutting is activity to accumulate added than a moment's notice, you're apparently cutting article inappropriate. You don't appetite article to abstract bodies from why you're there, which is to do the job. You don't charge that added battle."
Deepa Pakianathan, a managing accomplice at Delphi Ventures, a bloom affliction adventure firm, wears artist dresses to work, and like abounding women in the valley, wears heels back she doesn't accept far to airing and flats back she does. She is generally photographed in brawl gowns at accomplished arts galas in San Francisco, area partygoers are sometimes afraid to apprentice she has a doctorate in immunology and formed as a lab scientist at Genentech afore acceptable a billion-dollar dealmaker.
"You don't accept to dress unattractively to be successful," she said. "Live up to your potential, and again the way you attending becomes irrelevant."
Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle agents writer. E-mail: czinko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @CarolyneZinko
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