It was a great get. The CEO of Microsoft agreed to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference as their first male plenary speaker. He ran around talking to people, and then did an onstage interview.

Satya Nadella. Difference Feminist?

This was not a hostile interview, not a “Gotcha!” situation. Satya Nadella would be interviewed by his pal (“I adore this guy!”) Maria Klawe, who could help him showcase the fabulous things Microsoft does for women in tech (“He’s a spectacular human being!”).

“Here’s how I got him to come,” Klawe said, kneeling and clasping her hands pleadingly. Klawe is president of Harvey Mudd College, so she has practice being persuasive. She told him “If you do this, Satya, you’ll gonna enable your recruiters to recruit women at all stages, because you’ll be the first CEO to do it!”

Since it was an interview, he wouldn’t have to prepare a speech. Though in my opinion he might still have done a little preparation. Familiarized himself with a few relevant issues.

Klawe read submitted questions. It was jovial, and the audience was responsive. Nadella was upbeat, funny, meandering. To a question about why Microsoft has fewer female than male engineers, Nadella said Microsoft had about the same percentage (17%) as, say, Google, and that the issue is industry-wide in tech. He said the industry needs to make the culture such that women can do their best work. What’s important, he said, is “being comfortable in your own skin. And having confidence that your passion, your excellence, will shine through. I think it starts there. Each one of us has a few superpowers. Go exercise them!”

That reminded him of a funny story about how he applied to work at Microsoft when he was 23. There was a day of interviews. The last interviewer suddenly presented him with this problem: ‘A baby falls at a crossroad. What are you going to do?’

If a baby fell out of a tree, what kind of tree would it be? Also, what is your biggest weakness?
(Mary Cummins at AnimalAdvocates.us)

It had been a long day. Earlier, “I had solved some bubble sort pointer thing,” he recalled (producing knowledgeable laughter). Now this odd question. “I just looked at this guy. And he says ‘Well, what would you do?’”

“This was before cell phones,” Nadella reminds us. He pondered and answered, “’I’m going to run and get to a public phone and call 911.’ [The interviewer] gets up from his chair and he walks me out and he says it’s time to leave.”

“What exactly happened?” Nadella asked. The interviewer replied, “What it shows is that you lack empathy.” Nadella summarizes: “When a baby falls, you pick the baby up! I thought that was it, it was all over.” (Yet he seems to have gotten the job.)

“I’m pretty sure the 10,000 women here would have answered that question better than me. So, that’s the superpower!”

Oh. All women have the “superpower” of knowing what to do with babies.

*%&*^&#@^}%^$?!?!??!

…Okay, calmer now. I will argue that not all women would have answered that question better than Nadella did. (Also many men would have answered well.) (Also, why is there a crossroad in there?)

What if you’re at a crossroad and there is no baby?

But if it were true, WHICH IT’S NOT, if it’s something all women have, how is that a superpower? And if it is a superpower, how EXACTLY is it going to increase the number of women working in the tech industry? Do all Microsoft interviews include a baby-wrangling section?

Klawe was kinder than me, saying “I love it, I love it,” before going to the next question. A few questions later came one asking Nadella’s advice for women who aren’t comfortable putting themselves forward, pushing for promotion, asking for a raise.

He advised a long-term view. “It’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that I think might be one of the additional superpowers, that quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It will come back. Somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to give more responsibility to.”

The audience was quiet. They did not activate flaming torches and pitchforks and advance on the stage. But when Klawe said, “This is one of the very few things I disagree with you on,” they cheered like thunder.

Stay as sweet as you are, ladies! We LOVE that you’re not all about the money.

Klawe said when she took the job as dean of engineering at Princeton, she accepted without discussing salary, and “probably got a good $50,000 less” as a result. She made the same mistake when offered the job at Harvey Mudd. Klawe gave actual advice. “Do your homework. Make sure you actually know what a reasonable salary is,” she said. She advised role-playing, practicing asking for a raise.

They moved on to other questions. Nadella didn’t seem to realize what an ignorant retro fool he looked like.

Briefly: if it worked to have faith that good work is equally rewarded in men and women, there would not be a gender wage gap. BUT THERE IS. Corporations do not exist to spread fairness – if they can pay one group of employees less (and not be hassled), they save money. As Time‘s Laura Stampler noted, one tech entrepreneur recently touted the advantage of diversity in hiring with the slogan: “Women: Like men, only cheaper.”

Is it only women who should have faith and not rock the boat with trust-destroying requests for equal pay? Yes, apparently, that’s “one of the additional superpowers” Nadella thinks women have. That is, women who don’t ask for a raise have that superpower. Sounds like he has assumptions about how women and men should behave differently. Unexamined assumptions.

Bad Karma playing in Abbeville, 2010.

Then there’s the worrying mention of karma. This means different things to different people. I live in California, where “karma” gets thrown around a lot. I asked a playwright friend, “What do you associate with the word ‘karma’?”

“Bullshit,” said the playwright.

Sometimes when people around here say karma, they mean “he got what he deserved.” Or “what goes around, comes around.” Sometimes they mean, “Wow, sucks to be him, guess that’s his inescapable destiny.”

The word has precise meaning to some people. It’s an important concept in Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Taoist, and Shinto theology. Nadella is Hindu. That doesn’t tell us what he means by karma. Different schools of Hinduism take different views of karma, and it seems likely Nadella wasn’t speaking theologically.

Fighting Instruments of Karma, Solstice Parade, HonkFest West.

Karma can mean that your behavior influences the way you are treated. It can mean that your behavior in previous lives influences the way you are treated. It can mean that bad behavior in a previous life caused you to be reborn as a woman – too bad for you!

Whatever Nadella meant by karma, it may have manifested itself to him shortly after he got off the stage.

A sample reaction comes from Lisa Hirsch, who growled, “Right. We should just trust a system that has been screwing women forever. As we all know, men get ahead in computing by waiting patiently to be given the “right raise” by “the system” and by being the kind of person executives just want to give more responsibility. (That superpower business is also stupid. Please don’t insult me by saying I have special superpowers as you tell me not to ask for a raise.)”

Soon Nadella tweeted:

Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias.

He put up a letter to Microsoft employees:

…Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises. I answered that question completely wrong. Without a doubt I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap. I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.

I said I was looking forward to the Grace Hopper Conference to learn, and I certainly learned a valuable lesson….

Just ask. Just ask.

Nadella is not finished learning this valuable lesson. If it were so easy, people would ask for raises more often. Women may be more timid about asking for raises because they want to be nice and hope their superiors will shower merit raises on them. Karma raises. But they also may be more timid because they sense – correctly – that the reaction may not be favorable.

It turns out that people are more likely to think a woman is being a pushy jerk if she asks for a raise than if a man asks for a raise.

When will women realize their untapped ability?

A manager might think “Angela wants a raise? What an entitled whiner. Betty does great work and she never asks for a raise. Betty’s amazing.” – and not give either woman a raise. Angela doesn’t get one because she’s obnoxious to ask. Betty doesn’t get one because she didn’t ask. Betty’s fine!

Then there’s information scarcity. Klawe advised women to “do their homework” and find out what a reasonable salary is. Good idea. Often difficult. Companies like to keep that confidential. Opaque. At one of my first jobs I was reproved for having mentioned my paycheck’s amount and forbidden to do so again.

(Years ago, rioting students broke into a campus office, found a list of faculty salaries, and published them. My father, a professor and an illustrious figure in his field, read the list, although he disapproved of rioting. He was shocked to see he was being paid less than junior colleagues of lesser note. Why? The department head said, “John, you never asked.” He got a raise. )

How good are Nadella’s apologies? He was still “backtracking” 11 days later at a press conference on cloud computing, repeating that his answer had been wrong, and saying that he was going to work more on issues such as “equal opportunity for equal work.”

My relentless focus may have produced tunnel vision.

He doesn’t seem to have said “sorry” or “apologize.” He has certainly said he was wrong. He hasn’t made excuses, claimed to have been misunderstood, or cried sandbag. But his understanding is still flawed. He doesn’t seem to understand how gender discrimination plays out in the workplace. (“Just ask!”) Nor has he addressed the notion of female “superpowers” that involve not asking for money and infant-retrieval.

He doesn’t seem wicked or stupid. He seems like a man who never bothered to think or learn about these widely-known issues. I suppose he never thought he needed to. He was also meta-ignorant: he didn’t know that he didn’t know. So why not pontificate to 10,000 people who might care about these things and might have thought about them?

It’s good that he says he learned something, but I hope he doesn’t think he’s finished. As CEO he has a lot of power over many people’s working lives. It would be appropriate for him to understand more about that. He’s smart enough to get up to speed if he wants to.

Satya. Sweetheart. Let’s see some superpowers!