High Tech High RisersBy Susan VogelSanta Clara Law alumnae leaders at Microsoft and Oracle blaze a trail for women in the high tech world.
Some attribute the dearth of women in these positions to the fact that more men than women study computer science and engineering. But as the women profiled here demonstrate, the law continues to provide a path to the top of high tech companies even without a technical degree. Bonnie MacNaughton and Dorian Daley studied history, English, and business on their way to becoming senior managers at their companies. (Curiously, they both played football at Santa Clara Law…. We’ll leave that to another study.)
BONNIE MACNAUGHTONSENIOR ATTORNEY, MICROSOFTIn 1979, Bonnie MacNaughton ’82 jumped into her Plymouth Duster and headed out of Minneapolis for California. As she drove over the hills into the lush valley, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” was playing in her head. “All I knew about San Jose was the Dionne Warwick song,” she says. “I was in my Duster with all my worldly possessions expecting to experience that peace of mind.”
MacNaughton was born in the “Icebox of the Nation” (according to Wikipedia, the town was the model for “Frostbite Falls,” home of Rocky and Bullwinkle) and spent her childhood and her college years in Minnesota. She studied business and English at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small Lutheran liberal arts college in rural, Minnesota. It was time for a change. In the ensuing 30-odd years, the world has changed dramatically (in law school MacNaughton used a typewriter and in her first years of legal practice, sent her briefs to WANG word processors the size of voting booths), and MacNaughton has been able to have three exciting careers. After graduating from Santa Clara Law in 1982, she worked at Petit & Martin and Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro in Los Angeles as a civil litigator. Wanting more trial experience, in 1987, she became an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles and then in Seattle, where she was promoted to chief of the Narcotics Unit. After 14 years with the U.S. Justice Department cracking international drug conspiracies, she joined Microsoft’s Worldwide Anti-Piracy Team “ferreting out top-tier counterfeit producers and distributors of the software giant’s products,” she says. She is now a senior attorney and manages a team of lawyers, criminal investigators, intelligence analysts, and forensic specialists in enforcing Microsoft’s intellectual property rights. “It’s been fun to do a variety of different things,” she says. “I think people tend to think of the legal profession as one where you become one type of lawyer and work in that field for your entire career. That hasn’t been my experience at all.” MacNaughton agrees that women are underrepresented in the technology industry “at all levels,” and that “the gap is wider at the higher levels of management.” And she is doing something about it. “This past year, I joined our legal department’s diversity committee to help Microsoft in its commitment to close that gap and recruit and retain a workforce that is truly representative of our customers.” MacNaughton credits SCU with giving her the confidence to make her career moves and to aim for the top. “For me, SCU Law was a very supportive, nonthreatening environment. It built me up and made me feel confident to go interview at large law firms in L.A., to work for a prestigious San Francisco firm, and to go for the very competitive job of being an assistant U.S. attorney. I’m very grateful to SCU for helping me build a strong foundation for my legal career.” Santa Clara Law also provided MacNaughton another unique opportunity: to play football. She was one of the inaugural members of the famous Eleven Easy Pieces, the flag football team made up of female students of the School of Law. Now an important part of the history of the law school, the Pieces (later renamed the Attractive Nuisances) include the legacy of a law school scholarship for female athletes. These days, MacNaughton has given up her football cleats and spends most of her free time deftly maneuvering her minivan through Puget Sound traffic, hauling her eight-year-old twins, Mara and Faith, to soccer games. She is married to Brian Kipnis, a McGeorge Law School graduate whom she met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. She has not told her daughters about her former role as a football star.
DORIAN DALEYGENERAL COUNSEL, ORACLEDorian Daley ’86 almost didn’t go to law school. In her freshman year at Stanford, one of her two brothers, a student at a law school other than SCU, had the entire contents of his study cubicle stolen, including a piece of paper in his typewriter. By her senior year, both brothers had completed law school. “They didn’t seem to have enjoyed it much,” she recalls.
After graduating from Stanford with a degree in history, Daley got a job as a paralegal at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman) in San Francisco. Working with Mary Cranston, who would eventually become the first female head of the firm, convinced her to reconsider law. Daley chose Santa Clara after visiting its campus. “It was a beautiful campus and everybody was incredibly nice. It struck me as a very cooperative environment rather than a cutthroat, competitive pressure-cooker,” she recalls. At SCU, Daley found that both the administration and the faculty took “a very practical, commonsense approach to the law, in addition to stressing knowledge, preparation, and integrity.” Daley adopted this approach to practicing law and has successfully used it for 22 years. (Daley’s playing on Santa Clara Law’s women’s flag football team, which by 1983 was called the Attractive Nuisances, may not be a huge factor in her career success. However, it did provide her a way to get physical activity, something that she loved as a child growing up with her two brothers and twin sister in a rural, grape-producing area near Lodi.) Daley clerked at the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan during her third year of law school. Upon graduation, after a trip to Micronesia, where her brother was an attorney general, she became an associate at Landels, Ripley & Diamond in San Francisco, working in complex litigation. In 1992, she joined Oracle, the world’s largest enterprise software company. An in-house position appealed to her because she enjoyed “developing close relationships with clients and solving complex problems.”
“The biggest challenge,” Daley says, “is the breadth of issues we face and ensuring that we have the depth of understanding necessary to provide real value to the client—Oracle Corporation and its shareholders. But the challenges are the very things that make the work incredibly interesting and rewarding.” Daley unwinds by spending time with her family, as well as swimming, reading, playing the guitar, and doing “very physical work” in her gardens in San Carlos and Santa Cruz. Her husband of nearly 20 years, Michael, who has a high tech background, mans the home front with one of the couple’s two teenage sons, and spends his spare time on a project involving green technologies. The couple’s oldest son is a freshman in college.
SUSAN VOGEL is a frequent contributor to Santa Clara Law.
ENDNOTES For more information, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/01/technology.technology and http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/index.aspx?id=3224&m2=386&m3=4&m1=8
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