Re: Worthless chip manufacturing plant??
He could have...but I'm not sure he would have been as on target.
SURE it is sexist to claim that women know very little about high tech chip design and the industry that bakes them. A tour of any chip foundry would confirm that, unless you are talking about the line workers. That's not to say that a handful don't exist...but it IS a 98% male dominated niche. And it is a very specialised niche, with non-linear value propositions and unique economic models - probably the closets industry would be automotive manufacturing. Again, a field with a nearly zero exec female management number.
Women are GREAT as leaders at building consensus, understanding customer-centricity, at encouraging teamwork, and occasionally being ruthless and aggressive. But unfortunately, in the high-tech world, it is clear that much of the female leadership comes from a very non-technical background, and really does not have a firm grasp of the intricacies and non-linearities of the market. So while they might be great at ensuring eBay has a fantastic customer experience, they have not been as impressive when asked to manage technology product portfolios and strategies...again, not their background.
The IBM divestment decision REEKED of short-term, exec-compensation-stoking transactional thinking, designed to maximize exec numbers to ensure they got the most in their stock grants that year...at the expense of a long-term Unique Value Proposition in the mid-range and even upper-range systems market. Instead, IBM would focus on "Services", that easily off-shored, amorphous product that can mysteriously plug the numbers gap in future projected revenue spreadsheets. The gap where having a Power-fueld midrange server market used to fill. And that's a pretty big gap, especially as a large amount of IBM's "Services" business is driven by them being the hardware vendor of choice in the account!
So call it sexism if you must. It is however, a fairly depressingly accurate description of American tech management...