Monika Henzinger, the director of research at the Internet search engine Google, is a woman -- and she's been that way all her life.
This might sound like a doltish thing to point out, but Henzinger finds it useful to do so every now and then -- especially when reporters ask her variations on the question, "What's it feel like to be a woman working in the Silicon Valley?"
"It feels normal," she said when a reporter posed that simple-minded question to her on Wednesday at Google's Mountain View headquarters. That's when, laughing a little, Henzinger gently explained that "I've always been a woman. You kind of get used to it -- being out of place."
Recently, Henzinger has found herself talking about being a "woman in tech" quite a lot more than she cares to, and she might be a little chagrined by the attention she's been getting.
"It's all because of this award," she said, referring to San Francisco Women on the Web's ranking, this week, of Henzinger among its "Top 25" Women on the Web.
After all, she said, "I'm a scientist. I really think of myself as a scientist." Meaning that most of the time, she doesn't think of herself as a female scientist -- and so this prize, however much of an honor it is, might be kind of missing the point.
Here's the point: Henzinger's position as the steward of one of the Valley's most successful technologies is enviable regardless of her gender, and her continued success at Google doesn't have much to do with the fact that she's a woman, she says.
"It might be that I have better social skills," Henzinger joked about being the only woman among a group of men. "I think that I notice when one person steps on someone else's toes, or when I might step on someone else's toes."
That skill comes in handy in Henzinger's job, as she leads a team of some of the tech industry's brightest Ph.D.s in a quest to "make Google better."
While they don't write most of the working code, the research department develops theories for "information query" and tries to apply those to the search engine -- and those fundamentals find themselves into the working code rather quickly.
In addition to improving Google's Web searching, Henzinger's team also leads development in the far-out versions of Google: Google on WAP, a voice-based Google, a Google for Usenet, and more.
And this is just the sort of thing that Henzinger loves to do. It's a wonderful mix, she says, between academic "pure research" and "pure coding."
Before she came to Google, Henzinger conducted research for Compaq, and prior to that, she was in the academic world -- first at Princeton, where she received her Ph.D., and then at Cornell, where she lectured in computer science and was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award for excellence in teaching.
And it was in the Ivy League and during her years of schooling in her native Germany that Henzinger got used to being one of an embarrassingly small number of women in her field. At her all-girls high school, for example, Henzinger was one of only two students out of 100 who pursued careers in science.
"There's still this myth that math is hard, or not fun, or that it's for guys," she said, explaining some reasons why women might be turned away from tech.
But these are just possibilities, she stressed -- she can't really say why she's always been interested in science while her peers have treated it like the plague.
"It might have been that I was not put down, not turned away from it," she ventured. "But I've always liked math."
When her colleagues at Google get a crack at this question, they too react in the same perplexed way: They don't know why more women aren't in tech, they say, but Henzinger's success illustrates that, at least, women can do it very well.
"In general it's a shame -- the way it works out," said Alex Franz, a senior research scientist who works with Henzinger. "This is of course a sensitive subject, the whole nature-versus-nurture debate. And maybe it all goes back to the fourth grade. But who can say?"
Henzinger thinks there's another possible reason why women might be under-represented in technology: "I've seen them dropping out because of a family, or they get married," she said.
And Henzinger feels such pressures herself.
"Of course I'd love to put in enough hours as I'm awake (at Google)," she said, but that's not possible.
Henzinger is married and has a 3-year-old daughter, and she's expecting another child in the next couple of months. "And they need some of my time too," she said.
But she manages, she insists, and she thinks other women can do it also. "In the end, (pursing a tech career) is a very good decision," she said. "You end up with a good job, good pay, doing something you really like."
