HOUSTON — When Ginni Rometty was growing up in Chicago, her father left her family, leaving her mother with "four children, no education, no money and no home," she said.
"We never remember who cried, but we remember what she did," Rometty added. "She went to school in the day and worked at night. She was so determined to not to let any one define her as a victim or a failure."
Rometty took this experience to heart.
You never let someone define who you are. Only you define who you are.
"You never let someone define who you are," she said. "Only you define who you are."
Rometty imparted this advice in a keynote address a stadium full of attendees at the 2016 Grace Hopper Conference, the largest gathering of female technologists worldwide, earlier this week in Houston, Texas. In the address, the IBM CEO took attendees through three pivotal moments in her life that impacted her ascent to CEO of IBM.
She first recalled her childhood in Chicago, learning to persevere through difficult times through her mother and family. Rometty attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1979 with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Rometty then recalled a moment early in her engineering career (about 25 years ago) when her manager recommended her for a promotion, and she nearly turned him down because she didn't feel prepared for the new responsibilities and role. “I said, ‘Wait, I’m not ready. Maybe a year or two. Let me go home and think about it,'" she remembers.
With convincing, a self-reflection, she ended up taking the job and excelling.
“I learned growth and comfort never coexist,” she said. “It is true for people, for countries, for companies.”
Her third lesson came from 2012, when a healthcare CEO sought her out to express excitement for the possibilities of IBM's Watson, a big data artificial intelligence initiative that Rometty has called a "moonshot." It's a project that has been a key part of Rometty's work since becoming CEO of IBM in 2011 ("The natural resource if this time is data, but it will only go to those who...use it in the best of ways" she said earlier in her keynote).
“No matter where you are in your career, work on something you’re passionate about and work on something bigger than yourself,” she said. “You have great opportunities in front of you if you seize them.”
This was the first time Rometty has been to the Grace Hopper Conference--she decided to go after receiving a letter of encouragement from IBM employees who attended in years previous. As of 2015, women made up about 32 percent of IBM's workforce globally, according to Bloomberg. The Anita Borg Institute reported just 21.7 percent of tech roles at 60 top tech companies are held by women, a .9 percent increase from last year.
However, Rometty emphasized that there are significant untold stories of women who influenced technology from Ada Lovelace's algorithms in the 1800s to Grace Hopper creating coding languages to Katherine Johnson calculating rocket trajectories for the first flights to space.
“Women have helped drive every era of technology,” she said.
