Ruth Porat knows a thing or two about shattering glass ceilings and the limitations women often face in the workplace. Making the list of the World’s Most Powerful Women in 2020 for both Forbes and Fortune magazines, the current CFO of Google’s parent company Alphabet has a long list of accomplishments in the worlds of finance and technology.
Formerly known as the most powerful woman on Wall Street, Porat began her financial career in 1987 at Morgan Stanley, holding several major positions that would eventually culminate into achieving the rank of CFO. Porat acknowledges that when she first started in banking, it wasn’t an easy time for women in the field, “I haven’t thought about those shoulder pads for a long time. The bow ties, the scarves, the scotch, the horrible efforts to fit in.”
Porat made big news in 2015 when she left Wall Street for Silicon Valley to become CFO of Google. She accepted the position at a time when discrimination lawsuits and gender inequality complaints were coming to the forefront and since then has been vocal in her stance that diversity, environmental, and social government standards demand improvement in the field. In 2018 she joined 20,000 fellow Google employees in a walkout protesting her firm’s handling of sexual harassment claims. The walkout not only triggered changes at Google, but other Silicon Valley companies as well.
In her accomplished career, Porat has seemingly zeroed in on at least one of the actions that can have an enormous impact on how women can come up in the ranks. She speaks often of sponsorship and how having sponsors in her career gave her the footing to get where she is today. While she has acknowledged her sponsors were all men due to the lack of women in leadership roles when she was coming up, she now focuses on encouraging staff to provide these coaching and training opportunities to women in an effort to provide them equal ground.
“We’re putting all the elements in place to steadily grow a workforce that reflects the world around us,” says Porat. “And that’s in everything from recruiting to promotion to all of the efforts that we do to support people throughout their careers. It’s a journey, and one that is of the highest priority for us.”