Lin Chase is the director of research and development for technology at Accenture in Bangalore, India. She was in Pittsburgh this month to visit her hometown, Ligonier.

VWH Campbell, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. Lin Chase Job: Director of research and development for technology, Accenture, Bangalore, India. Age: 44 Hometown: Ligonier Education: Bachelor of science, physics, Carnegie Mellon University, 1985; master of science, computer science-robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, 1992; doctorate, computer science-robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, 1997. Career: 1985-89: associate engineer, Carnegie Group; 1997-99: associate researcher, National Center for Scientific Research, University of Paris; 1999-2002: director of operations for Europe, Middle East and Africa, SpeechWorks International, London; 2002-03: vice president, product marketing, Rhetorical Systems, Edinburgh, Scotland; 2003-04: chief executive officer, NeoSpeech, Fremont, Calif.; 2004: senior researcher, Accenture, Palo Alto, Calif.; 2005-present: director of research and development for technology, Accenture, Bangalore, India. Listen In: Excerpts of a conversation with Lin Chase of Accenture: Women in management roles in India Acceptance as a female manager

A: In between my bachelor's and master's degrees, I worked for a really great Pittsburgh [software] company, Carnegie Group. I was one of their first hires. The founders were from Carnegie Mellon University. One was Mark Fox, who was very keen to get me into the Carnegie Group, and years later, another founder, Raj Reddy, was my Ph.D. adviser.

It was a foreshadowing of what my whole career was going to be about: translating technology to bottom line results for customers. I helped open a West Coast office for Carnegie Group, and that started my love affair with the Silicon Valley.

Q: What was it like being a female in technology in the 1980s when the high-tech industry was not yet established in Pittsburgh?

A: Looking back on it, I think my self-perceptions were pretty accurate. At the time, I felt like I was really on target with how these technologies could be used; and I was really, really good at building relationships in the companies.

But I didn't think I was being taken seriously in certain situations because of both being young and being female.

A lot of the industries we were looking at were capital intensive: automotive, rail transport and the military. ... And these, traditionally, are not great industries for young women to take on. So I just decided I was really interested in getting a Ph.D. and furthering that kind of intellectual experience. And I really wanted some time to get some gray hairs and be older.

Q: So after graduate school, armed with master's and doctorate degrees in hand, you felt ready to tackle industry again?

A: After grad school, I got a NATO-National Science Foundation fellowship that allowed me to bootstrap my work experience in Europe. I was at the University of Paris with a speech technology group housed there. I spent two years there as an associate researcher. At the time (1997-99), the Internet was bubbling, heating up. There was all this venture money around. France was not that well-situated for startups. I was eager to get involved in something and have an equity stake and was kind of frustrated being in France.

So I called a friend from CMU who had founded SpeechWorks International and said, "What are you guys doing in Europe?" He said, "Nothing. But our board of directors is after us to get started there." So I talked to the chairman. The interview was over a beer in London, which I just loved. And they gave me the job and I built up the European division of that company over three years.

Q: You worked for a few other speech technology startups and then ended up with Accenture, an established business consulting firm formerly known as Andersen Consulting. Why did you switch to consulting?

A: In 2004 I sold my share of the company I was running back to the investors and took a break. I went to Colorado and bought a little house in the mountains. I spent the winter chopping wood and chopped up the old, crappy furniture in the house and burned it. I gutted the house; put it back together. Then it was time to go back to work.

During that time I had a lot of time to think about what had been right about my career so far and what had not been so great. What had been right was that I had been really passionate about the technology I was working with: I loved speech recognition, speech synthesis and speech technology. What hadn't been right was that nobody in the industry had learned how to make a lot of money using those technologies. Why was it that I wasn't fabulously wealthy and ready to retire at age 39 or 40? Because every time we had to put these speech technologies to use ... the systems integration costs were always very high.

So I called up the guys at Accenture ... they had done a lot of research on what makes a business a high-performance business.

Q: So they recruited you for research and development in India?

A: I worked for them in Palo Alto, Calif., in the Silicon Valley for five or six months. Then a very high engineering management team at Accenture decided it was time to open an R&D lab in India, and they sent word around asking people to throw their hats in the ring if they wanted to run it. And I jumped on it immediately. I thought: "Wow. How much more leveraged can you be than doing systems integration research in Bangalore at this time? I've really got to be there."

Q: You are one of only a few females in senior management for the company in India. How do you deal with that?

A: There are now four or five women at my rank or above. Half of us are Westerners; half are Indians. It's very, very rare to see an Indian woman in a very senior position. However, India has a long and glorious history of some women doing very well. It seems like a paradox but I'm starting to understand it. Women do well who, because of where they were born in society, don't have personal full-time responsibilities at home or can afford help; or who grew up in families where help was considered to be normal and it was normal to participate in external activities. But for most women in India, they are 100 percent responsible for the children and elder care and it's very, very hard for them to put their jobs first.

There is a small handful of women I know at work in their 20s or early 30s who are very, very devoted to their work, and I'm very sorry to say most of them are divorced.

I make a big effort to bring women on to my team. I go to great lengths to make sure they understand, and everyone on my team understands, that anyone who has elder care or child care responsibilities at home gets special treatment in terms of hours they need to work, whether or not I can pay for their Internet access at home, and whether they can have a laptop to take home. I don't say specifically it's the women who get this. I say anyone with elder care or child care responsibilities. It's not really about being male or female. It's really about work-life balance.

Q: So how are you received as a relatively young woman in an executive position?

A: By Indian standards, I'm an old lady. There's no delicate way to say this but I think being a Westerner trumps being a female in [the Indian] context. It's still a culture that looks up to the West in ways that are sometimes surprising. Visibly, as a Westerner, I get immediate respect, and I start with cards on the table that other people wouldn't start with.

I have a very aggressive style, and I've had to really work at making that acceptable to people and being able to collaborate with that kind of really assertive gene. That is doubly hard in India. It doesn't go over. I didn't tone down my style at first, but I had to tone it down as I went on ... to win back faith and then be able to move the group forward. I wish it weren't that way. I wish I could go in and hit hard.

Q: What do you think the United States should be doing in terms of education to attain an advantage in global competitiveness?

A: I love the U.S. and the fact I was educated in the U.S. because I grew up in a world where I felt I was really entitled and I had the ability to make a difference in the world. And that is still our huge advantage: that our kids and our professors and in our corporate environments we all believe we can make things happen -- we can get stuff done.

The one thing I always encourage Americans to do is to get a passport and get out there and make some visits. Sure, start with something relatively easy like an English-speaking country that's easy to get around in. If all you ever do is get a passport and go spend a week in London, still you got out and you learned something about the world and how we're perceived from the outside.

But I would encourage people to get a little more adventurous and get to some developing nations. Maybe not necessarily India, but Eastern Europe or Brazil. Get to a place where people don't grow up feeling fully entitled and everybody doesn't grow up feeling like they've got what it takes to make the world a better place.

The only real cross-cultural communication happens when people go and insert themselves into foreign situations.