Bonnie Ross is corporate vice president at Xbox and head of 343 Industries, the studio that oversees the Halo video game franchise. Fortune magazine called her one of the 10 most powerful women in video games in 2014.

 

The California native played sports growing up, and her first video game was a rudimentary basketball handheld made by Mattel in the 1970s.

 

“Ultimately, I ended up in gaming because of sports,” Ross says.

 

Her sports background paid off in other ways early in her career. Her ability to hang with — if not beat outright — her male co-workers in noon basketball sessions and company softball games helped her gain respect among her peers. It also provided valuable lessons for her profession.

 

“Having the ability to fail, learn from your failures and surround yourself with people who have other strengths is key,” Ross says. “And leadership does shift, whether it’s on the court or the field. You may start out as the point guard, but your role changes. Leadership is dynamic, and the leader is not always the one out in front. You need to know when to be in front and when to take a step back.”

 

An Engineering Start

 

Ross started her college career at Colorado State University in engineering, in part because her dad was an engineer. But as was typical during that time, she was one of the only women in her engineering major. In addition to wanting more creativity, she found it difficult to see how the skills she was learning would translate to a job in a STEM discipline.

 

“It’s a common challenge, especially with women in STEM fields, not being able to see what you can do with that education,” Ross says. “If you become a doctor, you know you’re going to end up with a stethoscope around your neck. In engineering, you don’t always see how to apply it. It’s not an obvious endgame.”

 

It’s a problem that CSU has already taken on: The university recently received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to better connect what is taught in electrical and computer engineering with real-world applications. Ross lauds efforts like these to increase the number of women in the pipeline for STEM fields.

 

“We have an issue that starts in high school and college,” she says. “You can’t recruit them if they’re not there. How do we make technology and engineering the fields that both men and women want to pursue?”

 

Switch To Journalism

 

At CSU, Ross ended up switching to a fledgling technical writing track in the journalism department during the 1987-88 school year. Through that program she gained a summer internship at IBM, where they liked her work so much they kept her on.

 

“This move seriously changed my life,” she says. “This was an amazing three-month internship, and because they thought I was doing a good job, it got extended to a two-year internship. My combination of technology and writing was hugely beneficial.”

 

In her free time, Ross wrote UNIX programming manuals for CSU’s computer labs. She graduated in 1989 with a degree in technical communication and a concentration in physics and computer science.

 

“When I applied to technology companies because of my degree in technical communication, which was brand-new at the time, it really opened up a lot of opportunities,” Ross says. “HP, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, and others opened their doors to me because they said they had a bunch of fiction writers trying to be tech writers.”

 

Ross predicts that technical experience, more than gender, will make the difference in who gets jobs in the industry in the coming decade.

 

“I believe, in the next five to 10 years, it’s not going to matter who you are,” Ross says. “If you don’t have a technical background, you won’t go far.”