Your Hour, Her Power Spotlight: Manijeh Noori

We’re celebrating Women’s History Month 2022 by highlighting women leaders in our community as part of our Your Hour, Her Power campaign. Our second spotlight is Manijeh Noori, Senior Vice President of Operations for The Zebra. Read more about her story below!

Q: How did you get to where you are today and what did that path look like for you?

A: I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Communications with a focus on Public Relations. I worked many jobs in the years following and always found myself drawn to roles where I was able to create and optimize process, communications, and cohesion within teams and across organizations. I joined The Zebra in 2014 as a project manager for the software engineering team, having never worked in tech before. We were a small team of 15-20 folks with an engineering team of only 5. I quickly expanded my role across the organization and filled any and every gap I could, learning as much as possible about our organization and how we worked. I had incredible support from my CTO (then VP) from day one, and that support helped me out of my comfort zone and into roles I’d never thought possible. I got promoted from Project Manager to Director of Engineering, then to SVP of Engineering. After almost 8 years, I’ve moved out of engineering into the role of SVP of Operations. Now I have the opportunity to take what I’ve learned in growing an engineering team from 20 to almost 100 and apply it to our broader organization. 

Q: Why do you feel it’s important to have women in leadership roles?

A: Growing up, many of the women around me didn’t focus on their careers. When I entered the working world, there were so few women in leadership positions that it felt like we had to compete with each other for limited opportunities. For many years, I didn’t even strive for a leadership position because of this. Even as I started to grow my career at The Zebra, I don’t think I realized how much not seeing women in leadership roles affected my earlier aspirations (or lack thereof).

In 2017, I was able to speak to a women’s boot camp on the Andela campus in Lagos, Nigeria. I had multiple women come up to me afterward to express how they never thought about the possibility of leading an engineering team one day. This experience further drilled into me how important it was to see women in positions of leadership, and how impactful representation can be in someone's personal journey.

Women in leadership are important for so many reasons. It shows other women what’s possible, and it gives us confidence that we can achieve more than we might have been raised to think. 

Additionally, we know that companies with equitable gender representation across leadership teams consistently perform better than those without. In order to serve a diverse group of consumers and employees, you have to have a variety of perspectives and experiences at the leadership level, so ensuring you have women in leadership is key. 

Q: Why do you feel it's important for women to have access to the resources DFSA provides

A: Just like having representation at the leadership level gives women confidence to strive for their career goals, so do the resources that DFSA provides. Our backgrounds and experiences are all different, and topics like financial literacy and career pathing aren’t guaranteed within our paths to adulthood. Providing services like these help both educate and empower women to seek out jobs or careers that might otherwise have been inaccessible or felt unachievable to them. 

Thank you, Manijeh, for sharing your journey and emphasizing the importance of women in leadership roles! If you want to support our Your Hour, Her Power campaign, we’re asking our supporters to donate one hour of their salaries to empower women. Donate here.