How does anybody step into a role,
after they've been told they were promoted because they were a woman, and then
deliver (for the first 90 days of their job) wondering where the target is on their back?
Women cannot do it by ourselves. We need women and men to work together to create an
equitable work environment for everybody. That's Suja Chandrasekaran and Diana McKenzie
explaining gender diversity. They formed an organization called T200 to address this issue.
T200 was formed from acknowledging women in tech is in record low numbers.
Certainly, there
are systemic barriers created by headwinds, and sometimes even tailwinds turn into headwinds.
Suja Chandra, welcome to CXOTalk. Please, tell us about your work.
I lead digital and tech as Chief Digital and Information Officer at CommonSpirit
Health. We are a provider health system. We operate in 21+ states and serve our
communities across the care continuum. My background prior to this has been,
I've been a technologist business leader at retail and consumer-focused industries. Marquee
names that I've been a part of include Walmart. I was Global Chief Technology Officer at Walmart.
I led various leadership roles and led transformation at Nestle and, prior to
CommonSpirit, I was at Kimberly-Clark. I also sit on the board of American Eagle
Outfitters, Loom Global (which is a digital supply chain platform company), and Agendia,
Inc.
(where we focused on precision oncology with a specific emphasis around breast cancer).
Women's health is a passion for me. I also spend time mentoring and developing others, and
we'll talk about that in the upcoming moments. Diana, let me introduce you and welcome you
back to CXOTalk. Tell us about your work. I get the opportunity to serve on the boards of
some very exciting companies, and I'm doing a senior advisory role with a private equity company
called Brighton Park Capital. I also engage quite frequently with promising healthcare
tech startups as an advisor and an investor. That builds on 30 years of experience in
life sciences, primarily in technology roles. I spent the last nine years of
my career in chief information officer roles both at Amgen and at Workday.
Right now, probably the most exciting thing about my life is that I get more time to focus on paying
it forward. I spend a lot of my time mentoring and advocating for women in technology and for
people who live with brain health conditions. You're both such accomplished business leaders.
Suja, you started—and I believe Diana was involved from the beginning—an organization called
T200 that is dedicated to supporting women in senior-level business and
technology roles.
Tell us about T200. Around the 2015-2016 timeframe, the women in
tech numbers were regressing since the '90s when I started my career. At that time, there were
about 28% of overall people in tech were women. At that time, it was regressing below those
numbers. I may be off by a few points. The numbers were still poor, still, about 37% of
techs started to have only one woman director, 58% of women were concerned about the venture
capital funding gap, and only 15% of CICOs (chief information cyber officers) are women.
With this awareness and also, in general, there was a need for women and women to
be helped to reach those next-level roles. Even just being and creating an environment
of comradery where we can help each other, we lift each other, we provide transparency.
Transparency is a prerequisite to equity. Transparency is a prerequisite to
being able to present opportunity. There is a way you navigate career paths, and
there is a way to teach people to do that. And so, we started incubating this idea.
What
started as just a moment of inspiration got into then vetting the idea. What could this look like?
Not letting perfect be the enemy of progress. Just speaking with other women, like-minded women that
are passionate as me, and then starting a group. In the early days, it was just literally
three, four, five of us got together. It was a WhatsApp chat group, so we included
women into that WhatsApp chat group, and we connected on various topics:
• Hey, what's going on? • What are you doing here?
• There is this problem, cyber security issue.
• How are you addressing that, this talent situation?
• I need to prepare and present to my board. • How are you approaching this particular
topic? What questions to anticipate. • How can we lift others?
We grew, and we set this community up based on invitation only.
We do have
a certain criteria that we're very curious about, and then it grew. Five became ten. I
literally remember those first few days. With a last name like mine, it does take
a little bit more influence and convincing of who this is, what's your agenda. Then we
found those women who are equally passionate in giving to others as well as receiving. We are now
about 200, 200+, I would say, and we matriculated from a WhatsApp chat group to a Slack platform.
Certainly, the topics range in a multitude of possibilities. Helping each other is
certainly paramount. We launched Lift, which is about lifting other women, the next
generation of women who are at the C-level minus one, which Diana was very much part of that
initiative in mentoring and developing women. We set ourselves goals.
We're very goal-driven,
mission-driven, principles-driven, purpose-driven, and goals-driven. Just like we bring the whole
self of what we do at work, we bring it to T200. Entirely voluntary, so it's a 501(c)(3). Diana
and I worked very closely together to get it registered as a not-for-profit. We
have a formal board, and we both sit on the board along with a few other women.
We are thriving. We are helping each other, which in itself is a great story, what
we got together, and lifting up the next generation is an even greater story.
Diana, let me pose this to you. What is the fundamental challenge when it
comes to women in senior leadership roles? These women, having access to role
models, advocates, and mentors. If they don't have these, then it's increasingly
challenging for them to have the transparency that Suja referenced earlier to understand
what opportunities exist in the environment. It's challenging for them because
they don't necessarily know and/or appreciate the importance
of building those external networks and ensuring that while they're heads-down doing
what they're trying to do inside their company, they also understand what the broader context is
for what they could be bringing to the company to drive the business of the company.
These unequal growth opportunities, you learn about those opportunities
by engaging with networks. There's a misperception that women
have that they must have all the skills before they apply for a job, and it's not
a perception that's shared by many men. And so, the opportunity to have someone who would
advocate, sponsor for them, and take the risk. I'll give you a specific example.
When I
was a senior manager at Eli Lilly & Company, there was a new director of architecture
and strategy position had been formed. I had a very powerful (in my mind) mentor,
advocate, who advocated for me to step into that role before I might have been ready.
I would say the same thing was the case for me when I stepped into the
CIO role at Amgen. Bob Bradway recognized that I might not be ready but advocated for me
to take that role. I will forever be grateful to those advocates for helping
me take that next step. Contributing in a male-dominated setting and being
heard is something that we hear a lot about women, and it impacts their confidence if they don't feel
like they're being heard. In reality, it may not have anything to do with whether they are being
heard or not being heard, but the fact that they lack the context because the men that are in the
room have a different context to the networks they participate in that the women don't.
I'll continue
to come back to the networking point as well. I would say the last thing that is a challenge
just overall is 74% of young women express a desire for a STEM career, yet the reinforcement
of that career opportunity fades such that by the time they get to a university, they don't
choose those careers. Or even if they apply to university, the admission requirements are so
difficult that they're unable to bridge the gap. I think there are a number of factors that play
into this that we as a community of leaders (both men and women) can help to address to grow the
number of women in these senior leadership roles. Is this a bias issue? Is it an
access to information issue? What's going on? What are the dynamics at play here?
Even if let's say there are some skills to be built, where do you focus? We all grow
up in different elements of the ladder. We play different roles.
What skills to focus
on? What leadership competencies to develop? Also, how do you communicate those stories, and
how do you communicate it in a way that resonates? This is hiring a chief technology officer, hiring
a chief digital officer. It's not easy for the CEO (and sometimes the boards). It is a role
that spans the entire spectrum of the company. Transformations are difficult. Change is
always difficult. And so, it's an equally challenging role for the C-suite and the board.
For us to be able to teach and help women to make those connections, not just the network
but you're in the conversation, and how do you connect with a person you're speaking to in
a way that you can tell what you have done and show the credibility of what you bring to the
table, that is one thing we do fairly frequently. It's that perspective of lifting up, looking
at your story of what you've accomplished, everything you've done, and then presenting it
in a way that's relevant to that conversation. The other angle I would say is it's a
double whammy when there are not enough of somebody in a particular role.
Let's say there
aren't enough women. Even today, there's 18% of C-level tech leaders, digital leaders
– call it whatever – only 18% are women. When you don't have enough, and then the
pyramid is sort of consistent. I would say your lead tech in the cloud, you wouldn't
see a woman in a cloud data center for miles. When you don't see enough, you can't believe
in it. That goes not just for the women who are aspiring. It also goes to people that
are hiring. So, there is an element of turning around and telling these stories
in forums like this and in other forums, so there is the believability so that
when you look at a particular role, you can also envision a woman in that role.
This is a true story, and it happened. There was a group of people that went to an
event.
There was one woman, a token woman, in that group. Nobody believed she was an engineer.
They thought she was there to take notes. She started, this woman, somewhere in the nation
– I forget where – this hashtag #imawomanengineer. It goes with an example. It goes both ways.
One is if there aren't enough role models, what can women aspire to? But it also is
enough of, if you don't see, there isn't the believability.
We create that overall experience.
Of course, the advocacy. Advocacy for each other, women lifting women, presenting them with
the opportunities, those are all very much necessary in order to address the access topic.
When Suja and I met for the first time in (I think it was) 2019, Suja had been on this journey with
the T200 community to build T200. I had moved to the Bay Area in 2016 to take the role at Workday.
Shortly after moving to that area, I had the opportunity to start meeting some of the
other technology leaders in the Bay Area. I was surprised to find that quite
a few of these leaders were women. I was surprised because even when I was at Amgen
and I would make trips to the Bay Area to attend the VC community gatherings for chief technology
officers and information officers, or some of the larger software vendors' annual customer meetings,
I literally was 1 of 2 women in a sea of 40 men. There wasn't any desire for that bias to exist.
it just did because there was no network of women going to these events.
Therefore,
the men went and the women didn't. That's what caused us to start the
Silicon Valley Women's CIO Network. A couple of us said, "This is just silly,"
because there's so much that we can learn and also contribute in these events that will take
us all back to our companies and make us better, make our teams better, make our companies better.
When Suja and I met, we actually bridged those two groups. We still have the Silicon Valley
Women's CIO Network with a very special set of relationships between now over 40 women, but
many of these women are also part of T200. That's one story about bias.
I think the second one, if we take it up to 100,000 feet, there really
is scarcely a company or an organization anywhere in the world that isn't undergoing
some sort of transformation to become a more digital company.
Every company, so it's not just
technology companies anymore; it's every company. That pivot is creating incredible demand for these
specialized roles that Suja referenced earlier: technology, product, data, cyber security,
human-centered design. On the boards on which I sit and the companies that I advise, one of the
biggest challenges is hiring, filling all of their open jobs with the talent they need.
If we continue to limit the supply to a subset of the population that's out there
and capable of contributing, not only will these companies not be able to compete and hit their
goals, but it could be an existential threat for their ability to survive and exist in this
world that's becoming increasingly digital. You think about then the social impact
of companies in the healthcare and the financial services sector and the fact that
they're adopting artificial intelligence and machine learning models over these large
data sets.
But we know that these data sets are inherently flawed because of the biases
that are introduced because care delivery in the healthcare setting or the services that
are delivered to populations have historically not included everyone from a diverse demographic.
When we think about who better to solve those problems, ensure that the technology solutions
that are being built in these companies are representative of the customer
and stakeholder population, it's just super important from a social impact
perspective that we solve this problem not just from how do we make everybody feel good that we
have good, diverse representation in the company. We have a very interesting question from Twitter.
This is from Arsalan Khan, who is a regular listener and asks such great questions. Thank
you for that, Arsalan. He says this: "What do you think is the role of societal patriarchy that
can affect women in technology and engineering?" He's wanting to know really about the broader
social roots, the underlying context that enables this situation to exist and perpetuate.
It's certainly what we do in our homes with our children, boys and girls.
What we do with them plays a huge role. If you look at the history and a track
record of any successful man or woman, they would always say they would go a
parent, a mother or father, a teacher, a mentor that they met in their
younger age.
That plays a huge role. My mother, for example, said you can be
whatever you want. You put your mind to it. You find what you're good at. You find what
you enjoy. Then you be the best at that. She never stopped me, even though I was
raised in India, which is generally a lot more patriarchal than other societies. I went
to engineering school, I went to tech school, and I came through that path.
But I was quite surprised sometimes when I come to the U.S.
This is a true
story. A friend of ours, her daughter, she went to school in SoCal. The high school
that she went to, her high school counselor discouraged her from doing a tech curriculum.
Her high school teacher – I'm talking ten years back. I'm not talking medieval ages. Ten years
back, a teenage girl at that point was discouraged from doing that, and she picked her second-best
interest, which was Japanese.
Language is always a great thing. It opens up new frontiers. All
that is great, but her real passion was tech. She ended up coming back into tech afterward,
but she lost some wonderful years during the time when she could be spending time learning.
That kid is now an amazing software programmer. She works for one of the large studios here
in California. She's coding animation. She's sitting with software engineers, so she calls
me and talks to me and gets counseled from me. Yes, absolutely, everybody plays a role.
There is a fair amount of discouragement. Both in my prior jobs as well as
even in general, I reach out to high school students.
It is important
to catch the girls in their sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. Those are very
formative years. Show them the role models. This is common knowledge. When the television
series X-Files came about, there were a lot of girls and women who became detectives. How
many role models do we have that are software engineers coding code in movies? Where are we
seeing that women are stepping up and solving complex cybersecurity problems? Let's see
that in society. Let's see that everywhere. Let's talk about that to girls and boys.
I'm not about neglecting our boy children, our male children, but it certainly is
necessary that we encourage our women, our female children, to focus and encourage them.
Yeah, it is going to be hard. Okay, so heck yeah. We can solve it.
We can address it. It is
going to be a lot of work, but we can do it. Surrounding them with those kinds of environments
so that they can thrive. Yes, absolutely. Families, societal, school environments,
mentors, friends, everybody plays a crucial role. Diana, picking up off of this, we have another
question from Twitter. This is from Wayne Anderson who says, "Companies like Microsoft who do care
intensely about overcoming bias are having trouble getting candidates in many roles. What are we
not doing? Do we need to invest in STEM and user groups? But it's very hard to hire people."
I'll just comment that this is true for both men and women, in general. But still,
there is this perception that, hey, we want to hire a woman but we're not getting
enough qualified candidates. What about that? I think the perception is reality.
I actually happen to have a son who manages a technical recruiting group in
tech as well, and we talk a lot about this. I think if we go back to how Suja
answered the former question, there is no question a pipeline challenge for us.
In 1985, 37% of the computing degrees were women. Today, it's 18%, so that number has declined.
One of the opportunities for us is to focus on that, quite frankly, zero to K to 12 continuum to
ensure that we're doing everything in our power, both men and women, focused on women
and racial-ethnic diversity as well, in that pipeline to attract these
young people to technology careers. I do think a big challenge that we faced
through those years when the dot-com era was big, when there was sort of a hacking
mentality, a gaming mentality that came to engineering roles is it was difficult for
women, young women, to find a place there. But in reality, I think we all know, Microsoft
knows, that technology is a means to an end. In essence, what we're really trying
to do is solve business problems, and we're trying to do it creatively.
Being a technologist gives you the tools to solve business problems in very creative
and artistic ways.
I think if we can tell the story different to young women as they're coming
through these earlier years of their schooling, to engage them, it makes a big difference.
I also think that where we are now, there's an opportunity to demonstrate (as you've suggested)
as a company, that there's a real commitment to creating a diverse workforce. In doing
so, the ability to attract and retain the talent that you want to have
represented in your workforce increases. But in addition to that, there may be some other
steps that can be taken.
The first of those would be to ensure that all of the men inside the
company—when we're talking about a gender-specific issue—have a commitment to mentor and advocate
for a balanced slate of talent inside the company: men, women, racially diverse, et cetera.
In addition to that, making sure that there's flexibility in how the networks are pulled
together. How do teams gather outside of work? How do they gather inside of work? In this new space
of flex working, how do you make sure everybody has an opportunity to participate when we're
working around work-life balance priorities? Then lastly, many companies are suspending
the expectation or the requirement to hire someone with a degree.
There are a number
of technology positions that people can apply for and contribute inside a company and
start to work on their degree while they're there. There also is the opportunity to reskill employees
that are already there who have an interest and an aptitude for technology.
There are multiple ways to get there, notwithstanding the fact that our pool
right now is not as great as it needs to be and that needs to be a priority for the nation. Suja, Diana was just describing the
intention to create a balanced and diverse workforce. Beyond the intention, what
should organizations be doing in order to make this happen and address these issues?
I'll start with a couple of stories.
One is women do drop out of universities
even after starting a tech path. A colleague of mine, her daughter started
in a BS engineering, computer science. She did the freshman year. She did
the sophomore year. Then she gave up. It was too hard. She was not part of
the groups that were working together for better grades. She didn't feel good. Her
grades were slipping, so she dropped off. A pipeline problem has to be relentless,
consistent, catching women where they are not starting in the line or they are dropping off
the pipeline. We have to create a very consistent mechanism in creating and watch out for those.
I will also tell, in general, there is a drive for talent and this happened in my own family. One
of my family members, a young kid, she came home for Thanksgiving. She said she's been working
60-hour weeks for the last 2 years straight. She was taking her first weekend
off, and then her boss called and said, "You have to work.
Get back to work."
The kid was sitting there crying, and I went and spoke to her and find out, "Why are you crying?"
She said, "I hadn't taken a day off, and I was working 60 hours every day the last 2
years through COVID, and then the first time I was going to take a day off during Thanksgiving
and I can't because I have to get back to work." I said, "It'll be fine." I calmed her down. She
got her work done, and then she went. And then she looked for a job for a couple of weeks.
She quit the previous job, which is with one of the blue-chip large companies. I don't
want to name them.
She went and now she's coding autonomous vehicles with another
company. A top-notch software engineer. This is happening around everybody. This is
not just a woman thing. We have to watch out. When I probed a little bit deeper with her what
happened, "Why do you have to work so hard? Nobody should be doing that, and aren't your teammates
working? What exactly is happening?" she said there have been open accounts and they haven't
filled it for two years. This is one of the richest, multi-trillion valuation company.
This is a tough situation. We need to help everybody lift up.
What have we done practically? I believe in setting very clear goals.
At CommonSpirit Health, we had to hire quite a few people. We've hired 500+
people in the last couple of years. We gave ourselves a goal that we should meet a
goal of 30% of women and people of diversity. It was both.
It was not just women. It
was women and people of diversity, 30%. It's interesting. When you set these
goals, there are different perspectives. All perspectives are valid, but it's
interesting to reread those patterns. There was a group that said, "Are we stupid? How
are we going to get the goals? There are not 30% women to get the goals. There aren't 30%
women that are going to be available." Then the other group said, "Why 30%?
It should be 50%. Did you look around the society? 50% of us are women."
I knew I wasn't going to win that game, but I said, "You know what? We need
to set 30%. We'll see where we get." It was not easy, but I give
great credit to my organization. We achieved a 40% of our new hires were women
and people of diverse backgrounds – 40%.
When we did that, now we have amped up our goal. It is at
least 40%, and the subsequent hiring needs to be even farther than that.
Now, I'm in healthcare, and health tech is in an interesting situation.
There is a general challenge for women in tech, and healthcare even more of a tougher environment
because of the hours, and especially in COVID in the frontline of the battle, so we have to
work two times as hard to make this happen. There was a comment that's floating around, which
I thought would be good to share with you all. "Diversity just doesn't happen
because you talk about numbers. When the leader practices diversity,
inclusion and belong follows instinctively." The whole continuum of the long game, the whole
continuum of being included, the whole continuum of access. You hire in the 10, 15 years back,
it's very easy to find one person, one woman in a group, very easy to find one person of color in a
group because there was a tokenization of checking the box and counting a number.
But certainly
today, the focus is around diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, and access.
That continuum is what is needed, not just to bring in people, but also to
keep them there because, without that access, they are not going to thrive. Without
that sense of belonging gives the clarity. I lived this. I go into a room and I'm the only
woman in the room or only person of color. It creates a mental dissonance. You have to gather
yourself a little bit more to be fully present in that event. You practice it, and you get
better at it. But people who are just pushed into those environments, we have to help them.
The environment needs to be accepting and belonging. Then accept the diversity
of perspectives that they bring. It's not about just bringing someone
because it's nice to have that box checked, but when they say something different.
Women tend to be a lot more nurturing and caring. Women tend to be a lot more focused
on people.
I put people first. When women do that, then focus on that. Hear that.
Definitely, there is a meaning and a larger purpose to it than just the morality of
it. Morality is important—not any less—but there is a clear economic value because ultimately
it's in the diversity of those perspectives that the right decisions come about.
Give them the space to speak. Give your voice a place. Those are some
of the tips I would offer, Michael. We have another question coming
in from Twitter.
You can see I prioritize the questions that come in from
the audience. They're always great questions. This is from Emma McDonald who's picking up on
something you both discussed a little bit earlier. She's saying, "Can you comment on the
impact to a woman's career progression related to working from home over these
last two years that you guys have discussed and it's been in the press recently?"
Suja, I'll pick up, and then you can build. The most recent statistic is that the quit
rate, if you will, for women in tech roles in 2021 was 53%, which just continues to
build on this conversation we've been having. Because they were at home, their children
(if they had children) were also at home, and they were trying to manage the work and the
school schedules.
And in many cases, mom and dad were both at home, or mother and their partner
were at home, trying to manage the children. It was a challenge for everyone, but it demonstrated
itself in terms of statistics more for the women. I think the benefit now, as we emerge from the
pandemic and we're seeing companies embrace more flexible working conditions, is we have
an opportunity to go someplace that we weren't necessarily able to go before from a flexibility
standpoint. There are women who are able to get up in the morning, take their kids to school,
work, go pick their kids up from school, and then get back on at night.
Having that
additional flexibility in their calendar addresses some of the challenges that
caused a number of them to back away. I think, to your point, the
question about inclusion is a question not only for women but it's also a
question for anybody that is going to spend the vast majority of their time working from home when
there are people in the office and the two have to interact with each other. There is this element of
intentionality that Suja was referencing earlier that flows through this entire conversation
all the way back to the paternalistic question that we got.
That is, if the success of your
company and your ability to compete is dependent upon the quality of the talent you have in your
workplace, and your goal is to engage that talent, retain that talent, develop that talent, then as a
leadership team, you have to do everything in your power to make sure you're creating an environment
that engages and promotes inclusiveness. It's a very different way of operating than many,
many companies operated prior to the pandemic.
I think there are a lot of companies that are still
figuring it out but, ultimately, it comes down to the role the manager plays in ensuring that
they're creating an inclusive environment for their team regardless of whether they're working
from home, they're working from inside the office, and/or they represent gender or racial diversity.
I think, ultimately, we have to ask the question, what should companies be doing?
Three things, and it's definitely at the organizations but it's also the
individuals. Here is what I mean by that. I don't believe the playbooks of the work
from home, the hybrid work environment, the playbooks have not been shaped
and clear yet. They're not clear yet. I think it is evolving, and we are going to be
learning over the next several months and years. Tools and technologies are better but they need
to mature and emerge in a much further way, and we are all part of shaping that industry also.
Action for managers: creating that environment, creating that rich environment.
Examples: chat groups.
Watercooler conversations have completely stopped,
so create those informal chat groups. Create informal environments so people can come
and thrive. Create an equitable work environment. Create opportunities to work asynchronously.
What it takes in your specific company situation so that everybody can be included and, in
particular, the women can take advantage of it. To Diana's point, women have been lopsidedly
impacted because typically they have been the caregivers for the young age as well as the
senior caregiving is also with the women. Give them that space. Create the
environment. That is for the organizations and the environment to prepare and produce.
Now, as an individual, we also have a role to play. To the person who brought up the question,
I love her for asking that question because she's reflecting on it, she's thinking about it.
Two things happened. One is, through the work from home, the introverts started thriving because a
lot of it is on chat and that is an element of not being able to speak up, but I am okay to think
about my sentence and put it on chat.
Whereas in a meeting, an extrovert or people who generally
tend to speak, they take over the conversations. So, people could leverage and take advantage
of some of the modalities that introverts and women tend to be a little bit more on the
introverted side, especially women in tech, so they can start taking advantage of those.
But thinking through influence techniques, every individual needs to do that. How
I influence, how I engage with my peers, how I engage with my leaders, how I engage
with my organization, what do I need to do? Engaging with the networks was much easier
when you just went on a conference and you grabbed coffee with someone. You had a meal
with someone. You just waved to someone. You gave them a casual hug on the way between
conference sessions.
Those are all gone. When you're doing that on Zoom, it is even more
intentionality to create that similar networking environment. To some people, it actually can be
an advantage because if you see social media, the introverts started getting engaged a lot
on social media, in general, ten years back. Intentionally thinking through individual's
influence mechanisms, all things considered, where we are, is also up to the
individual as well. I'm sure there's a lot of coaching and teaching that can be done.
I will finish what I said, Michael. I don't think the playbooks are written yet. We're all learning.
Personally, I worry a lot about my organization and am I doing enough.
I think we have to think
about it and talk about it and create that more. What should women do when they
observe bias in the workplace? I'm going to share a story about when this
happened with me and how I handled it. I think the first thing any woman needs to do is take a step
back and seek to understand what just happened. It doesn't mean that it wasn't intentional
bias, but trying to understand, first, sort of allows the perspective
to then say, "As I approach the person that generated the bias (or said the sexually
harassing remark), were they aware of how that landed on me? Were they aware that
that wasn't acceptable? Ultimately, can we get to closure on that so that I
can see if it's going to happen again?" Then if it doesn't happen again, we sort of circle
back to the conversation we've been having.
"Hey, this environment may not be an environment that
truly values diversity, equity, inclusion, and there are so many environments out there that are
emphasizing this right now. Maybe the right place for me to be is in one of those environments."
What I'll say is when I was very first promoted to director – and I referenced that earlier – our
CIO at the time was getting a lot of pressure from the executive management at the company that he
didn't have enough women on his leadership team. I was told by the HR executive director that I
was given the promotion because I was a woman and that all of my peers (male), some of
them had some concerns about my promotion and they had been given 90 days to schedule
time with me to tell me what their concern was. How does anybody step into a role,
after they've been told they were promoted because they were a woman, and then
deliver (for the first 90 days of their job) wondering where the target is on their back?
I had that conversation with the HR director, and I said I am not waiting 90 days.
Within
the next week, I scheduled one-on-ones with every single one of my new peers and had
a conversation with them asking for open, candid feedback about what their concerns
were about my ability to perform in this role. Ultimately, there's no question there were
feedback and observations for me in terms of how I participated, influenced, et cetera. But
ultimately, I ended up being exceedingly successful in the role, and some of these
individuals that I worked with at the time, I continue to stay very connected to in my network.
I think, at the outset, allowing a bad situation to take things in a more negative direction
without trying to address it head-on, you're missing the opportunity to potentially educate
and improve the environment for other women. Suja, we're just about out of time,
so very quickly, what can men do? Every woman will tell you there were men along the
way that helped to lift them.
The allyship, the kinship, the understanding of the circumstances,
the willingness to reach and lift them. Many men come to us and say, "Hey.
My mom was a big player in my life. I have my daughter. I worry about my two
daughters. I want them to have role models." Give them confidence. Women generally tend to
be low in confidence. There's a beautiful book called Confidence Code. Give them confidence. Be
their cheerleaders. Don't call them emotional. Watch out for the biases that Diana talked
about. You can be their sponsor, advocate. Women cannot do it by ourselves. We
need women and men to work together to create an equitable work
environment for everybody. Unfortunately, we're out of time. A huge
thank you to Suja Chandra and to Diana McKenzie. Thank you both so much for taking time
to be here today. I really am grateful to you. Michael, thank you. It was a pleasure.
Thank you, Michael. Suja, always a pleasure.
Thank you, Diana. Everybody, thank you for watching. Before you
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Have a great day, everybody. Bye-bye..