I wonder what the gender ratio was for attendees at this week’s Infosys Confluence in San Francisco? To my eye, it seemed typical of technology events; perhaps at best 15% women in the crowd. And yet Confluence turned out to have the most gender-aware content I have ever seen in an IT conference.
On Tuesday morning, HPE CEO Meg Whitman took the stage for a keynote fireside chat with Infosys Americas president Sandeep Dadlani. They got onto equality, and Whitman was forthright about the hiring challenge. She said if businesses wanted to have fifty percent of management positions filled by women, they had to make the effort to “look across the whole slate” of candidates. It’s really only a matter of commitment and time. The most important metric in executive recruitment is the time taken to fill a senior vacancy, and it’s merely easier to find men. Whitman’s clarity reminded me of a salient point made crystal clear by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. When asked if affirmative action policies meant jobs going to less qualified candidates, she replied that if we all agree the sexes are equally able, then reaching quota only meant making the effort to go out and find the qualified women. They’re there!
In the Infosys Foundation session “Preparing America for Tomorrow”, the founder of Code.Org, Hadi Partovi, reported they were close to the milestone of 20 million students coding on the platform. Of those, 10 million are girls, and 10 million are Black or Hispanic. The Confluence crowd was rapt in this achievement.
And in a quite amazing closing keynote, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger traversed many big questions, urging us all to step up to the urgent global issues of today, including equality. He questioned the moral bearings of male politicians who come late to women’s rights because they happen to have daughters and see the sexism they suffer. Sully argues from first principles that men should care about equality because it’s about humanity. I could not agree more.
Infosys should be congratulated for embracing the often-touchy topic of gender in technology, and curating such frank and progressive discussion. The whole IT sector should be spurred to engage with equality. It’s not taboo! And it’s not just about those of us working in the industry, but rather all the people touched by our products and services. As real power migrates from management ranks out into machines, gender and minority awareness must figure more in AI strategy and in algorithm design, where the question of bias is still not properly recognised.
