Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft. (Women in Cloud Photo)

When Gavriella Schuster entered the tech industry back in 1991, 36% of the computing workforce was made up of women. In 2019, that number dropped to 27%.

“It’s going in the wrong direction,” Schuster said. “And it’s really about to get much worse.”

Schuster was a featured speaker Thursday at an annual Summit hosted by Women in Cloud, a Seattle-area economic development initiative that aims to help boost the number of female leaders in the tech industry.

Schuster, a 25-year Microsoft veteran who leads the company’s global Microsoft One Commercial Partner Team, pointed to three trends that could worsen the tech industry’s gender gap.

“By percentage, there are fewer women entering technology; there are more jobs in technology; and more women are being displaced by the technology,” Schuster said. “This is really a recipe for disaster.”

The pandemic is not helping. A McKinsey report cited by Schuster showed that women — especially women of color — are more likely to have been laid off or furloughed since March. One in four women have considered scaling back from work, or leaving the workforce entirely, due to demands for caregiving at home and added pressure at work.

Schuster said it’s up to existing leaders to help get 8 million women into the tech industry and reach gender equality. She offered four ways they can become “agents of change” and help close the gap.

  • Connect: “This is about creating access, connecting deeply into your network, giving women access to you and to each other through your connections. Being a part of the Women in Cloud community is a great start. But ask yourself, are you making the most out of these connections? Could you bring more into the community? The answer is yes, you can always do more. And we need to do more.”
  • Outreach: “This is about adjusting your recruiting practices, your hiring practices, your supplier selection practices. When you have an open job, do you screen out candidates, or do you screen in candidates for diversity? In my own organization, I required my team to look beyond hiring for expediency and hiring the people that they knew. I required them to have a diverse candidate pool that incorporated people from outside of the company, The gender diversity in my team changed dramatically.”
  • Mentor: “I would not be where I am today without the many men and women throughout my career who have mentored me, who have helped me learn from their successes, learn from their failures, helped me avoid those tripwires and unwritten rules of business, and lifted me up when my confidence waned. When you mentor, you blaze a trail for others to follow.”
  • Empower: “Empowerment is about being inclusive, about promoting women, sponsoring women, bringing women onto your board of directors. Studies show that leadership teams with diverse representation are 19% higher in profitability; they have higher levels of customer satisfaction; and higher levels of employee engagement. So this isn’t just good for society. It’s good for business. Empowering people is easier than you might think. It’s about, including them in the discussion. It’s about seeing them, hearing them, enabling them to be visible, making them visible.”

Women in Cloud has a network of more than 20,000 people and aims to create $1 billion in economic access for women entrepreneurs by 2030. It also runs an accelerator in partnership with Microsoft. The Summit features more than 200 speakers and runs through Saturday.

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