GROWing in IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software
IBM has had a rich history of supporting women in the workplace and career growth. Here are a few notable highlights of our commitment to women and diversity:
· 1899, we hired our first woman and African American employees
· 1935, Thomas Watson declares for women equal pay for equal work
· 1943, Ruth Leach was hired as our first woman VP
· 1984, Non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation
· 2012, Ginny Rometty was appointed our first woman CEO
Decade after decade, we’ve made advances. We stayed committed to supporting women in technology while managing career and life. We’ve been featured in Working Mother’s 100 Best Companies to work for consistently for 34 years, often in the top 10. It’s for our forward-thinking workplace programs in the areas of leave, family support, and career development.
Even with our commitment inside of IBM, we know across the board and around the world that we need to do better. We have a diversity problem in the IT industry. The World Economic Forum found that 23% of computer and math jobs are held by women and only 5% of Information and ITC CEOs are women. [1] IBM’s IBV Study, Women, Leadership, and the Priority Paradox, found that only 18% of women hold executive positions out of the 2,300 organizations we surveyed. [2]
Numerous studies tell us that having a gender balanced leadership team and workforce leads to better business results. A 2018 study published by Harvard found that innovation revenues improve by 2.5% when increasing gender diversity across all teams. Enterprises that implemented diversity practices like equal pay, participative leadership, management support for diversity, and open communications generated up to 12.9% more revenue. [3]
We also know that women are leaving at IT at a very high rate — anywhere from 45% — 52%. [4][5] There are a variety of reasons including male dominated cultures, isolation, lack of career growth, lack of sponsors and mentors, and lack of support and flexibility.
We need to continuously build our pipeline of technical talent and provide a platform for women to learn and get support in their career so they don’t walk out the door.
To that extent, in May 2018, we launched a women’s career community in IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software called GROW. GROW stands for Guidance, Resources, and Outreach for Women. We are a grassroots community supported by women and men to provide our women with resources, support, networking, and career advice. Our senior executives and male colleagues have embraced GROW by participating in our Slack channel and live streams. We also have a male executive as one of our 4 sponsors.
We ended 2018 with 800 women and men active in our Slack channel. As of mid-October, we’re at over 2,400. We share job postings. We put ourselves out there asking publicly for mentors. We share interesting webinars and podcasts to build our skills. We share articles of discrimination and bias that we will not stand for. It’s a place where we feel safe to bring our whole self to IBM. We also host live monthly live streams and face to face events on a variety of career topics from external and internal speakers. Our topics include but are not limited to:
- Executive Presence
- GROWing your career by leveraging your network
- Sustaining High Performance
- International Women’s Day — Be Equal (24 live events!)
- How to have a Salary Discussion with your manager
- Tenacity
- Bold decisions for career growth
- Hot skills for the future
- Influence: What is it and how to get it
- Journey to becoming an Inventor
- Mentors, Sponsors, Coaches — what’s the difference?
- Technical Executive Panels
- Day in the Life of a Data Scientist
- Hot Skills for the future
- Digital Leadership
I’m pretty proud of how far we’ve come, and I can’t wait to see where we’ll go next. If you are in tech, regardless of gender, I encourage you to find time to help ensure that we improve the diversity numbers. As the studies above show, it does lead to better business results, a better culture, and a more sustaining organization.
#beequal
