Organizations are knee deep in their respective digital transformations, trying to create a more evolved, technology-based way of doing business. Technology companies, ironically, are not accelerating the pace of bringing diversity to the workplace to keep up with the speed of innovation required to successfully fill the data gap while transforming digitally, according to Kim Stevenson (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of data center infrastructure at Lenovo Group Ltd.
Tech companies began releasing “diversity reports” in 2013 to provide transparency into their inclusion efforts. However, industry insiders feel that these reports are mere “performance art”and nothing is indeed changing, Stevenson pointed out. And the fact that the needle is moving slowly has many companies rethinking the way they recruit talent.
Unlike much of the industry, women play a starring role at Lenovo in shaping the future of thedatacenter. “It’s a very diverse company, and that diversity plays out in our president’s staff, which I am a member of; half of the staff are women,” Stevenson said. “That may not sound unusual, but it’s very unusual in tech.”
Stevenson spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Lenovo Transform event about diversity in tech and how it is changing the customer experience at Lenovo. (* Disclosure below.)
This week, theCUBE spotlights Kim Stevenson in our Women In Tech feature.
Current studies also bring to light that the “bro culture” still reigns supreme in the industry. It is an interesting contrast to other industries where studies show that companies with women at the helm have a 15-percent increase in profitability. The tech industry cannot lose sight of that statistic when only 21 percent of its leadership roles are held by women.
In an industry where only22 percentof women believe that the companies they work for are taking action to hire and advance women in tech roles, Stevenson, who had a long career history as the chief operating officer at Intel, recently joined Lenovo because of its management team.
“I had good experiences with the management team, and I wanted to leverage that. In fact, it’s been a seamless transition because I knew the management team and I understood some of the dynamics that we’d be facing together and the challenges that we wanted to take on together,” Stevenson said.
Specifically looking for a position in the data center industry, she found that the incumbents did not add value in a market that is undergoing rapid changes.
