In this age of inclusion, all businesses, stakeholders, and employees assess the level of diversity, equity, and inclusion activities. While navigating the market’s current changes has been difficult, several companies have built exceptional work environments for women.
Chandra Balani, Head – Global Enterprise, India, AWS India – Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd, shares how her company focused on creating a more inclusive, diverse, and equitable (ID & E) workplace for the long term. AWS has been recognised as one of the finest locations for women to develop their skills, networks, careers, and, most importantly, a sense of purpose.
- How has a more gender-diverse workforce unlocked value for your business?
At AWS, we’ve been successful to unlock value for our business by hiring women for all positions, including management, and I’m excited to work with an incredible and diverse workforce who are innovators and builders, contribute to the growth of the organization and deliver exciting results for our customers. It is this culture of inclusion at AWS that nurtures diversity and has helped attract, retain, and grow women’s talent in the technology sector. Greater effort is required than simply for women to want a career in tech and creating a global community of women in IT that is inclusive, equitable, and innovative can be accomplished by removing the barriers standing in their way. Vaishali Kasture, for instance, joined AWS as an ISV segment leader and now heads the Enterprise Segment. She is primarily responsible for Top Enterprise, Mid-Market and Global customers and has worked in multiple geographies – India, Japan, and Hong Kong – carrying out different sales and operations roles.
- What are some of the biggest challenges that your organization faced when it came to implementing D&I and creating a gender diverse workforce? How has it addressed these challenges?
The onus is on businesses, leaders, and every employee to implement diversity and inclusion and provide opportunities for growth and visibility. Companies need to take a step-by-step approach to consciously nurture talent and develop the talent by building an inclusive work environment, focusing on developing employees from a rich heritage.
We guide and monitor our efforts to build inclusive teams and believe that these initiatives must be implemented at all levels of the organization, from leadership to human resources (HR). Business leaders at the top can initiate mentorship programs and directly assist women in preparing for the boardroom. Puneet Chandok, President, India and South Asia, AWS, for example, encouraged the entire AWS India leadership team to make personal pledges as a commitment to DEI. Puneet’s personal pledge was to hire at least three female leaders for his leadership team, mentor eight to ten women, be more aware of the challenges women face, and actively support their decisions.
Moreover, there are numerous international programs that promote inclusion, diversity, and equity (ID&E). In Singapore, pilot programs such as AWS GetIT were launched with the goal of empowering young students, particularly girls, to help them gain digital skills, challenge gender stereotypes in the tech industry, and consider a career in technology. Management and employees at AWS have been fully supportive of fostering gender inclusion initiatives.
- What are some need gaps that you have identified when it comes to retaining your women employees?
When planning initiatives to engage and retain women, the first step is to identify the pain points that a woman faces on a specific issue. By understanding these pain points and challenges, we can then look to provide solutions to help women address those issues better. When it comes to entering the tech industry, women face several challenges. There are structural and cultural challenges, as well as a perceived steep learning curve, a lack of visible female role models, and difficulty finding a starting point when exploring tech career paths.
We have many international programs to support inclusion, diversity, and equity in addition to She Builds. The She Builds event, led by women employees, encompasses talks and invites women leaders as speakers. This event encourages women in technology to participate by providing opportunities for them to hear stories about other examples, connect with like-minded peers, and explore opportunities to improve their technical and strategic skills to advance their careers.
We also organised community events such as the AWS DeepRacer Women’s League ASEAN and the AWS DeepRacer Women’s League India. We hoped that by bringing together women students from the regions to learn collaboratively and get hands-on with machine learning through a cloud-based virtual racing simulator, we could drive early adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
Additionally, highlighting some of our other important initiatives:
Diversity Referral Drive: Under this initiative, the Talent Acquisition team drove a new recruitment program via employee referrals to hire women in tech.
She Dares with “Aspire for her” to train women with non-tech backgrounds on cloud skills to help them find tech jobs. Aspire for her is a 100,000+ women community. AWS has partnered with them under the She Dares program, with 2 cohorts of batches already trained on cloud skills.
Helping Women Founders Startups
AWS collaborated with IWIL India on Techxelerate, a 4-week virtual program attended by 120+ female founders. The program included mentorship, masterclasses & AMAs on product, fundraising, culture & hiring domains led by 12 leaders from startups, VCs & AWS. 50 founders were selected for Activate portfolio program.
Her Leadership – Spotlight on Women leaders in Enterprise
Her Leadership in partnership with Yourstory focuses on women leaders in Enterprise world where Chandra Balani (Head Global Enterprise and Lead ID&E Initiative, India) interviews Women leaders on their leadership journey. Two episodes were released with Arundhati Bhattacharya, Salesforce India CEO and Shruti Kashyap, CIO of Unilever with more women leaders coming up in the series from companies like GE Healthcare, Barclays, Discovery, Edelweiss, HSBC and Accenture.
