In an interview with the Financial Express, Intel CIO and corporate VP Kimberly Stevenson talked about the company’s efforts to increase diversity in the workforce, citing a study that had been conducted in 2014 regarding purchasing habits.
Women purchased 65 percent of all consumer electronics and influenced 89 percent of consumer electronics purchases in 2014, Stevenson said.
In 2015, 75.9 percent of Intel’s employees were female, and about 46 percent were of an ethnicity other than Caucasian. The company has released information about its efforts to increase diversity both in the workplace and among its suppliers.
Stevenson connected the number of women who influence purchases with the increased effort to add women to the company, saying that women can be “the voice of the customer” and “have strong propensity for relationships.” Essentially, women can make products women will buy – and women are buying a lot of products.
Intel wants to keep up with both the purchasing trends lead by female customers and with the newest ideas. “Multiple technologies coming together in what is essentially the social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) stack is creating this enormous value creation and disruption capability,” Stevenson said.
She also leads the Intel Network of Executive Women (INEW), set up to engage more women and girls in STEM. Intel started a new diversity effort with a study in 2013 that showed that women felt unsupported in the workplace. It also showed the different routes men and women take to find a job: women usually look using formal networks, while men find jobs through informal networks such as references and social groups.
It’s a simple equation: having more girls interested in STEM means having more female professionals in the industry, which means more items targeted to that 89 percent. Stevenson thinks there is a benefit for corporate culture, too. “I am a great believer of mixed gender teams as they perform better,” she was quoted as saying.
Intel also partnered with several media and entertainment groups for an anti-harassment initiative called Hack Harassment, announced on Jan. 7 at CES.
(Via Financial Express.)
