Tools for building equity and breaking down structural barriers

This Women’s History Month, we have so much to honor and recognize! On March 8, the world observed International Women’s Day (IWD), which has roots in activism against gender discrimination in the workplace. Similarly, Equal Pay Day, which was on March 14 this year, symbolizes how far into the year women in America must work to earn what men earned in the previous calendar year—and we still have a way to go before reaching Equal Pay Day for women of color. This month serves as a reminder for me about why I love my job here at AWS, and the intention required by all of us in fighting gender inequities.

When we started the AWS Training and Certification (T&C) organization 11 years ago, we were tasked with democratizing access to cloud skills education around the world. Still to this day, what remains at the heart of our mission is the idea of equitable access and opportunity—not just for individual learners and enterprise customers we wanted to train, but also for our employees, too. To accomplish that, we are intentional about bringing diverse sets of perspectives to the table at every opportunity.

We are deliberate in hiring and developing a diverse talent pool, not only in gender but in backgrounds, education, geographies, and other lived experiences.

Did you know the number of women in tech roles today is lower than in the 1980s? When I learned that the gender parity gains we made pre-pandemic had backslid, it became clear to me the role T&C could play. Millions of women exited the workforce during the pandemic, and skills training was a way to reverse that trend, especially for the tech industry, where women have always been underrepresented. Upskilling and reskilling our workforce are tools for building equity.

There are a number of structural barriers to women remaining in the IT workforce, including unconscious bias, isolation, supervisory relationships, promotion processes, and competing life responsibilities. That is a big reason why AWS is offering free AWS Cloud training programs and courses to anyone who wants to learn. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people around the world by 2025.

Part of breaking down structural barriers, particularly for a more gender-equal workforce, is starting the learning journey early. We would like to see more opportunities for girls and young women to get exposure to science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM)—before they even begin to consider career paths. At AWS, several of our T&C programs are designed to inspire young girls for a future in STEAM. AWS GetIT is a program that helps schools and educators bring female tech role models into middle-school classrooms and provides access to curriculum designed to help students build foundational skills, learn about careers in cloud, and design their own app that helps to solve a challenge in their community. Our AWS Girls' Tech Day is another program that aims to educate, inspire, and empower girls and young women ages 8 to 24 to pursue careers in technology.

These kinds of programs are not only important to the tech industry, they are important to every industry. Global organizations across different sectors, from healthcare to retail, are finding the need for tech skills more critical than ever. There is a growing tech skills gap, and the generations after me will be the ones to ensure a stable future of work and resiliency.

I do not want to see these generations only to just know resiliency, I want them to thrive! To me, thriving is about self-confidence, recognizing your worth, and sharing your innate gifts with the world. I will admit these things have not come easy and they do not always stay. Yet, the challenge of finding my voice is one I always seek and has proven the most rewarding of my career. I did not find it alone. I am grateful for the many mentors, and allies, that prodded me to share my opinions, encouraged my engagement in meetings, and acknowledged my ideas all along the way. It is still not easy, but their support has become a model for how I can show up each day to encourage others to find their voice.

How does that look like in practice? I actively try to recognize biases, especially my own, and work within my teams to combat them. We all have unconscious biases. They are our mental shortcuts to help us process information. They are not inherently a bad thing, but an efficiency. To build an inclusive team that brings all people in, however, it is important to help individuals understand their biases and how to actively interrupt them before they become a barrier. At AWS, we have an Inclusion Pledge that activates employees to interrupt bias and microaggressions when they see them. It increases our knowledge and intention on being an ally, and develops a safe space for difficult conversations. This psychological safety is the basis for an effective culture of learning.

My favorite leadership principle at Amazon is Learn and Be Curious. It says we are never done learning and will always seek to improve ourselves, and act to explore new possibilities. When you have a culture of learning and experimentation, teams are more likely to take risks safely knowing that failing is not only okay, but expected. Being intentional in providing this type of environment is critical for disruptive innovation. At AWS, we encourage failing forward so that all employees, particularly underrepresented groups like women, confidently try new things, share their learnings and failures unapologetically, and at the same time continue to climb their professional ladder.

I no longer fear failure, but I do fear more backsliding. In the case of women, any innovation that fails to address their needs and experiences, fails half the world’s population. We still have a lot of work to do, but instead of being daunted this Women’s History Month, I am grateful and humbled to lead a team dedicated to skills building as an important step in helping women thrive.