How to attract women, minorities to tech sector

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How to attract women, minorities to tech sector

Las Vegas - Dell Technologies is harnessing the power of artificial technology and machine learning to be more inclusive and mitigate, identify and defeat unconscious bias.

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Nilanjana Gupta

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Published: Thu 9 May 2019, 2:31 PM

Last updated: Thu 9 May 2019, 4:47 PM

Diversity and inclusion took spotlight at Dell Technologies World 2019, an annual event that brought together more than 15,000 visitors from 122 countries in Las Vegas. While organisations want to encourage and support diversity, how do they measure KPIs for doing so? Leading the charge at Dell Technologies, Brian Reeves, Senior Vice President, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, said to media and analysts, "Inclusion is a business imperative. It drives greater innovation, greater employee engagement, greater employee retention. You gain great business advantage by being inclusive and if you're not you will have a disadvantage with regards to your competition. I would like people to talk about Dell not only as a great place to work for innovation, but a great place for anyone to grow their careers, regardless of their gender, race and religion." 
Dell Technologies is harnessing the power of artificial technology and machine learning to be more inclusive and mitigate, identify and defeat unconscious bias, as it can often negatively affect women and minorities in the workplace. The tech giant has an initiative that allows employees to go on long breaks from their jobs, because of family commitments and life events, and rejoin the tech workforce. As part of another initiative, the company trains graduates from non-STEM backgrounds and equips them with skills to be able to join the tech industry. 
Reeves added, "There are mostly women, who have life events and may be have children and take 7-8 years off, and have a tough time coming back in, similar to veterans. We want to be the employer of choice for those folks to be able to re-enter into the marketplace. We want to grow that pool of talent, and that diverse talent will start to address some of the challenges that many think we have with regards to talent shortage moving forward." 
Haidi Nossair, Marketing Director of Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Dell Technologies, said, "We are now building a network of women in technology in different countries and around our Dell Technologies Forums. We run sessions where we have professional women in the sector of IT talking about how we can help other women. That way, we will be able to mentor a lot of younger women and help them find and identify their careers." 
"We have many educational programmes to create awareness about diversity and inclusion, one that stands out is MARC - Men Advocating Real Change. Since men are in a lot of leadership positions, we want them to understand the value of inclusion and diversity so they can help women build a career in technology. It's a 4-hour mandatory programme for all the employees at Dell Technologies and I would like to see if organisations in UAE would be willing to run a similar programme too."
nilanjana@khaleejtimes.com
Also read: Evolve digitally or go out of business: Michael Dell


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