Along with all of its other significant challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic put up new barriers when it comes to closing the global gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum. The pandemic increased the gap by a generation, from 99.5 years to 135.6 years.

The gaps are more likely to be found in sectors that require disruptive technical skills, with women making up 32% of the workforce in data and artificial intelligence, 20% in engineering and 14% in cloud computing. In fields like cloud computing, organizations will need to implement gender-sensitive recovery strategies to make up lost ground to prevent long-term scarring in the labor market, according to Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the World Economic Forum.

“Leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to build more resilient and gender-equal economies by investing in inclusive workplaces, creating more equitable care systems, advancing women’s rise to leadership positions, applying a gender lens to reskilling and redeployment and embedding gender parity into the future of work,” Zahidi said in the WEF’s 2021 “Global Gender Gap Report.”

When it comes to cloud computing, there are already countless women in the field who are driving innovation in their workplaces. Highlighting those stories is the focus of theCUBE’s “Women of the Cloud” interview series. The program is an effort to dive deep to learn from women about how they’re unlocking success to deliver value to their organizations, customers and communities.

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s ongoing series highlighting “women of the cloud” within the Amazon Web Services Inc. partner ecosystem.

Helping organizations prepare for a new economy

It’s clear that sustainability is a top priority for companies across the country. Chief executive officers placed environmental sustainability among their top 10 business priorities for the first time ever, according to a recent Gartner Inc. study. It represents a sea change and an opportunity to drive innovation forward, according to Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability officer and global head of ESG at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.

It’s the role of Mendelsohn’s company to think about sustainability as a way to help organizations prepare for a fundamentally different economy.

“If we start building from the ground up with systems like cloud and Amazon Web Services, we’re actually enabling everything else to change with us,” she said.

That’s something that Makenna Salaverry, sales leader of digital-native businesses at AWS, has been hearing too. Organizations have been asking about sustainability more than ever before.

“We’re hearing from customers that sustainability is a board-level topic for many companies, and it’s actually a criteria when selecting a cloud provider,” she said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Sophia Mendelsohn, Makenna Salaverry, and Dannerys Duran, head of digital operations at Ginkgo Bioworks Inc.:

How to transform a company

Transforming a business can often be a daunting task. Some legacy clients using data center models are sometimes not quite ready to go cloud-only just yet, according to Adrianna Bustamante, vice president of global alliances and partnerships at Rackspace Technology Inc. That’s where an ecosystem of relationships comes in handy.

“We’ve helped customers not only be able to build and maintain part of their data center footprint that’s not ready yet to transform, but move some of this into a facility that is within our data centers to get out of that huge, kind of CapEx-heavy workload type environment,” she said.

Once a company is in the cloud, there are new problems to consider, including technological biases. That’s an area of focus for Patricia Jordan, vice president of enabling processes and technologies at Optum Inc., a health services and innovation company.

Among her many goals, Jordan is seeking to ensure businesses don’t struggle to keep up with the amount of data it is taking in. Businesses know the applications and analytics it can build, but it will be limited if the right data isn’t available.

It’s for reasons like that and the ability to be provided with the leadership of a platform for analytics that excite Jordan.

“As part of a DevOps team, I knew when the bad things came. Now, I’m trying to prevent my team from pushing bad things down the pipe,” she said. “I’m just really excited about what’s to come, because there’s so many opportunities for improving the products that we build.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Adrianna Bustamante:

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Patricia Jordan:

Delivering innovative solutions

You haven’t had to look far to read news in recent years about global supply chain challenges. But it was the opportunity to get involved in what may be one of the most complex supply chains, grocery and food, that got Jeanette Barlow, vice president of product and retailer solutions at Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), excited.

“I was also intrigued by the breadth at which they’re approaching this, not just the marketplace, but how we are helping retailers through our Instacart platform actually reach their consumers in ways that they like to shop,” Barlow said.

That means going into stores with connected store technologies, involving everything from smart cards, to scan and pay, to wayfinding, according to Barlow. Through all of this, data remains integral to any modern business, and data integration is more complex than ever.

That’s why helping individuals and businesses become more data-driven is one of the chief priorities of Tia Dubuisson, co-founder and president of Belle Fleur Technologies Inc. Having started her career in microbiology, Dubuisson was married to a data scientist. She was able to pair her own experience in microbiology to data to determine how both fields could function most effectively together.

“You have data, but [it’s about] gaining the value out of it to actually make decisions,” she said. “Helping our customers to actually do the assessment around the type of data that they have, taking them through a process all the way through to insights that they could then look at, how can we monetize? That is where we actually play, and that is our specialty.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Jeanette Barlow:

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Tia Dubuisson:

Making an impact

The COVID-19 pandemic may have unfortunately put up more barriers when it comes to closing the global gender gap, but it certainly didn’t stop enterprises being thrust into the world of cloud — or the women of the cloud who help those enterprises thrive.

Now that the transition has taken place, it’s all about fixing the processes, the financials, the components and the compliance that weren’t addressed before, according to Ashley Gaare, president of North America at SoftwareOne AG.

“What’s next in cloud, both from an industry and a SoftwareOne standpoint, is expanding outside of this infrastructure-as-a-service mindset where cloud was there to run your business,” she said. “The beauty of it now is that cloud is there to also drive your business and create new products and capabilities.”

Where the industry goes next is an open question, as are the solutions that will drive the next needed generation of women leaders in the cloud space.

Still, as the cloud computing space continues to evolve, it will be more important than ever for everyone, including women, to advocate for the representation of women, according to Tendü Yogurtçu (pictured), chief technology officer at Precisely Holdings LLC.

“Do something for the women in technology while being a woman in technology,” Yogurtcu said. “Give back to your community, whether that community is gender-based or whether it’s your alumni, whether it’s your community, social community in your neighborhood, or in your country, or ethnicity. Give back to your community. I think that’s becoming really important.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Ashley Gaare:

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Tendü Yogurtçu:

Watch more of theCUBE’s Women of the Cloud coverage below:

Photo: SiliconANGLE