[Women in STEM] Lata Singh, Director-Partner Ecosystem, IBM, India and South Asia

Lata Singh, Director-Partner Ecosystem, IBM, India and South Asia, is an IT professional with 25+ years of industry experience. She has constantly worked in the Alliance Management and Consultative sales sector and developed a strong network in IT Industry. “The network has offered me the opportunity to pursue my passion for empowering and mentoring people. I’m a strong believer in the power of partnerships and enjoy developing deep relationships built on mutual respect,” states Singh.

In the continuing series of Women in STEM, Singh answers some of the pressing questions that will help guide women in STEM roles. She also outlines IBM initiatives for diversity and gender inclusion in the tech major.

What are your roles in IBM? What are your immediate goals for the company?

As the Director - Partner Ecosystem, IBM India and South Asia, my role entails leading the business and driving revenue growth for IBM along with our ecosystem partners across Hybrid Cloud, AI and Security. Our priority is the well-being of our employees and their families and to provide them with all the necessary support required to overcome these challenging times.

At the same time, from a business perspective, we are supporting partners and clients to ensure business continuity and building resiliency to eliminate disruptions. Our partners are also going through challenging times of running their business as well as ensuring the welfare of their employees. Hence, our focus is to provide them with extended support as well as invest to help them build capabilities to address the dynamic market needs across security, data, AI and hybrid cloud.

Has the inclusion of Women in STEM changed over the years?

There has been a two-way change with more women coming forth to pursue a career path in STEM and the overall cultural shift towards developing a more inclusive talent workforce. An IBM and Quest Alliance study found that most young girls in schools have high aspirations and many want to get into STEM careers like medicine, engineering, agriculture, and scientific research. However, when it comes to converting aspirations into actual career pathways there is a big gap due to societal stereotypes and family pressure (23%), lack of organisational support (19%), and the difference in abilities (10%).

How can the change be snowballed?

It’s important that a STEM mindset is instilled among students, especially girls, at a very early stage in the education system to dispel biases. There are multiple gaps in the current education system including a lack of life skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship in school curriculums. The education system needs to improve pedagogy with STEM skills supplemented with hands-on practical work to build critical thinking, develop conceptual understanding and problem-solving approaches rather than blindly following trends like coding languages. The industry also needs to support and enable this change by acknowledging the need for a STEM mindset and collaborating with academia to develop skills-based curriculum and experiential learning-based courses in K12.

In the new normal, how are the roles of Women in Tech changing? What are the new challenges for women in tech?

Increasingly, technology is becoming ubiquitous and with it, the demand for a highly qualified workforce in India is quickly increasing especially in emerging technologies like Hybrid Cloud and AI. While the role has remained the same, over the past year we have learnt the importance of pivoting rapidly to meet the changing business and client requirements and the unique attributes you bring to the role. We have seen great examples of women leadership, especially in challenging times, driving the change with two key attributes - empathetic leadership and the ability to bring people together which is critical as people are going through a crisis at multiple levels.

On a professional front, it’s an equal playing field in the sector. The issues that exist for women are across sectors and workplaces. In India, culturally women are expected to be the primary caregivers and over the past year, this has become a greater challenge for a lot of women in the work from home scenario.  There is a need for a good support system to enable women to balance their personal and professional requirements while giving them the time to also take care of their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.  We are seeing organizations addressing these requirements, however, it requires a cultural and mindset shift within the family as well as society.

The impact of women in technology is undeniable. What do you think should be the ways to keep women engaged and appreciated in the workforce?

Remove unconscious bias, offer customized skilling and reskilling programs, provide equal opportunities and access to positive role models and mentors, and enable women to create their support systems. We have seen a lot of women taking a professional break due to personal reasons, even more so during the pandemic. Organizations can design special training modules for women to enhance their skills in emerging technologies while they are away from work to ensure their re-entry into the workplace more seamless.

In senior roles, how many women are on the top at IBM? What is the company doing to bring equality in genders in senior leadership roles?

IBM has more than 100 years of work on diversity, inclusion and equality in the workplace. That foundation, and continued commitment to advance equity in a global society, have made IBM among the leaders in diversity and inclusion. As per the global 2020 IBM D&I report, overall female hiring over 3 years has been 39%. In 2020, executive female hiring was 30% and 36% of all promotees were women. Globally, women earned over 185,000 badges for learning skills. This demonstrates our commitment to ensure each IBMer can bring their full selves to work and create an inclusive work culture.

At IBM there are several Diversity & Inclusion initiatives to address varied requirements including:

Development programs aimed at charting career paths:

DISHA is a development program for high potential women employees in mid-career. It includes self-paced learnings to equip them with various skills. Leading with a Digital program, enables senior women leaders to further enhance their personal eminence, build resilience and become a strategic leader. The Tanmantra is a cross-industry Executive Leadership Development Program in collaboration with IIM Bangalore and Catalyst India WRC. The program is aimed at preparing women leaders for top management and Board level positions in the corporate sector.

Initiatives to support women at the workplace

The Step-up program enables women employees to transition into managerial roles while addressing and overcoming key issues like self-restricting behaviour, unconscious biases among others. The Tech re-entry focuses on bringing back talented technical professionals who took a break from the workforce and are now looking to restart their careers. In addition, at IBM the Women's Executive Council comprising of highly accomplished executives from around the world work passionately to attract, grow, develop, engage and retain women at IBM. The council aims at increasing the representation of women in leadership roles through meaningful career paths and opportunities and equips allies at all levels with actionable tools to advocate for women employees.

Programs aimed at developing a supportive ecosystem

Charisma is an initiative to help working parents. It includes a host of tools and enablement programs including workshops to support parents, sensitize managers, provide access to childcare centres, doctor consultation and resources like HR policies among others. At IBM, we also conduct regular Sensitization Sessions for employees and managers to move from unconscious bias to conscious inclusion. In addition, we have introduced bi-annual inclusion awards to recognize managers who help enhance our efforts to be inclusive and enable everyone to "Be Equal.”

Tell us more about the STEM for Girls Initiative by IBM.

IBM is working closely with the ecosystem to help improve the quality of education across the globe. We launched our STEM for Girls initiative in India in 2019 to improve education and career pathways for girls in government high schools. Our vision is to prepare over 200,000 high school girls, across multiple states, through a 3-year program to pursue and understand their potential in STEM careers. The program includes imparting training in digital literacy, coding and technology skills, 21st-century skills, and career development to enable girls’ empowerment and increase their interest in STEM education and careers.

We began working with 10 states and in 2021, have reached over 180,000 students through 1200 schools across 11 states —Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Odisha, Assam, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Uttarakhand.

What should organizations do, to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in new hybrid workplaces?

A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study on ‘Women, leadership and missed opportunities’ shared insights that would help organizations to develop and drive sustainable change in their business, based on the learnings from companies who ranked gender inclusivity as a top business priority. Some of the key learnings to accelerate progress in gender equity in the workplace include:

Pair bold thinking with big commitments. It is important for organizations to treat gender equity and diversity in the same way as our business goals. Success should be defined in clear and measurable terms.

Apply specific crisis-related interventions. For example, additional benefits like backup childcare support and access to mental health resources can be key. Other recent IBV research found that the best performing CEOs say they are committed to supporting the wellbeing of their employees, even at the cost of profitability or budget.

Create a culture of intention, and insist on making room. Focus on empathetic leadership and enabling middle managers to be advocates for positive cultural change. People leaders can intentionally champion inclusive team cultures, with flexibility aligned to individuals' personal and professional needs, and set accountability into business and individual goals to sponsor the future pipeline of women leaders.

Use technology to accelerate performance. Organizations can use technologies like AI to help reduce bias in the candidate screening process, provide cloud-based digital tools for communication and feedback to surface what's working and what's not in supporting women in the workplace, and invest in collaborative tools and teaming practices that allow women and men to engage effectively in physical and remote environments even after the pandemic abates.