After 30 years of being in the Tech industry, she was able to work as chief strategy officer for Cisco. She orchestrated many partnership deals like with one of the largest and most popular company in the tech industry as well -- Apple. The person behind this is non-other than Padmasree Warrior.
According to an article in Business Insider, she first started out as an engineer, and after that a CTO and now as the US CEO of the famous electric vehicle startup NextEV. Warrior is smart, poised and articulate. She rarely says anything that can be controversial or offensive to others. One thing that changed that, however, was when she was asked about women engineers who are currently struggling to being accepted in the tech industry.
It happened when Bloomberg West's Emily Chang asked her about the topic.
Chang told Warrior about an interview with Michael Moritz which is the chairman of Sequoia, the all-male partner VC firm which is an investor in NextEV. Moritz mentioned in that interview that he would hire more women but that they weren't about to lower its standards. Warrior admittedly said the statement bothered her. She said, "We have to be careful that we don't think that women have to do more in order to be recognized."
More recently, there is a lot of focus on the empowerment of women and encourage them to join tech careers and getting equal pay as well. Nobody, however, talks about how to do away with the expectation that women have to work harder in order to get the same promotions, compensation, and choice assignments. This kind of mind set isn't helping anyone.
Warrior explains that many women start their tech careers and leave after a few years because they feel that the environment doesn't foster learning or growth. She wants to hire and promote more women in more technical roles. She added that companies should create an environment where talented women have the chance to accomplish what they want. She said that people should notice that you're a woman. And now that she's CEO of her own company, she is absolutely going to go look for great women to come work with her.
