P&G CIO Says He Wants to Hire More Women Coders
July 10 2019 - 4:45PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that educates young women in
computer science, has added a chief information officer to its
board for the first time.
Javier Polit, the CIO of Procter & Gamble Co., joined the
board last month. He plans to help the organization boost the
number of summer coding programs it runs to more than 100 from
about 80.
He also wants to ensure the young women in the program are using
the most up-to-date tech tools and learning the right skills
related to information technology, cybersecurity and data
analytics.
"We want to make certain we are exposing them to
industry-leading IT tools to make them competitive," Mr. Polit
said. He plans to stay on the board for at least three years.
Girls Who Code trains girls of various ages, from elementary
school to high school, in the U.S. and Canada.
The organization, which was founded in 2012, will have trained
185,000 girls to code by the end of this year. About 30,000 of its
alumnae are now in college.
The nonprofit is focused on ensuring that the pipeline of girls
it has trained are making it into technology jobs, said Deborah
Singer, its chief marketing officer. "CIOs are uniquely positioned
to help us understand their workplaces," she said.
Girls Who Code has 13 board members, seven of them women, from
companies including Accenture PLC and AT&T Inc.
Mr. Javier said he wanted to get involved in the organization
after witnessing gender disparity within IT.
"As a CIO, I definitely feel that I have a significant
accountability of making sure we have diversity and inclusion in
our enterprise," he said, adding that his affiliation with Girls
Who Code will be another way to recruit more female technologists
to his team.
Mr. Polit said he has made sure an equal number of men and women
enroll in IT leadership development programs at P&G. About 46%
of the company's managers are women, while at junior employee
levels, the split is about even.
P&G's focus on gender parity has "had a significant impact
on how well we're performing right now," Mr. Polit said.
Women account for less than 20% of computer science majors and
less than 25% of the computing workforce in the U.S., according to
Girls Who Code Founder and Chief Executive Reshma Saujani, citing
research from her group and Accenture PLC.
Other corporate technology leaders have also been involved with
the nonprofit in recent months. Vince Campisi, senior vice
president and chief digital officer of United Technologies Corp.,
in February announced a more than $1 million investment in Girls
Who Code to expand its programs.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 10, 2019 16:30 ET (20:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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