GENDER ISSUE

I’M EMBARRASSED at how few women I’ve interacted with professionally in the course of covering African’s tech and innovation scene. It’s got me wondering why such a stark gender imbalance has persisted in Africa and in other more developed parts of the world – even in places that one might expect to find a more progressive state of affairs.

Recently, Silicon Valley tech giants, not least Uber, have been taken to task for failing to create an inviting and enabling environment for women to operate in and lacking the commitment to ensure that women can work without being harassed.

At the recent World Economic Forum on Africa hosted in Durban I caught up with two senior executives serving at two leading global tech firms to get a sense of what they make of the progress being made, or lack thereof, in addressing gender inequality within tech.

When asked to sum up the issue, Charmaine Houvet, the public policy director for Africa at Cisco, quoted views published in the Harvard Business Review that hold that gender equality is not a women’s issue, but rather a political, economic and social opportunity.

Houvet said that while she had observed more and more corporate leaders bump gender equality up on their list of priorities, we aren’t all the way there yet in convincing the industry that diversity was a key ingredient for ensuring business success.

She cited the McKinsey Women Matter Africa 2016 report, which makes a strong business case for greater gender diversity in senior leadership positions, stating that companies with more women in executive positions tend to be more profitable – by as much as 20 percent.

Michelle Davadoss, the acting vice-president of marketing communications at Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa, told me that