OREANDA-NEWS. March 15, 2016. At the most recent Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing annual conference, BNY Mellon won the Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women Award. Congratulations! How did it feel to win this award?

It was truly an honour. Certainly to be recognised as the single best firm for women in technology … and the fact that we were included in this tremendous community of tech firms who were also vying for this recognition.

The Anita Borg Institute has done so much raise the awareness and unite like-minded firms to make the technology field more open, engaging and supportive of women. They’ve built an incredible community – and as part of that community, I know that the advances we make in improving the technology careers for women at BNY Mellon will also help other companies make their own positive changes.

What types of activities has BNY Mellon taken to improve its recruitment, retention and advancement of technical women, and how have these activities changed over time?

BNY Mellon has long been a strong supporter of diversity in the workplace. We were among the first on Wall Street to focus on women when we launched our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) in the early 2000s – and today WIN has more than 5,000 members and 56 chapters worldwide.

We recognised that we needed to place an even deeper emphasis on recruiting, developing and retaining women technologists, so in 2013, we launched our Women in Technology (WIT) group. WIT is helping us to better engage with women and men who are invested in gender equality in technology and to actively support the 31 per cent of our technologists who are women … and also work to increase that percentage.

Since launching WIT, we’ve created 16 Lean In circles globally, held a number of major external and internal development and networking programmes each year and launched a sponsorship programme in which our entire technology leadership team commits to working with 16 high-performing women prot?g?es for an 18-month cycle.

Our core WIT team, along with several other notable companies, have been a big part of the launch of the ABI (dot) New York Tech Hub and the inaugural One-Day Grace Hopper Celebration, in conjunction with the Anita Borg Institute.

Do you have plans to build on your success in these areas?

This year, we are hosting the One-Day Grace Hopper celebration here at BNY Mellon, as part of our commitment to the New York tech community. We have just initiated our second wave of the women’s technology sponsorship programme. Our entry-level recruitment pipeline is strong, and we’ll also be looking at opportunities to develop and recruit women re-entering the workforce to attract diverse candidates at all levels.

If you could give three pieces of advice for other companies also looking to improve in these areas, what would those be?

When I look at BNY Mellon’s success in supporting diversity in the workplace, including this unique focus on women in technology, I think we’ve been able to accomplish so much because when we committed to focusing on women in technology, we fully committed – and not just to advancing women in our organisation, but in the industry.

First and foremost, we have tremendous support – both time and money – from our executive office. Second, we built a very strong core team, as well as a network of extended work groups, all of whom are very active and invested in our initiatives and mission.

Finally, we have a strong culture of process and measurement in our technology group and that has allowed us to prove the positive impact of our efforts, which is not only motivating and gratifying for the team, but also makes it easy for us to continue to garner company-wide support. I think those are three key factors that a company needs to drive a successful programme like this.