Q&A: Tech CEO Stephanie Trunzo talks advancing women in tech and leadership

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While it’s still up (because the federal government is scrubbing its sites of public data), I’m going to share with you a stat that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published late last year:

"While women are nearly half of the total U.S. workforce, they were just 22.6% of the high-tech workforce in all industries, and only 19.4% of the high-tech workforce in the high-tech sector."

Let’s unpack that:

The high-tech sector involves any work with high concentrations of STEM professionals. While DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) has become a dirty word, inequality across demographics—gender included—remains a pain point, including in the high-tech space.

And as CEO of storytelling tech company MERGE and former exec at Oracle and IBM Stephanie Trunzo knows, even those who are included (i.e. hired) aren’t always respected.

Getting candid about what it takes to empower women at work

What’s it like being a woman in tech and leadership, you ask? For Stephanie, that’s like asking: “What’s it like being a human on planet Earth?” 🌍

Stephanie: It’s a fundamental part of your existence. You have to be able to imagine a different way of being in order to answer. 

I didn't go into tech so that I could talk about being a woman in tech, but at some point you are part of a minority group and you want to help others not have to trip on the same obstacles. A lot of it is highlighting—in reality, not in concept—why there is benefit to diversity, why there are those challenges that you're observing in the first place and bringing some awareness to them.

Stephanie: Sometimes it feels as simple as just being a respectful human and listening. There are countless times where I've been in meetings where, if I'm not the only woman, the other woman in the meeting is not talking. Just making sure there's space for her or having separate conversations with her to make sure her ideas are heard. 

It’s about never taking for granted that everyone else in the conversation is going to be as aware as you are. It's easy enough to just go about your day and get through this next call, this next meeting, do whatever it is that needs to be done to move your day forward. It does take more time and energy and effort. How do you help neutralize or create a level playing field for a conversation? That's not a big statement. It's a micro statement. Literally every 30-minute meeting, it's something you need to be thinking about. 

More diversity, more superpowers

Stephanie’s active approach to empowerment does not exist in a vacuum. Gaps still exist for women in tech and leadership. But which ones? “All of them,” she said. “We are not fixed.” For one, it’s time to rethink what good leadership looks like in trainings and personality assessments, which are based on outdated models built around male-centric standards.

Stephanie: If you doggedly pursue a plan you put in place that is no longer relevant because the world has changed around you, that makes you a poor leader. One of the big challenges that we all have is breaking some of the old models. 

Women bring some stellar characteristics to the tech and leadership table, Stephanie said. These include:

• Curiosity

• Kindness

• Respect

• Open-mindedness

• Resilience

• Non-attachment

Stephanie: This is a broad-stroke statement, but they tend to be the ones that women are a bit more naturally inclined towards. Confidence and direction and these words you find in any leadership book, they're much more a reflection of a male-oriented culture. 

If we believe in diverse datasets, we should believe in diverse workforces

Stephanie’s moral compass as a leader comes from within. MERGE has a robust diversity statement, which is brave at a time when companies around the country are slashing any reference to diversity. 

Stephanie: The way we develop our identity at MERGE, and the way we put priority on our diversity initiatives as much as our innovation initiatives, comes from what we believe is right, where we see the need and what we think our business is going to benefit from. What is happening around us is always an input to that, but there's nothing that is happening in the world around me that is going to change how I feel about where I see the benefit of diversity. 

Coming from a tech background, Stephanie points out that LLMs (large language models), a type of AI model that uses large amounts of data to train itself to respond and act like a human, use diverse datasets.

Stephanie: If we believe the richer and more diverse our datasets are, the better they are, why would we not want richer and more diverse workforces? They're the same outcome. The more inputs that you can have, the more differing perspectives, the more different starting points, the safer that people feel to bring ideas to the conversation, the better that your outcomes are going to be. 

Despite systemic setbacks, Stephanie believes the momentum towards truly diverse workforces—speaking to gender diversity in tech and leadership or otherwise—is unstoppable. She can have conversations now that wouldn’t have been possible 15 years ago because of things like new vocabulary and normalization. Even in broad discussions with a diverse group of colleagues, she’s able to say things like, “Mary hasn't spoken. Let's ask her.” 

Stephanie: I do think that these are sustainable changes, because they're happening at a ground level, and hopefully the bottom up and the top down meet at some point and there's systemic change as well.

Thanks,

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