Business Chief USA October 2019

LEADERSHIP
44
“I’m not theorising
that an all-female
board would do
better than an
all-male one,
but diversity has
been proven to
improve boards
in other industries”
—
Helen Knight,
IT Director, Calgary DI
absent from the list. In Canada,
Vancouver is starting to emerge
as a hub for women in tech.
However, the factors that push
women away from jobs in technology
still remain in our cultural and
educational institutions. “In North
America, the influences that work
against women becoming interested
in technical fields start very young.
It’s like there is an unspoken belief that,
if you’re pretty enough, you don’t need
to learn math. That is a uniquely
Western perspective that I don’t see
happening in Asian countries. It’s
ridiculously wasteful and it happens to
girls at a very young age,” says Helen
Wetherley Knight, Canadian CIO of
the Year Finalist 2018 and Director of
Information Technology at the Calgary
Drop-In Centre. We sat with Knight to
hear her insight into the current state of
women in technology, how a gender
diversified approach can lead to better
decision making, and how her ongoing
work with the Women in Technology
(WIT) Network promotes women and
girls to pursue careers in technology.
“My grandmother was a mathematician
in Australia in the 1940s. When she got
married, she could only find work as
OCTOBER 2019