Trailblazer in tech

Archana Jain is laughing. In fact, she can’t stop laughing. It’s a warm, engaging laugh that invites you to laugh along with her, even if the story she’s recounting isn’t particularly funny.

It was 2006, as she recalls, when Zurich’s Group Chief Technology Officer was still at Verizon, the U.S. telecom giant. She had just been promoted to a director’s position and her V.P. gathered a group to meet after work for celebratory drinks.

When Jain met them at the bar – after her class at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where she was studying for her masters’ degree in information systems – a colleague she hadn’t known turned to her and said, “So whose secretary are you?”

She could’ve come back with a four-letter retort, and this being northern New Jersey – Sopranos’ country – it may have been considered acceptable, even applauded. Instead, Jain took a different tack.

“I kind of burst out laughing,” she says in her fifth-floor office at Quai Zurich Campus, with the lake – gray and brooding, in stark contrast to Jain – framed behind her. “And then I was, like, ‘You’re having drinks in someone’s honor and that someone happens to be me,’” she says, and starts laughing again, as she did 19 years before.

“I can feel bad about it, or I can laugh about it,” she says. “It has nothing to do with me; it has to do with him. It’s about his way of thinking.”

Sadly, though, it’s not just that one individual’s way of thinking. Tech culture at large has had a difficult time including, accepting and retaining women in the sector. This isn’t breaking news, especially the higher you look on a company’s organizational chart. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, the multinational semiconductor company, is the very rare exception.

Numbers don’t lie

Statistics as recent as November 2023 show that women hold just 26.7 percent of technology-related jobs. In software engineering, women report a lack of equal pay, making 0.93 cents for every dollar that men make. The percentage of women pursuing STEM subjects in higher education is on the decline, according to the report, and women achieve only 18 percent of new computer sciences degrees. More than 50 percent of women in tech report gender inequality, discrimination or sexual harassment. And just 10.9 percent of those holding CEO or senior leadership roles in tech are women. None of which is especially encouraging.

If the obstacles are many, Jain overcame them, thanks in part to her upbringing in Ranchi, India, in the eastern part of the country. Her father was an engineer for the consulting firm Mecon (where he had a female boss), and though her mother was a homemaker, she always wanted financial independence for her daughter and encouraged her to “do what you want to do.” Mathematics came easily to the young Archana, who also delighted in science fiction and the stories of Isaac Asimov – “Kid Brother” was a particular favorite.

Her parents’ circle of friends and associates was made of engineers and doctors, so, Jain says, “I could be one or the other.” She laughs again. But don’t mistake the laugh with frivolity. She always excelled in school and by age 17 qualified for the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, which was founded in 1950 by Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, three years after India gained independence. (It’s worth noting that India granted equal voting rights to men and women as soon as it became independent in 1947.) Her mother was worried – as moms are wont to do – but there was no doubt that Archana would attend.

When she arrived at the Delhi campus, she found only four girls out of an incoming class of 400, and she was the only one out of 40 in the chemical engineering department. (All four of those women, by the way, went on to have good, extensive careers in tech internationally.)

Coming from Ranchi – “a small town,” in her words – where the schools were co-ed, it was completely normal for her to attend classes with boys. But, she says, “being the only girl in the class suddenly made me very shy.” The academic environment was fiercely competitive.

Through extracurriculars – the drama club, basketball, music – she made friends. “I sang but I didn’t sing well,” she says. (I can relate.) “But it was a way to build relationships in a noncompetitive way. It was my learning moment. And now I tell my employees, ‘It is a given that you have to build your expertise and do your work well, but being part of a team and organization is also about building relationships.’ It provides you the ability to influence and also makes the journey more fun.”

At I.I.T., she had virtually no female professors, she says, “and in chemical engineering I don’t remember a single one.” But her male professors were all very encouraging. “I felt no biases and was never held back in any way.”

After she graduated, she got her first job as a chemical engineer at Tata Steel, where she met her future husband. While there, she was trained on the workings of the steel plant as well as on the information systems, learning that set her up well for her career.

After five years, they moved to Madison, Wisconsin in the U.S., and she got a position in the state welfare department, where the information technology group was made up of 20–30 percent women, which Jain describes as “pretty good” for the 1990s. But while she’s clear that she doesn’t want to paint too rosy a picture of India, it was in Wisconsin – not in India – where she began to ask herself, “Why aren’t people listening to me in meetings?” Also missing were any female mentors, which is key for women – and any underrepresented group – to pursue tech and, just as important, to remain in tech.

Two-and-a-half years later, in 1996, she and her husband moved east, to the New York Tristate area, where they both got jobs at Verizon. It was there, while working in building applications, that she did meet a true mentor, Ajay Waghray. He recommended her for that director’s position, which was greeted by the silly comment at the bar. At first, Jain didn’t even want to move to an infrastructure job because she loved working in app development – and particularly loved working for Waghray. “He said, ‘Are you kidding me, you have to round up your experience, you’ve got to do it! Get out of your comfort zone.’ He insisted that I had to learn different areas to grow in the organization.” And move she did, to the infrastructure team, where she maintained high availability for servers, storage, network and ultimately the applications. She learned on the job and excelled in her new role. Since then, she has taken on new challenges every few years.

The importance of mentors

That push from a mentor is something she thinks must continue if women are going to fulfill their potential in technology. “There are things that I think men have to sponsor,” she says. “Men have to mentor and observe and see that there are women who, if they don’t appear to be ambitious, it’s because they don’t think it’s possible. You need to open doors for them. I think that is key.”

Lauren Long, a Senior Security Engineer at Zurich who was once part of Jain’s team, agrees. “There is a lack of female role models in the industry,” says Long, who focuses on what tools Zurich has available to provide the best method of improving processes, which currently is heavily based on using Microsoft PowerPlatforms. “This could even be just having female teachers or lecturers to show that there are opportunities for women and that it is not an industry solely for men. Having someone to look up to and encourage your passion can make a huge difference….For women that are in the industry, we need to start thinking of ourselves as role models and advocates for the technology industry. Reach out to communities, speak at schools and show young women that we have a role to play in the tech industry.”

And then there’s the gender pay gap. “In technology this is a problem,” says Long, who has been with Zurich for six years. “Women aren’t going to want a job in technology knowing that their male counterparts will be earning more money for the same job. This will not be an overnight fix, but companies need to ensure that your gender does not affect your pay.”

Martina O’Sullivan, another member of Jain’s unit who works in Zurich’s Cloud Center of Excellence leading the site reliability engineering and operations teams, has spent over 21 years in tech and has been a close observer of the industry. “This is something I have theorized on a lot during my years in IT,” says O’Sullivan, who has been with Zurich for the last eight years. “I think there is a predisposition, or unconscious bias, to think that women are more suited to tasks requiring soft skills, such as planning and organizing, and men are more suited to complex technical tasks. I watch many women in technology gradually drift toward project management or service management roles, due to the types of tasks assigned over time, while men remained in more technical roles. So even for women who are already in technology, sticking to core technical type work can be a challenge.

“Because of the pace of change in IT and the continuous development of new skills on the job,” she continues, “I believe it is more difficult to transition back to a technical team after working in a nontechnical role for a period of time. Similarly, within technical teams I think women can be requested to do, or accept, more administrative type work….I always made it clear to my manager that I was interested in the most technical projects and worked hard to position myself well for new technical projects coming online.”

Zurich paving a way forward

And while all three say improvements have (slowly) been made across the industry, more needs to be done. And Zurich, in their view, is a company that is paving a way forward.

“Zurich is making positive changes to encourage women into technology,” Long says. “There are now women in technology leadership roles, proving to others that there is no limit to what they can achieve while working here. There has also been a change in the way jobs are advertised, in how they are written and the role type (part-time, full-time). This may not be specifically to help with diversity in technology but to encourage diversity at the company as a whole – but the outcome is the same. Women are now more likely to apply for the roles. So I believe Zurich is a company where women can thrive in tech. I have never felt like I have been limited or missed out on an opportunity due to my gender. I am lucky to work for a team in tech that has more women than men. It has created a culture that shows me women can succeed in technology at Zurich.”

“Engagement in STEM initiatives, completing a gender pay-gap review and acting on the outcome and having an active interest in recruiting women in IT are all positive actions Zurich is taking to empower women in technology,” O’Sullivan says. “Zurich encourages an open dialog between employees and management teams, and personally I felt comfortable highlighting where I felt nontechnical tasks should be more evenly shared across the team.”

Jain, whose daughter and son, like their parents and grandfather before them, are both in tech – and yes, she laughs when she recounts this – now turns deadly serious. “A lot of women don’t have the confidence,” she says. “Or they just believe they need to do the work and the successes will follow. There’s no one who tells them that there are five other things that they should be doing other than the work assigned to them. Many women don’t think big as there are not many role models, with exceptions. Not many say, ‘I want to be on the board of a company,’ right? Or ‘I want to be a CEO one day.’ Men are always thinking of what they could do next. So I say to women, ‘Get out of your comfort zone and realize your true potential.’”