Future State 2025

Chapter 7Next-Generation Leadership

As enterprise companies continue to take more active steps in increasing the diversity of their leadership teams, there's been a steady rise in the number of racially diverse CIOs and women taking on leadership roles.

Although the percentage of female CIOs in Fortune 500 companies has risen from 15.6 percent in 2014 to 17 percent in 2016, according to SpencerStuart's The State of the CIO in 2018 study, women are still vastly underrepresented both in IT and in IT leadership roles.¹

I recently spoke with Phyllis Post, former vice president and CIO, Global Human Health IT, Merck, to discuss steps that could be taken to attract more women into IT careers and to strengthen career opportunities for women in the technology field. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

• Hunter Muller:  Your career originally began outside of IT. Can you please share how your entry into an IT role came about and what this may portend for other women who may be interested in launching a career in IT from another profession?

• Phyllis Post:  My career began in the typesetting and printing industry in a period when it had transitioned from hot type to cold type where we had big rooms with temperature controls for large mainframe systems and you did your typesetting there. A few years later, desktop publishing emerged and began to change the industry—ultimately leading to a total disruption in its future.

  During that period of change, the typesetting and ...