Female execs front and center at Google Cloud conference

On International Women’s Day, during the opening keynote of Google Cloud’s NEXT user conference, former VMware CEO Diane Greene gave the primary keynote.

When Google showcased its machine learning technology, renowned Stanford University computer scientist Fei Fei Li addressed the audience of 10,000 attendees and thousands more on the live-stream.

And during a press conference after the keynote, eight of Google Cloud’s top executives sat on a stage to answer questions from press and analysts. Four of the eight are women, and three of which are listed on Google’s About Us Leadership page.

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Google and other companies release an annual diversity report, which includes its ratio of male to female employees. Overall, 69% of Googlers are male and 31% female; in leadership positions across the entire company, the split is 76-24%. In technical roles, 81% are male and only 19% female.

That’s about in-line with other technology companies, as this report shows. Microsoft, for example, has a 74-28% ratio of male to female workers overall, and an 82-18% ratio in leadership and technical positions.

During her keynote, Greene in the first few minutes pointed out how proud she was to be keynoting the conference on International Women’s Day. She wore a red ribbon pin to commemorate the day, as did almost every other person – other Google executives, customers, partners – who spoke during the first day’s keynote.

In an industry dominated by men, Google’s cloud conference is a refreshing change. But the diversity numbers show the industry still has a ways to go to even out male to female ratios.

Pictured in the image from left to right during an executive Q&A at the Google Cloud NEXT conference are: Google Cloud VP of Marketing Allison Wagonfeld; Google Cloud President of Customers Tariq Shaukat; Google Cloud Head of Global Technology Partners Nan Boden; Google Cloud Vice President of Apps Prabhakar Raghavan; Google Cloud Vice President of Cloud Platform Brian Stevens; Senior Vice President of Google Cloud Diane Greene; Senior Vice President of Google Cloud Technical Infrastructure Urs Holzle; and Chief Scientist for Google Cloud Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Fei Fei Li.