HPE’s In Her Element campaign empowers women and allies to change the tech industry from the inside.

CHALLENGE

2021 was a landmark year for women—it was the first year since 1948 that the female unemployment rate reached double digits. This ‘shecession’ was even more pronounced for women in tech, who face higher cultural and professional barriers than their male counterparts. This was the backdrop of International Women’s Day 2021, a global event designed to celebrate women’s social and economic achievements. This year, IWD wasn’t going to be a celebration for women in tech—it was going to be a wake-up call. 

While HPE prides itself on its unconditionally inclusive approach to supporting and advancing women in tech, they’re better known for their IT solutions than their DEI ones. They reached out to Edelman to launch an IWD campaign that would engage their audience in meaningful conversations about the work that needs to be done--both by HPE and the industry--to make tech more inclusive for everyone.  

INSIGHT

As we set out to tackle the issue of female representation in tech, conventional wisdom told us that the best way to get more women in tech would be to focus on the bottom of the pipeline.  

But after digging into the data, we learned that young girls are not only just as interested in STEM as their male peers--they're also outperforming them. The deeper we dug, the more we realized; the lack of female representation in tech isn’t a recruitment problem—it’s a retention problem. 52% of women in tech leave the industry within 10 years of entering it –that's over half of potential female mentors, managers, and leaders lost because of hostile workplace cultures.