Marina Kacaribu shares her experience working in a maledominated tech industry and Cisco’s strategy for inclusion and diversity through education programs and dialogues.
Chapter: Attracting female talent
About: : Marina Kacaribu is the managing director at Cisco Indonesia, a US-based company that provides technology solutions for enterprise networking technology, data centers, security, and collaboration platforms. Prior to joining Cisco, she was the vice president of enterprise digital services at Telkomsel. As a business leader, she believes gender inequality in STEM fields could be solved by providing more inclusive education and active participation from companies.
What has your career been like for you as a woman in the technology industry?
As a woman with an engineering background, I have always been in the minority. It started during my college days when I decided to pursue an engineering degree. Soon after I graduated, I was a member of a research and development team at Telkom—a team member of a group of 70 people with only five women. Despite that, my gender has never been questioned in my whole career.
Industries such as telecommunications and IT are evolving very fast. With the rise of smartphones, mobile applications, and the Internet, everything is changing. The industry is now more driven by innovation, and you have to move fast. With all of the business demands, gender differentiation is not really an issue. In fact, diversity adds value to the innovation.
“It’s not about just the company culture; leadership also matters—leaders and companies that give women equal access to opportunities.”
How does the company promote gender equity? Do you have specific targets for diversity and inclusion?
Cisco is a global company that takes a modern, open-minded approach to diversity and inclusion. We encourage and implement that as part of our culture throughout our business activities, in recruitment, promotion, and talent development. Forty-two percent of our executive leadership team and four out of six country leaders across ASEAN are women.
Cisco has no distinction between the roles for men and women, and the performance demands are the same. Everyone is encouraged to be the best version of themselves, regardless of their gender.
Moreover, inclusion isn’t just something we do. It’s part of who we are and our conscious culture. Our conscious culture is a diverse and inclusive culture, built on fairness, dignity, and respect in our interactions with one another. At a global company, you might interact with many people who are coming from different backgrounds and nations. It might be common to ask certain questions in one culture, but in another culture, it might be a bit offensive. At Cisco, we model inclusion in the way we show up, speak, and interact with one another, such as speaking up when we see behaviors that are out of step with our beliefs.
“Inclusion and diversity are two crucial factors in our culture at Cisco. We put people first, and that includes gender issues.”
Request a free copy of the Empowering Women: A Collection of Thoughts from Women Leaders to Advance the Workplace.