Sastry Durvasula

"When you look at the intersection of diversity, equity and inclusion, especially with gender and race cross section, I think it's a compounding issue."

[Q: How do we get businesses to start hiring more women, despite the 'we can't find any women in stem to hire' excuse?] "Focusing at the granular level, at the systemic level is an important element of solving this problem. Obviously it's very important to track, it's important to measure, it's important to have strategic initiatives around hiring, retention and promotion, etc. But I think the awareness is an important element when it comes to corporations. Engagement of the leaders, walking the walk, managing the moments, I think those are very important."

[Q: How do you avoid generating the feeling of unfair advantages or compromising on standards while promoting diversity?] "The fundamental thing is really for organizations to embrace the business need of having diversity. Diversity for the sake of having diversity is not what we are talking, right? There is actual commercial business impact that every company can make with having a diverse and inclusive workforce. So if the leaders and organizations and men are bought into that, then they actually would look at this in a very different way. I often hear this comment, right, that well, are we reverse discriminating, are we over indexing on this, etc, in various networks and firms? I think it's really understanding the clear business impact that advancing diversity would have I think is really the key aspect."

"Of course, on the asset management side, we have other activities happening with climate tech, etc, because we have a huge focus on ESG."

"We still have a lot of work to do on gender diversity. No question about it. In any industry, technology actually is probably the most pronounced one, but I am quite excited about it. I'm super proud to say that more than 50% of my direct reports are women in technology. And obviously there's a lot of work that goes into it to make sure that we have a diverse and inclusive leadership team because that sets the tone for the rest of the organization. But at the same time, we're equally focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the broader context. As I mentioned, we have partnerships with a number of these institutes, whether it's Blacks in Tech or Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, a lot of work with LGBTQ Plus. So I think the dialogue is happening… but you know I see that from both sides, by the way, not just technologies. From a business point of view, this is an important element of our business focus."

"So that I really recommend to a lot of mentees that I have that are aspiring leaders that make sure that you have diversity in gender or diversity in ethnicity or diversity in backgrounds, diversity in thoughts, but make sure that you have diverse voices at the table. The power of that coming together each can underrepresent or overrepresent at any given day. It's a pretty powerful unlocking mechanism."

"For example, ESG is a classic area of our focus, which was not a focus for a lot of the firms. We were one of the pioneers. We were actually recognized as a leader in that space even before ESG was like a mainstream topic. That's because we were trying to reimagine the future. So I think that's going to be a continued focus… And frankly, that's what keeps these types of firms apart from others"

[Q: Can you talk about DEI?] "It's an important focus for our company. Top to bottom. I think it's a top down mandate. We have a very diverse executive team to begin with a very focused CEO. So it's a top down mandate for us… So I'm personally passionate about this myself, serving on the other side of the hat that I have as a board member and one of the big advocates for diversity, women gender diversity in technology. So I think it's a big focus for us and it also, no question, it is a business imperative, right? So I think we want to serve and we want to provide lifetime income for all the all matters a lot. So I think if I think about diversity, equity and inclusion, it's important for the business, it's important for the clients, but frankly, it's very important for me as a leader of technology and client services because we want to include the talent that can innovate and envision those solutions and create a very open playing field."

"Obviously, every business needs diversity, equity and inclusion for the business itself. So it's not a good thing to do, but it is the most important thing to do for any business to flourish."