The gender gap in information technology is an open case, with a range of researchers offering various explanations for the unequal numbers of men and women in the field. Perhaps one way to gauge how the small number of women in tech wound up there and what the industry might learn from them is to listen to their personal stories.

Reporting from the trenches is Infor Inc. Chief Operating Officer Pam Murphy (pictured). “I never meant to end up in this industry, so I look back and think, ‘How on earth did I actually get here?'” she said during an interview at this week’s Inforum event in New York.

But get there she did, and as Murphy rose through the Infor organization, others began to turn to her for leadership. Roughly five years ago, Murphy responded by creating Women’s Infor Network, a forum for women at all levels of the company. WIN gives women at Infor an environment in which to swap stories about challenges they’ve faced working in technology and how they overcame them or continue to grapple with them.

The network metastasized globally in just a few years. “We’ve got hundreds of WIN chapters around the globe with thousands of women participating,” Murphy told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Pam Murphy in our Women In Tech feature.

WIN analyzes the gender gap in tech

WIN uses its base at Infor as a laboratory to closely examine technology gender disparities. “If you look at G&A [General and Administrative] functions or if you look at marketing functions, it’s 50/50,” Murphy said. The network is studying departments with greater gender disparities to uncover root causes, which may range from travel requirements to unconscious bias.

The Inforum conference hosts a special WIN session each year to advance the outfit’s mission. This year, the session branched out from WIN’s stated purpose and focused on tech as a weapon in the fight against global terrorism. Panelists included Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code; Susan Rice, former U.S. National Security Advisor to President Obama and ambassador to the United Nations; and Jill Biden, educator and wife of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

“The only WIN or female aspect of the session is that every speaker on stage is female,” Murphy said.

Though Murphy founded WIN expressly for women at Infor, the sessions held at Inforum conferences can spread its benefits to all attendees, including customers, Murphy explained. Customers have reached out to Murphy to express how a WIN session inspired them to take action.

“Before, they may have felt something, but they heard from someone else saying how they overcame it and it caused them to honestly [make a] change within their own lives and their own organizations,” Murphy said.

WIN has yielded much more than pep talks and potlucks, Murphy stated. Since its founding, the number of women vice presidents and senior vice presidents at Infor has shot up 60 percent, she said.

Murphy is optimistic that similar gains can be made across the tech industry. “I think we’re doing a far better job of going out to colleges, to institutions, and enabling girls and providing girls with coding courses,” she said.

Cloud future renews prospects of women in tech

The shift from on-premises hardware to cloud seems to be affecting gender representation, according to Vellante. “There are far more women at application-oriented shows than there are at infrastructure-oriented shows,” he said.

Infor itself has increased its focus on cloud, which fulfills the demands of modern enterprises, Murphy explained. “The older days of a company spending $100 million on any ERP [enterprise resource planning] implementation are gone. That’s really not acceptable anymore. It’s absolutely not our strategy,” she said.

The application layer is where the action is. Infor’s industry-specific, end-to-end cloud suites do not require modifications and deliver the instant gratification that is becoming the new standard, Murphy stated.

Acknowledging companies like Saleforce.com Inc. that offer business applications in the cloud, Murphy maintained that Infor goes a step further. “We’re different, because we have complete end-to-end suites in the cloud — mission-critical applications,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE