The past two years have seen a record number of women elected to board positions. According to a report on U.S. Board Diversity Trends posted by Harvard Law School, 46% of newly elected directors in 2019 were female and women now hold 27% of directorships across the S&P 500 companies.

One of those newly elected members is Wendy Pfeiffer (pictured), chief information officer of Nutanix Inc. and board director with Qualys Inc. and Girls in Tech Inc.

“When I was recruited for the board [of Qualys] … we didn’t talk about the fact that I am female at all. We talked about the fact that I’m an operator, that I’m a technologist,” Pfeiffer told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio during the Qualys Security Conference in Las Vegas.

During the interview, Pfeiffer and Frick discussed how the growth of artificial intelligence is helping data security, making having a diverse workforce more critical than ever. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE spotlights Wendy Pfeiffer in our Women in Tech feature.

The diversity quest is far from over

While Pfeiffer’s experience with Qualys — which already has a 50-50 gender diverse board — was positive, it is unfortunately not yet the norm. And it is definitely a far cry from the years when she started her career.

Although Pfeiffer realized she had a passion for computer science in high school, she couldn’t envision a way forward into the field. It took a circuitous path through accounting, journalism, and business administration for her to finally discover her true calling within the technology industry.

Today, Pfeiffer’s list of awards and accolades prove that she landed in the right place. 2018 saw her named number one on Enterprise Management 360’s list of Top 10 Tech CIOs and one of the National Diversity Council’s Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. In 2019, she was named CIO of the Year by both ORBiE’s Bay Area Enterprise and the Fisher Center for Data and Analytics.

Security needs AI …

Providing security and compliance solutions is Qualys raison d’etre, and, as with any enterprise cloud company, security is mission critical for Nutanix. Artificial-intelligence and machine-learning tools provide the key to efficiently and quickly detecting potential attacks and stopping them autonomously.

“We need to train the systems, and the systems need to be responsive, performant, resilient,” Pfeiffer said.

Rather than the sci-fi image of a robot servant, she sees the combination of man and machine creating the real utopian future. “The machine itself, the computer itself, is refining and augmenting the things that human beings are doing and therefore able to be, first of all, more responsive, more performant, but also to do that layer of work that is not unique to human discernment,” she said.

… and AI needs diversity

While artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical for cybersecurity, diversity is equally as important for accurate model training in AI. “If we think about all of the data that is training these technology tools and systems, and we think about the people who are creating these systems and the leaders who are building these systems and so on, for the most part, the groups of people who are working on these things, technologists, particularly in Silicon Valley, they’re not a diverse set of people,” Pfeiffer said.

This adds a new urgency to the need for diversity in the tech industry.

“Our training data sets are growing exponentially, year over year, and they’re being built in a way that doesn’t reflect the potential usage,” Pfeiffer said. “And now is the moment, while these tools and technologies are being developed … [that] we need diverse voices in the mix. We need diverse training data. We need folks who have different perspectives and who understand different interaction design.”

When voice recognition gets it wrong

Pfeiffer herself has experienced this restriction with the voice recognition technology on her iPhone. She told how when she dictates a text including her daughter’s name, Holly, it is always transcribed as H-O-L-I, which is the spelling for the religious celebration.

“In 10 years, Siri has never learned that when I say Holly, I most likely mean my daughter,” Pfeiffer said. She attributes this to bad architecture.

“[Siri] was built without allowing for true user input, true training, at the point of conversation,” Pfeiffer stated.

Continual misspellings in texts are annoying. But they would probably fall under a “first-world problems” category in level of importance. However, the limits of voice recognition can have more critical implications.

Pfeiffer has an elderly neighbor who is currently unable to drive due to poor eyesight. He was telling her how he was excited about the potential of autonomous vehicles to give him back his mobility and freedom. But Pfeiffer recalled how she had to help him set up an app on his phone because it didn’t understand his voice commands.

“If his mobile phone doesn’t understand him, how is the autonomous vehicle going to understand him?” she said. “The very population who needs these technologies the most will be left out. Another digital divide.”

Refugees can be a talent resource

Qualys is Pfeiffer’s second board of director’s position. She also serves for Girl’s in Tech, where she mentors young women with a passion for technology. As a volunteer with the non-profit Tech Qualled, she encourages U.S. combat veterans to enter the technology workforce, bringing their diversity of gender, ethnicity and experience to enrich the sphere.

As a volunteer dedicated to expanding the diversity of the tech workplace, Pfeiffer has found that data scientists and developers can sometimes be recruited from the most unexpected locations.

“There are organizations that I work with that go into the permanent refugee camps and find technically qualified folks who can actually build some of this training data for analytics and AI. We need much, much more of that,” she said.

With the stakes rising, Pfeiffer sends out a rally call for everyone to join her in the fight for diversity: “People of every gender, every color, every ethnicity, immigrants … I’m begging you guys, stick with it. Stay engaged. Don’t let the mean people, the naysayers, force you to drop out,” she said. “Reconnect with your original values and stay strong, because that’s what it’s going to take.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE