Women may still have a glass ceiling to break, but companies like VMware Inc., are trying to help them crash through with creative initiatives that are helping to equalize the workforce and make it easier to for women to thrive in the workplace.

“VMware is a great place for diversity and inclusion. That is one of our company’s strategic motifs,” said Lily Chang (pictured), vice president and leader of the strategic transformation office at VMware. “We believe that in order to basically create the best technology in the world today — with the evolution and the advancement of all these technology working together — we are servicing all genders. So that means … we need to bring all these cultural aspects to bring into our design thinking. So when we solve a problem, we are not solving in a mono fashion. We actually can look at multiple facets.”

Chang spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Women Transforming Technology Conference in Palo Alto, California. They discussed VMware’s dedication to helping women through a variety of programs and initiatives (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Helping women come back to work after children and family

VMware has always been an inclusive company, according to Chang, because it was originally co-founded and run by a woman — Diane Greene.

“We believe in human power and potential,” Chang described. “We especially believe in women that, basically, are underrepresented in a lot of the technology sectors. Our job is to unlock [this] potential.”

How is VMware doing this? One way is to partner with Women Who Code through a VMinclusion Taara initiative in India. With this initiative, VMware is hoping to encourage and train these women to come back to the workforce after children or other family duties have kept them away for too long to assimilate back into the workforce quickly. Since technology moves at such a fast pace nowadays, many professional women are left behind if they take time off to help with children, making the glass ceiling in technological careers even more impenetrable.

“Basically, we are funding 15,000 women, and we are training them, and brought them up to speed about technology — especially with our software-defined data center and virtualization, networking, storage,” Chang said. “That enables them to be able to jump back into the workforce with a full qualification.”

This program will grow more over the years, and VMware is also launching this same program in Costa Rica, according to Chang. “For me personally, and the for woman who code, we want to basically be able to change the world,” Chang concluded. “We want to offer all the technical woman in the world a choice for their career ladder. So Taara is a way to do it — to break one particular glass ceiling.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE