When a group of female AEye employees shared with me their idea to start an organization for women in the autonomous vehicle industry, it felt a bit like deja vu.
Several years ago, I was CEO of XOJET, a fast-growing private aviation company attempting to transform the industry with a revolutionary new on-demand business model. Similar to the automotive industry, the private aviation industry is highly regulated, safety oriented, and heavily male-dominated. In 2010, the number of female pilots was around 4%. At the time, XOJET was the largest non-unionized pilot group in North America and was on par, or even slightly behind that number.
Several women on the XOJET team, who wanted to see the company expand with intentionality, asked for funds to promote XOJET through active participation in organizations such as Women in Aviation. My first reaction was, “This is a no brainer.” It made great business sense to me to recruit from a population that was not being actively sought-after. Through proactive engagement with female pilot organizations, expanded recruitment efforts that signaled our openness to diversity, and continued effort to evolve our work environment to be more inclusive, in two years we were able to increase the percentage of women pilots at the company to 16% — 4 times the industry average.
We achieved this diversity by focusing on a talented, yet underserved pool of candidates. By doing so, we were able to attract better pilots in a shorter timeframe and with greater retention. What we didn’t anticipate were the changed attitudes of existing pilots, and the transformation of our culture. We challenged pilots to think about how to make the company better in all ways, including thinking differently when interviewing — not just choosing people they had worked with before or who had the most flight hours. Our culture improved because the female pilots brought different experiences to the table that helped the core teams innovate and think about how to change the way we did business.
I am now the president of a growing autotech company and find myself in a similar scenario to the one at XOJET. I know the value of having a diverse workforce, and it’s my responsibility to ensure that we create an inclusive and representative culture at AEye. Unfortunately, we’re not yet there yet. While we do employ many intelligent, hard working women and have had several recent promotions, AEye does not yet have a single woman on its executive team.
The challenge to rectify this is slightly more difficult, as the absolute number of women with experience in the autonomous vehicle and/or automotive domain is low. Gender diversity at the top levels has been a major issue in both tech and automotive, AEye included. The issue was made globally obvious in 2017, when CES was lambasted, with industry outcry and trending tags like #CESSoMale, for naming an all-male keynote line-up for the second year running. The CTA reversed course soon after, and, in 2019, 45% of CES’ keynote speakers were women.
Women at all levels are under-represented in automotive and autotech: they make up just 8% of top execs in the top 20 motor vehicles and parts companies, and 16% of all workers in the automotive industry.
We can do better, much better.
This year, AEye kicked off a program to invest in and accelerate talented women who may not have the exact job experience, but that we can develop. And this week, the women at AEye are launching a forum for female influencers and innovators to network, encourage, educate, and exchange ideas with one another so their voices can be better heard and represented.
They’ve named their initiative, Women in Autonomy, and their first event taking place this Thursday, Driving the Future of Transportation, featuring Nauto COO Jennifer Haroon, Designated Driver CEO Manuela Papadopol, and DeepMap COO Wei Luo, sold out in a matter of days. Undoubtedly, there is high demand for an organization like this one.
Women in Autonomy will be hosting ongoing events, where female executives, engineers, policy makers and academics discuss topical issues and address common challenges facing autonomous driving. The goal is to empower women today, drive the next generation of leaders, and accelerate the future of automotive.
I realize that AEye, along with the entire automotive and autotech industry, has much to learn and a lot of work to do in addressing and solving issues related to gender diversity and inclusion. Like I experienced at XOJET, choosing to be inclusive cannot be passive. It requires intent and action. It requires self-awareness and the pursuit of new ways of making connections. If we expand opportunities for everyone, we expand the realm of the possible and redefine what it means to innovate.
Which is why Women in Autonomy is so important.
AEye is growing, and as we grow, we will strive to include a more gender diverse group of innovators and leaders amongst our ranks. I can’t promise perfection or expect change overnight. But I can promise to grow AEye with intentionality, and to make inclusivity a top priority. Because I know from experience that it will result in a better, more innovative, and more sustainable company.
My hope is that Women in Autonomy is the beginning of a sea change, not only within our own company, but within the entire automotive and autotech industries.
Blair LaCorte is an accomplished leader and strategist with a long history of leveraging his change management skills to drive operational alignment and growth within companies. He has served as Global President of PRG, the world’s largest live event technology and services company, CEO of XOJET, one of the fastest growing aviation companies in history and the largest private charter company in North America, and operating partner at TPG, a premier private equity firm with over $91B in global investments. LaCorte has also held numerous executive and general management positions in private and public technology companies including VerticalNet, Savi Technologies, Autodesk and Sun Microsystems. LaCorte graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maine and holds an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he later served as an executive fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies.
