InfoComm 2021: Where Does Female Participation in AV Stand After the Past Year?

Key Points:

• Female participation has traditionally been low in AV and Technology Industries.
• Women find having a lack of role models and unequal growth opportunities as obstacles.
• Cory Schaeffer believes the AV Industry has a lot to offer women and hopes they come back post-pandemic.

Commentary:

Female participation in AV and technology industries has historically been low in number. According to recent surveys, women associate a lack of mentors and role models, gender bias, and unequal growth opportunities as obstacles to advancing their careers in technology, but pre-Covid, those numbers were actually trending upwards as more females began entering and staying in the field. At InfoComm, Tyler Kern sat down with Cory Schaeffer, the Director, Alliances & Ecosystem, QSC, to discuss how the pandemic affected that growth and where things stand today.

Abridged Thoughts:

When COVID hit, I think we thought this would be a couple of weeks to a couple of months. It was in March that the State of California was shut down. I feel pretty blessed because QSC is pretty diverse in the markets we serve. 
We hope to bring in some more women and more diversity. I definitely hope so because we did lose some women. It’s like when you have to get your kids on a Zoom call and work from home, and a lot of women just took the hit for their family to be that person to do all of that, and I hope we can pull them back. Given that things will be hybrid moving forward and that we’ve been given this great experiment that we can still run our companies with people working out of their homes. It’s got to be able to bring more women in and get women to look at this industry as one that would be able to adapt to their life/work balance. 

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