THE OUTLOOK : TRACKING PROGRESS

LaTasha Gary , HP ’ s Director of Sustainable Impact Program Management and Digital Transformation , on her long career at HP and role helping the company meet its sustainable impact goals .

HEN LATASHA GARY was a teen in the rural community of LaMarque , Texas , in the 1980s , her high school had just a single computer shared among more than 1,000 students . Gaining access to that computer — even on rare occasions — opened up new possibilities for Gary , who had an aptitude for math and science from an early age . “ We would rotate using the computer to do whatever little bit of programming we had learned ,” she recalls .

At a time when there were few women in STEM fields and fewer who were Black , even the “ village ” of teachers and mentors who helped spur her toward an engineering degree at Texas A & M University ( where just a tiny percentage of the student population was Black ) and a graduate degree at Howard University couldn ’ t have predicted the success she ’ d have in her more than 35-year tech career .

For most of her three-plus decades at HP , Gary has held senior leadership positions in the IT organization . Before taking on her most recent role as Director of the Sustainable Impact Program Management Office , she oversaw business planning for cybersecurity and served as the business planning manager for then-Chief Information Security Officer Jack Clark and , after he retired , Joanna Burkey .

Gary ’ s career took a different turn in 2020 , when the murder of George Floyd touched off an overdue reckoning around systemic racism in the United States , including corporate America . As a founding leader of one of HP ’ s Racial Equality and Social Justice Task Force pillars , she found her work and personal experiences converging in an unanticipated way .

Gary decided to go after an opportunity that she saw could have lasting impact as HP ( and many other companies ) pledged to increase their spend with Black and African American suppliers and increase their representation of Black and African American employees and leaders . In addition to its goals around digital equity , climate action , and human rights , HP pledged to double the number of Black and African American executives by 2025 and achieve 50 / 50 gender equality in HP leadership by 2030 . HP also committed to staffing more than 30 % of technical and engineering positions with women by 2030 . As of October 2022 , women represented 23.7 % of engineering and technology positions globally , and the number of Black and African Americans in technical positions increased to 3.1 %, up from 2.3 % in 2020 .

Innovation sat down with Gary to discuss how she ’ s helping HP get closer to attaining those goals .

1 / Describe your role today and what prompted you to make the switch ? I have been supporting DEI initiatives since becoming a manager at HP , including recruiting at HBCUs and sponsoring the Houston Black Employee Network group . I am very passionate about DEI . It just became a no-brainer for me to take my IT skills , my program management skills , and go for this particular opportunity in Sustainable Impact . Today , I lead the Program Management Office to help HP reach its Sustainable Impact goals — allocating budget for initiatives with HP partners that extend our reach to new populations ( such as NABU and the Digital Equity Accelerator ), and tracking the effectiveness and impact of those programs .

2 / How does HP assure we ’ re holding ourselves accountable and we ’ re progressing ? We want to make sure that if we say we ’ re going to achieve a goal , whether it ’ s by 2025 or 2030 , there is a path to get to that particular goal . We ’ re not just saying something and hoping that it happens , but ensuring that we