When Julie McGourty was speaking at a tech conference recently she noticed something different about the room. “It was very nice to look out at the audience and see that the vast majority of them were female,” says the EY director, cybersecurity. “That’s something I’ve never seen at any conference I’ve been to in the last 20 years – when the audiences were always mostly male – so it was really inspiring to see that shift.”
EY is leading that shift, thanks to its strategic focus on empowering women in their careers. McGourty’s been in cyber for 20 years and at previous companies she was often the only woman in a team, but this isn’t the case at EY, where women are “very much empowered”, as shown by the large number of female partners it holds.
