Today, March 8, marks International Women’s Day and I’m excited to join the world in celebrating women’s achievements and empowerment.

Gender diversity is key to success and a major business imperative. In the past year, we’ve renewed our commitment and have made great strides. A third of our Executive team consists of female leaders; we’ve established a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office; and we have two employee resource groups in place devoted to women and their allies: Genesys Women in Technology (GWIT) and Genesys Women of Color (GWOC) Alliance.

On this day, I’m honored to celebrate a few of the female innovators at Genesys. These amazing leaders make up the fabric of our DNA and are continuously inspiring others as change agents for innovation and growth.

Caitlin Kaphaem is an expert software engineer who represents the future leader for our cloud offerings. She started as an intern and quickly gained strong technical capabilities and leadership qualities with a clear path and technical influence as an Architect. The team she led has thrived and tripled in size in less than two years.

Galina Kovalenko is a world-class multicloud engineering leader with a tenure of over 20 years. Of her 11 patents, the most remarkable ones solve for redundancy in voice networks and allow for dynamic redistribution of network traffic to optimize media streams, delivering robust multicloud voice to the largest enterprises.

Katie Ritz in our Digital Product Management organization showed above­-and-beyond commitment in leading efforts to release the right product/platform enhancements, which helped bring our hybrid strategy to life. Her strong advocacy for empowering customers to embark on digital transformations has enabled more customers to migrate to our cloud technology: Genesys CloudTM. Her effort has turned strategic aspirations into true measurable sales success for the company.

Olesya Kazanko started her career as employee #2 at our St. Petersburg office and now runs multicloud product quality assurance for the entire office. She never forgets to help others grow their careers and has mentored many strong female leaders.

Rachel O’Donnell is a great mentor who canvases for diversity through actively driving GWIT EMEA, and pioneers innovative collaboration initiatives. She’s known for championing our company mission to deliver superior experiences with her leadership in more than 20 user-centered workshops and six major product releases in the past year alone.

Sherina Giri has played a leadership role in driving rapid growth for a key site in APAC, where she established the HR practice from the ground up — from zero to 500 employees. She now oversees HR for the entire APAC region. Her belief – everyone should own their careers – is a mindset she evangelizes through conversations with employees. She also rallies employees to give back to the community through supporting low-income families and feeding the elderly and medical workers.

Sian Jenkins has substantially elevated the Genesys brand through dynamic marketing initiatives in Australia, New Zealand and South Asia. One of her success stories is exercising the art of capturing and amplifying customer stories across all marketing channels. Sian is a strong cross-functional collaborator and supports the local community by rallying her team in Sydney to give back.

I’m proud to highlight the accomplishments of these great role models who lead by example. They are not only shaping continued success at Genesys but also contributing to making the world a better place.

Genesys is committed to gender diversity — and I challenge all tech CEOs to lead the way in removing gender bias and empowering women globally. Together, we can make a difference.