#13 China - Afke Schaart: Gender Equality and Global Impact at Huawei

Welcome to the 13th episode of Innovation Matters, a podcast organized by the Netherlands Innovation Network. In this episode we’ll talk to Afke Schaart. This podcast episode is broadcasted from Shanghai, China.

Afke Schaart is the Senior Vice President and Head of Global Impact at the headquarters of Huawei in Shenzhen and the most senior foreign national currently working at Huawei. She previously worked in local and national government, at KPN, Microsoft and the GSMA (or the international association of telecommunications companies). The release of this episode coincides with February 11th, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Women are still under-represented in the tech industry worldwide, occupying just 12% of jobs in cloud computing, 15% in engineering, and 26% in data and AI. In this episode, we also dive deeper into topics such as achieving gender equality.