Striving to make Amazon and AWS the best workplace for women in tech
A Q&A with two AWS leaders from the Amazon Women in Engineering employee affinity group
Written by the Life at AWS team
Amazon and AWS employees gather at the Grace Hopper Celebration—a career growth and networking conference for women and non-binary individuals in tech—in September 2022.
Amazon Women in Engineering (AWE) is one of 13 official employee-led affinity groups that aim to expand cultural understanding, serve as a voice for customers and employees, and connect people with communities around the globe.
With more than 40 chapters worldwide, AWE's mission is to make Amazon the best place to work for technical women and non-binary people. Life at AWS met with two members of AWE's global leadership team to learn more about how the group's mission is benefiting current and future employees, and inspiring a new generation of gender diversity across the tech industry.
Natalie White, AWS principal enterprise solutions architect, is AWE's global external conferences lead, and Jen Yonit Diaz, an AWS senior quality assurance engineer, is the group's global mentorship program lead.
Life at AWS: What is the primary purpose and mission of the Amazon Women in Engineering affinity group?
Natalie White: The mission of Amazon Women in Engineering (AWE) is to make Amazon the best place to work for technical women and non-binary individuals. For our thousands of members, this looks like local AWE chapter engagement and leadership opportunities that include recruitment, growth, and development, and mentoring mechanisms. The AWE global leadership team also leads the internal AWEsome conference and Amazon’s presence at the annual external conferences for
Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) and
Society of Women Engineers (SWE).
What kinds of activities does Amazon Women in Engineering host throughout the year to serve its mission? What are some of the most important or noteworthy causes or events?
NW: Local AWE chapters organize their own local member engagement with speakers, networking, and social events. My favorite events are the larger conferences where we become technical thought-leaders, both internally at the AWEsome conference and externally at GHC and SWE. As a long-time SWE member, I lead Amazon’s renewed presence at the SWE conference, and I love learning about all of the different fields of engineering outside of software development where our members are innovating, building, and supporting our operations, data centers, drones, and space businesses. The breadth of opportunity at Amazon is a differentiator, and making connections across businesses is the best way to learn more about everything we do as a company.
Jen Yonit Diaz: I am the global owner for the AWE Mentorship program. Throughout the year we call upon our community to become mentors for early-career engineers and those making a career change (
Amazon Technical Academy,
ADA Developers Academy). We host events to provide opportunities for interns, new hires, early career, apprentices, and others to meet more tenured full-time AWE engineers to help them build community and their networks.
"The value of a mentor who’s had a similar lived experience and paved the way for the next generation is incalculable. I love how AWE creates spaces to make those mentorship connections and opportunities to grow."
Natalie White AWS principal enterprise solutions architect
What are the primary challenges facing women in engineering and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields globally, and what is the affinity group focused on to help mitigate these challenges?
NW: SWE does an annual review on the
state of women in engineering. The challenges start way before college and university. The gender gap in math has narrowed; while boys continue to outscore girls on standardized math tests of various kinds, advanced math classes such as calculus are no longer dominated by boys and girls consistently earn higher grades than their male counterparts. However, boys are more likely than girls to score in the extremely high range of assessments of math ability and achievement.
While this may explain low numbers of women in engineering because they believe it is high achievers who are most likely to select engineering majors, other research has shown that boys with mediocre math scores are more likely to enter engineering than girls with very high math scores. One possible reason is that high-achieving girls, in contrast to many high-achieving boys, are high achievers in other fields besides math, meaning that they have broader options in choosing a major and career.
I also see early-career women in engineering choosing to move into people management and product or project management, because they had more well-rounded skill sets. However, this contributes to the gap in women in principal technical roles later in their careers, and reduced potential for total compensation long-term.
It's a complicated problem, but the solution can’t be that the women currently in STEM roles need to do more to bring others along to join us. We need the support of everyone to create more inclusive work environments, job listings, and hiring practices, and intentional goals associated with short- and long-term diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activity to drive real results.
JYD: As part of my work, I often hear from people who are the only woman or non-binary engineer on their team or even entire floor. They have shared how they felt isolated, misunderstood, and of course they often used the phrase “impostor syndrome.”
Meeting with a mentor outside of their reporting structure helps them have a safe place to ask for help, feedback, vent, and get perspective on their challenges. While our program initiates a finite, three-month relationship, we hear back often from folks who are still connected to their mentors years later. I personally still meet regularly with two of my mentees who have progressed from intern to level five.
"We're seeing more women in leadership positions across Amazon—it’s pretty cool! You have to see it to be it. Like the rest of Amazon, I’ve found AWS leaders actively seeking feedback from their teams and actioning on it. My org starts every meeting with a safety tip and a DEI tip. Having DEI so visible is heartening considering other industries I’ve worked in where that would not be the norm."
Jen Yonit Diaz AWS senior quality assurance engineer
What are some of the positive ways the Women in Engineering affinity group is supporting current and future women engineers?
NW: AWE supports the
Amazon Circles program run by Women at Amazon, which helps women across Amazon connect with each other in small group settings supported by senior advisors in order to foster both peer-to-peer and senior mentorship.
The value of a mentor who’s had a similar lived experience and paved the way for the next generation is incalculable. I love how AWE creates spaces to make those mentorship connections and opportunities to grow. Many of us are also involved internal K-12 STEM outreach through
Amazon Future Engineer and
Class Chats, and external K-12 STEM outreach through organizations like SWE and
FIRST robotics.
JYD: AWE has other committees focused on mid-to-late career and future engineers, so I’ve carved out a niche for those newly fledged Amazonians. Early career is a critical time to support engineers. Joining Amazon is a gauntlet where we take supremely talented individuals and throw them into a new ecosystem. The ramp-up can be challenging sometimes, and high overachievers can feel discouraged (I've been there!).
I am dedicated to the goal of ensuring that if recruiting continues bringing in diverse talent, we’ll have a support structure ready to help their chance of success by providing a listening ear, words of encouragement, strategic and tactical advice, and introductions into the wider world of Amazon.
Our affinity group has established a strong reputation over the past 12 years, leading managers to knock on our doors to get their new hire or intern a mentor during their first week!
What are the primary challenges in attracting and hiring more women tech talent at AWS?
NW: In my experience, recruiters and hiring managers don’t always understand that recruiting women and other underrepresented people in technical roles looks very different than what they are used to. We spend so much time, energy, and political capital proving ourselves and building our brand that a random recruiter email or LinkedIn message won’t elicit the response they’re hoping for.
Relying on the women in your organization to recruit from their network doesn’t scale and puts more pressure on them to do additional non-technical, non-promotable work. That’s why being intentional about our presence at events like GHC and SWE is so important—we could be making hundreds if not thousands of high-quality hires at events where a high proportion of the attendees are looking for new roles, and build the relationships and corporate branding that drive long-term results in more diverse hiring.
A follow-on to this statistical reality is that women may be less likely to leave Amazon for a role for the next shiny new offer in our inbox because culture matters so much to our long-term success. So hiring a more diverse team can result in lower turnover, which results in higher quality technical work and longer-term solutions, mindsets, and team cultures. When you take that longer-term view, being more intentional in the short term should become an even higher priority.
"Most of us are involved in DEI work because we have benefited from others who have come before and want to pay it forward for the next generation of underrepresented people, and the more that work is viewed as a core part of everyone’s job, rather than a distraction from it, the more results we’ll deliver in the long term."
Natalie White AWS principal enterprise solutions architect
What are some common challenges you're facing?
NW: I personally struggle with the perception of my appearance at technical conferences where I create and deliver technical content, but also meet with executives and other business stakeholders.
Do I wear a T-shirt and hoodie to align with the technical builders in my sessions and workshops, or do I go for more business attire to align with the executives, or do I pull a Superwoman and change clothes between the two? I doubt my male colleagues think twice about this, and while it would be nice if women in tech weren’t judged by our appearance, I’m a realist and have to plan for the fact that appearing overly feminine, masculine, or androgynous may diminish my perceived credibility in different circles. Some may dismiss this as my own insecurity, but I have seen real-world impact from these kinds of decisions and perceptions across my SWE network, and it’s still a very real problem in many engineering industry settings.
JYD: The data has shown that it’s not a pipeline issue, it’s that women and nonbinary engineers are discouraged, discriminated against, and lose hope, causing them to bail out of the pipeline at different points. I’m really glad there are folks dedicated to getting K-12 and college students from underrepresented backgrounds hyped about STEM, but you rarely hear about the efforts to keep them thriving in a STEM career.
What were the biggest surprises for you as a woman engineer when you joined AWS?
NW: Our managers’ support for and recognition of the DEI work we do internally and externally has been a pleasant surprise. Most of us are involved in DEI work because we have benefited from others who have come before and want to pay it forward for the next generation of underrepresented people, and the more that work is viewed as a core part of everyone’s job, rather than a distraction from it, the more results we’ll deliver in the long term.
How would you describe the work culture here at AWS for women in tech roles? How does AWS or the Amazon Women in Engineering group help women feel supported and included?
NW: The culture at AWS is genuinely collaborative. Since we have alignment on the
Leadership Principles and our customers, it frees us from some of the blockers that might otherwise surface. We work together to give our customers the right guidance and build reusable, scalable solutions, and everyone genuinely wants our customers—and our teammates—to be successful.
That focus on data and working backwards from outcomes extends to the work we do on the AWE leadership team, advocating for change and support using data-driven proposals for what success looks like (or could look like). That’s something I haven’t seen at any of the other companies I’ve worked at, and I’ve been able to see the results of that culture drive real change that impacts the entire company.
JYD: I’m actually a tech org inside of the AWS Sales and Marketing org, so my experience will be different from others. We're seeing more women in leadership positions across Amazon—it’s pretty cool! You have to see it to be it. Like the rest of Amazon, I’ve found AWS leaders actively seeking feedback from their teams and actioning on it. My org starts every meeting with a safety tip and a DEI tip. Having DEI so visible is heartening considering other industries I’ve worked in where that would not be the norm.
What would you tell a woman candidate about the work culture at AWS?
JYD: I would highlight two points: each team is so different from each other in terms of social and technological maturity; and you have a lot of ownership over your destiny and career at AWS. A candidate shouldn’t feel shy about asking the hiring manager or interview panel about work-life balance, what kinds of tenure and career promotions the team has seen, and how they work to ensure their team feels safe to bring their authentic selves to work.
What else would you like current and future women of AWS to know about working here?
NW: It’s difficult to communicate the scale, impact, and opportunity available at AWS specifically and at Amazon in general. The organizational complexity of these large businesses means there are many different roles that someone with technical skills can fit into.
Combining those technical skills with business acumen makes you a great fit for a Solutions Architect. Combining technical skills with a drive to innovate and build new services and features makes you a great fit for Professional Services or a service team. Combining technical skills with a drive to support internal teams makes you a great fit for operations.
In each case, those technical skills make us very valuable to the organization as a whole and give us a lot of mobility if we want to try something new, and that’s what so exciting about joining AWS for the long term.
Stay in touch » Tell us a little about yourself and we’ll share more of what makes AWS the best place to build and learn.
Curabitur congue et est vel scelerisque. Mauris efficitur non metus id maximus. Donec aliquet, libero ac semper imperdiet, tortor eros facilisis velit, sit amet egestas tellus orci non libero.
Curabitur congue et est vel scelerisque. Mauris efficitur non metus id maximus. Donec aliquet, libero ac semper imperdiet, tortor eros facilisis velit, sit amet egestas tellus orci non libero.
Curabitur congue et est vel scelerisque. Mauris efficitur non metus id maximus. Donec aliquet, libero ac semper imperdiet, tortor eros facilisis velit, sit amet egestas tellus orci non libero.
