She rides a bicycle to work. She is gentle-spoken, wears no makeup, and does not put on any airs as head of one of the biggest tech companies in the world. To present the keynote address to an audience of around 200 humans from eighty distinctive nationalities, she walks as much as the level in casual attire – a black T-shirt and trousers.
Her simplicity isn’t always misleading. It’s inspiring and heartwarming. Gillian Tans, President and CEO of online journey platform Booking.Com, is one of the world’s highest-paid CEOs, with an internet worth of $forty million. (Her salary in 2016 turned to $17 million.)
When HerStory catches up with Gillian at Booking.Com’s swanky workplace in Amsterdam, she is excited to talk approximately not simply about the 23-year-antique agency in which she has spent the remaining 16 years, but additionally about girls creating a mark at the tech scene, which has long been a male-dominated one.
“The gap for ladies in leadership roles is truly widening, no longer narrowing. It demands attention. Overall, you spot more guys than ladies in technical roles. There are no longer even enough women who can study these topics, so it’s not something businesses alone can fix.”
Gillian is an exception to this norm. After graduating from Hotel School Middleburg, The Hague, and serving as Director of Sales at Golden Tulip Hotels, she joined Booking.Com in 2002. In the last 16 years, she has held diverse positions at Booking.com in worldwide sales, operations, IT, content, and client care. In 2011, Gillian was appointed Booking.com’s Chief Operating Officer and was promoted to Chief Executive Officer in 2016.
The 48-year-old mom of 3 has also been instrumental in bringing more women into technical roles and leading some initiatives at Booking.com.
Attracting more girls to tech
To boost opportunities for ladies in tech, Booking.Com gives grants of 500,000 euros in scholarships to undergraduate and postgraduate ladies analyzing PC technology, engineering, technology, and mathematics. This is done in partnership with Cornell University, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, Oxford University, and the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.
Gillian strongly believes the era drives social and financial trade. If women remain below-represented in technical roles, it could create a larger social divide and supply rise to gender stereotypes.
“This is a real problem; we should all worry about destiny. This is why the timetable for Booking.com is excessive, wherein 20 percent of the ladies are in tech roles, which I think is probably higher than many organizations. We control and grow it every 12 months. However, it takes quite a few attempts,” she says.
In a recent survey, Booking.Com determined that women nonetheless perceive their gender as negative when pursuing a tech career, with more than half (fifty-two percent) attributing this to the tech enterprise’s largely male-ruled body of workers.
Gillian worries that there aren’t many role fashions amongst ladies setting up their enterprises or becoming CEOs. “This might also lead more ladies to assume this road is not viable. That’s why I maintain pushing media additionally to show off more such women (in tech),” she provides.
However, Gillian consents that it is more difficult for women in board rooms to speak up. “I additionally want to push myself once in a while; my voice is low, or I don’t need to break.”
Leading the company’s boom
Under Gillian’s leadership, Booking.Com grew from a small Dutch startup to a worldwide leader in tour and tourism and superior operations in more than 224 international locations and territories.
Gillian remembers with a smile that the founders wanted to build the agency from an Excel sheet. This became a time when few hotels had been using the era. Gillian realized that they needed to extend to more nations, have people on the floor, and help their companions succeed by going online. She says:
