Resilience through diversity: How women are strengthening telecommunications
Most people don't think about the miles of fiber buried deep beneath their feet until something goes wrong. In the world of high-capacity infrastructure, we live by a singular code: redundancy is a requirement, not a luxury. At Light Source Communications (LSC), we spend our days designing and building underground, diverse dark fiber routes that ensure hyperscalers and enterprises stay connected, no matter what happens on the surface.
As we celebrate International Women's Day, I've been reflecting on how the principles we use to build the world's most robust fiber networks - diversity, redundancy, and resilience - are the same principles we must apply to leadership and gender parity in the technology sector.
In network engineering, "diversity" refers to physical path separation. If you have two fiber lines running in the same trench and a backhoe hits that trench, your network goes down. To achieve true resilience, you need "diverse routing" - completely separate paths that ensure if one route is compromised, the data finds another way through.
For too long, the leadership "routes" in the telecommunications and infrastructure industries have lacked this diversity. When every person in the room comes from the same background, and shares the same life experiences, the "network" of that organization becomes fragile. It creates a single point of failure in decision-making.
For my part, I took an atypical route to the telecommunications world, having roles related to the English degree I earned at the University of Michigan before taking time away from the workforce to raise my three daughters. I was hungry when I went back to work and motivated to show - not just tell, but show - my girls that they can make their dreams come true, by living mine every day. I set out to achieve big things, and we are now seeing tremendous momentum building behind LSC. My strength of managing the business side of things is balanced by my company's other co-founder, Pete Empie, and his background. Pete is a technical genius with decades of experience in the industry. Together, our diverse backgrounds and "routes" help to make LSC agile, resilient and dynamic.
In the era of AI and hyperscale growth, we cannot afford rigidity. The demand for data is exploding. We are building the physical foundation for the next century of human innovation. If the architects of that foundation - the people deciding where the fiber goes, how the data centers are connected, and how the AI models are powered - are not a diverse group, we are building a legacy of bias into the very ground beneath us.
Resilience is built through inclusion.
Throughout my career leading LSC, I have seen firsthand the challenges that come with being a woman in male-dominated field. You need to speak up and advocate for yourself. Just as LSC wins by being more nimble, more responsive, and more creative than legacy providers, women in tech often win by seeing the routes others miss. We bring a consultative, partnership-focused approach to a world that has historically been "one size fits all." The good news is progress is being made, and the more that we stand up and speak out, the more we begin to see that change.
But it's not enough to stand up alone. Resilience also requires a support system. In fiber, we talk about "ring protection" - a loop that ensures data can always travel in the opposite direction to reach its destination. For women in tech, our "ring protection" is our community. It is the mentors, the peers, and the champions who act as our redundant systems when we face the inevitable "line cuts" of corporate life. I am fortunate to have a partner in Pete who is fully supportive and trusting in my ability to lead this company in the male-dominated tech world, as well as the rest of the LSC team.
This International Women's Day, the theme of "Inspiring Inclusion" reminds us that we are all network architects in our own regard. We have a responsibility to build "diverse routes" for the next generation of women engineers, CEOs, and innovators. We do this by moving beyond performative support and into the technical foundations of inclusion: advocating for female leadership in digital infrastructure, mentoring the next wave of "boots-on-the-ground" builders and ensuring that our boardrooms are as diverse as the networks we build.
As the foundational infrastructure partner for the AI era, LSC, takes pride in being the backbone of the digital world. We build the secure, scalable routes our customers need to thrive in an AI-driven future, enabling hyperscalers and enterprises to power GPU-dense workloads at a global scale. But, ultimately, as CEO, my mission is to ensure that the human infrastructure of our industry is just as resilient as our underground fiber.
The future of technology is being laid today, one mile at a time. Let's make sure those routes are diverse, redundant, and built to last. By empowering more women to lead at the physical layer of tech, we aren't just celebrating a day - we are engineering a more resilient world for everyone.