‘When I go into a room and it’s mainly men, I have to not care’

When Anna N. Schlegel (née Anna Navarro Descals) first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992, she was a philologist from Olot, a town in northern Catalonia, with little experience in the tech industry. She founded a translation start-up, sold it, and went on to work for some of the biggest companies in the United States, such as Cisco, Xerox, VMware, or Verisign.

Last year, one of the leading magazines in the AI sector, Analytics Insight, named her one of the most influential women in tech for her work as the vice president of NetApp, a leading cloud company which she recently left to become VP for Procore Technologies. She was also recognized for championing women through her work and the non-profits she founded—but Schlegel is far from satisfied with the progress made towards addressing gender inequality.