Roberts and her team worked diligently to ensure a smooth transition after Crunchyroll was acquired by the Funimation Global Group in 2021. Her team launched the Crunchyroll app for Nintendo Switch, the first app on the console to offer offline viewing. She’s also the founder of the ERG Funimation Tech Women, which focuses on the advancement of women in technology.
“The most game-changing moment in my career occurred when I hired a leader with more domain expertise and raw talent than I had. Not only did I not get fired for bringing in someone ‘better’ than me—I actually got promoted and given more responsibility. It taught me great leaders aren’t great because of what they can do on their own but because they hire and nurture other leaders to build strong and diverse teams that can scale.”
What should companies do to ensure more women are in senior leadership roles? Companies need to measure senior leadership percentages at every level of leadership, not just as an overall number. Unconscious bias is real, and as a leader it is important to recognize and grow the leaders who need more diversity. Today we still see far too many companies patting themselves on the back for their gender diversity, when all of their diversity is in junior roles or in functions that tend to have more women in them. To break this cycle and aim for more meaningful and lasting diversity, companies should take a data-driven approach, setting targets and measuring not only their overall diversity numbers, but also diversity numbers at every level of seniority and by department. And they should take these targets as seriously as they take their other OKRs, setting stretch targets and reporting them to the company in the same way they do more traditional business performance metrics like revenue growth and profitability. When I hire, I start at the recruiting funnels and ask for an equal number of women candidates, which in the technical teams I hire in requires significantly more work. I also insist we look at attrition numbers and promotion numbers, to make sure the women we hire are being as successful as the men we hire. Again, that’s more work, and some people resent having to do it. But you know what? That extra work is always worth it.
