Dive Brief:

• Sephora's technical workforce is standing out from many other companies in terms of its female employees. A comfortable 62% majority of the company's digital and engineering workers and five of the six digital executive team members are female, a significantly higher margin than the 23% female tech workers of most Silicon Valley companies, reports the Wall Street Journal.

• Explaining the keys to their success, company executives cite a focus on potential rather than the specific skills of a prospective hire, the company's encouragement of risk taking even if it could mean failure and an open environment where employees feel they have a voice.

• Sephora's technology department is coming into its own. The company has integrated mobile apps, augmented reality and digitized platforms to personalize customer experiences and build out a data pool for analytics, according to Digiday.

Dive Insight:

Women in tech are a force to be reckoned with — just look at Fortune's Most Powerful Women list for 2017, which features nine female tech executives. Yet the 20% female workforce in Silicon Valley-based companies and 30% female leadership in major tech companies demonstrate there is still work to be done on gender parity in the enterprise.

The importance of a diverse workforce has been shown time and again, and a diversity scandal or backlash can hurt a company’s financials or publicity. Just ask Google.

Yet ensuring a workforce without gender biases is a nuanced issue because women themselves cannot be grouped into a singular category. Within the female tech workforce, there exists significant disparities between representation of different socioeconomic backgrounds and races as well as in advancement opportunities.

With tech job markets blossoming across the country, the time is ripe for the composition of the technical workforce to shift.