Jessica Guerrero - Shaking Up Approaches to Move the Needle
Higher Education, M.S.Ed., 2009
Over her career, Jessica Guerrero, GED’09, has held multiple roles at higher education institutions while maintaining a single goal—to provide access to people of color. Now global head of diversity, equity, and inclusion for Google’s Cloud Go-to-Market (GTM) division, she works from a New York office to manage a bevy of teams that drive strategy and share best practices with client companies.
“My heart lies in this work,” says Guerrero. Her passion springs not only from her lived experiences, but also from her first job at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships, where she worked for a college access program while pursuing her master’s degree in higher education at Penn GSE.
“I grew up believing that education was the great equalizer,” she says. Through her work at the Netter Center, however, she saw the hurdles marginalized communities faced in gaining access to college—from obtaining college preparation and advising, to meeting financial requirements, to finding a sense of belonging on campus. In class at Penn GSE, her eyes were further opened to inequities even as she learned about alternative models and envisioned “what could be possible if universities and even K–12 institutions were redesigned to be places where everyone could thrive.”
After working in diversity roles at Princeton University and New York University, she returned to Penn as senior associate director of diversity at the Wharton School. There she served on the MBA admissions committee, advocating for students she had recruited. Having joined Google in 2020, she aims to effect change for the 14,000 employees of Google Cloud GTM, which offers an array of computing services in areas such as storage, data, security, and communication.
“What could be possible if universities and even K–12 institutions were redesigned to be places where everyone could thrive?”
—Jessica Guerrero, GED’09
“Google is a pioneer that is shaking up the workplace and shaking up diversity,” Guerrero says. One innovation she rolled out offers micro training modules—30 to 45-minute sessions—that use virtual reality in partnership with Praxis Labs to explore workplace scenarios pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Already, she says, employee interest is high and behavioral changes have occurred within teams. Guerrero also is changing up the content of training to include what she calls the how—“how to be allies, how to run inclusive hiring practices, how to think about culture when putting a team together.”
In her role, she focuses on “opening different thinking pathways”—for instance, arguing that the company could increase the number of women hired as engineers by recruiting from a wider range of colleges. It’s a case she makes with data, grateful for time spent at Penn GSE learning “to look at data, make sense of it, and construct strong arguments.”
For Guerrero, that focus on data makes her target clear: she strives for documented impact, to produce “actionable items that can be measured over time that move the needle.”
This article appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Penn GSE Magazine.
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