07-Mar-2022
When Amanda Baumann started at Mako Surgical Corp. in 2008, she was working on the development of joint replacement implant systems. Along the way, as Mako Surgical Corp. became part of Stryker, she became involved locally in the Stryker’s Women’s Network (SWN) South Florida chapter, an employee resource group formed by employees who aspire to advance women in healthcare. Inspired by the idea to improve the number of women entering the engineering profession, Amanda eventually stepped into a leadership role with Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), a subcommittee of SWN. “We want to make sure we have diverse representation across the organization, and I’m specifically focused on this goal within our technical capacities,” Amanda says.
One of our diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) commitments is to strengthen the diversity of our workforce. Our goal is to attract, develop and advance talent that reflects the diversity of our customers, patients, communities and stakeholders—a goal that Amanda is helping us achieve.
“We’re partnering with our customers who are also a changing demographic,” she says. “Creating new products requires people with a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds.”
Our people are encouraged and empowered to bring their whole selves to work. “If I’m spending all this extra energy trying to be somebody I’m not, I’m not focused on robotics,” Amanda says. “And I need to be focused on robotics.”
Manoshi Stoker, director of transatlantic research at our Joint Replacement Division, is also involved with SWN. Manoshi’s passion for engineering started early in her career when she was working with children who had spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders. “I learned that I could help them through my engineering skills,” Manoshi says. While working with the kids, Manoshi started her own lab to assess people with knee and hip replacements. “That really got me interested in working at Stryker,” she says, which she started doing in 2010.
At Stryker, our mission is making healthcare better, “and that’s where team members like Amanda and I come into play,” says Manoshi. “We help make devices that work really well, work even better through robotics and virtual reality technologies. It’s super rewarding.”
As far as our society has come – even as more women enter fields like science and engineering – there is still a long way to go. But Amanda, Manoshi and many others at Stryker are having the conversations and doing the work to advance us forward. “It’s easier in the short term to not invest in DE&I and to not celebrate International Women's Day or International Women in Engineering Day,” Amanda says. “It’s easier to pretend like everything is fine. And that’s not the route we’re going to take, because we want to change the world.”
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