The Equity Talk: Pfizer exec Angela Hwang is a power player in the world's vaccination effort. Driving innovation, she said, is all about making people feel comfortable enough to take risks.

• Angela Hwang is the group president of Pfizer's biopharmaceutical division.
• She's responsible for helping produce and distribute the company's COVID-19 vaccine and booster.

As the head of Pfizer's biopharma division, Angela Hwang is responsible for helping address one of the world's foremost challenges: controlling the spread of the coronavirus. The executive, who shepherds a team of 26,000 people, oversees the company's ambitious efforts related to its COVID-19 vaccine and booster.

Pfizer plays a critical role in the world's vaccination push. According to Our World in Data, a project by the University of Oxford, over 500 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been administered worldwide, outpacing Moderna's vaccine at 85 million, Oxford/AstraZeneca's at 67 million, and Johnson & Johnson's at 18 million. And the stakes are incredibly high; over 5.3 million people, including 805,000 Americans, have died of COVID-19.

Hwang, a prominent leader at Pfizer, credits much of her success to championing diversity. She wants to make Pfizer a better place for employees from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2020, Hwang mandated that all leaders have conversations with their direct reports on anti-racism and how to foster community within the company. She then worked with other executives to establish clear diversity, equity, and inclusion goals within her division, including plans to mentor and sponsor people of color. These efforts, she said, will boost innovation at the company.

"When we are trying to solve complex problems, there is no one way of thinking about it," Hwang told Insider. "The more diverse your teams can be, the better your problem-solving can be. You have to create a culture that embraces uncertainty, that allows people to take thoughtful risk-taking."

In the latest installment of The Equity Talk, Hwang spoke about how she drives a culture of innovation at Pfizer, her top leadership principles, and how her childhood shaped her worldview.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

You are under all this pressure to vaccinate the world. How do you balance that with diversity efforts within the company?

At a time when a lot of companies scaled back their diversity efforts, we doubled down. During the pandemic, we kicked off a number of people-development initiatives that really focused on our Hispanic population, our African American population, and our women population.

So we created tiny little cohorts of 12 people each. We designed it to be a safe space with no fixed agenda. We put these 12 people together and said, "What is it that you want to learn? What is the curriculum that you want?" I worked with a group of 12 women, and my job as the leader was to listen and then go out and support them. The goal is to get them to advance to the director level and above. It was such an epiphany for us to see how you can turn learning on its head, how you can make it inclusive.

How are you working to ensure that the COVID-19 vaccines, boosters, and antiviral drugs are distributed in an equitable manner?

I want to confirm and reaffirm that access to all of our medicines — and in particular our vaccines, as well as our protease inhibitor — was always our north star. It was always at the core of how we thought about our entire program and our distribution. It's the reason why we priced it the way that we did, right, which was using an index created by the World Health Organization. We created a pricing model for high-income countries, middle-income countries, and low-income countries. We've been very transparent about that. It's key for us that affordability is not an issue in someone's ability to access the vaccine.

We worked in partnership with various governments around the world to create multiple mechanisms to ensure access to the developing world. So I can say that of all the doses that will have been delivered to the world by the end of 2021, approximately one-third of them are to the developing world.

How has your commitment to diversity contributed to your success at Pfizer?

As I have risen through the organization, I have realized that bringing people along, creating great teams, is how we do great work. Diversity comes in all shapes and sizes. It's not just racial diversity. There's the experience of backgrounds, of upbringings, of where you go to school, etc. All of that contributes to our success.

You have to inspire people. When we can bring other people in and we can uplift others, that's when the world can get better.

What drives your passion for diversity and inclusion?

My passion for DEI really stems from my childhood. I grew up in South Africa in the time of apartheid. Simple things like me going to school, or just even where you had a residence — these were not normal things for people of color. You had to get permission or authorization to do things.

It became very clear to me, from the time I was little, that things are not equal. There was no equity, and there was no opportunity. I had to get special permission to dorm at my college because it was located in a white neighborhood.

At the same time, however, I had the incredible support and the resourcefulness of my parents. I was able to grow and develop out of pure resourcefulness — never taking no for an answer. Because of this, I've always felt this incredible responsibility to pay it forward. Life doesn't get better and the world doesn't get better if we all just sort of stick to what we have, right?

What's one of your key leadership traits?

You have to inspire people. I truly believe that to do that, to inspire people, you have to respect and really believe in the whole person.

We spend a lot of time at work, but it's not just about work. I want to know the whole person. I want to know who I'm working with — you know, what's important to them outside of work. When you really respect and you care about colleagues, both their professional lives as well as their personal lives, I think great things happen, because people then can bring their whole selves to work.

Pfizer has four values: courage, excellence, equity, and joy. Talk to me about equity and your plans to push this value forward at the company.

What we mean by equity is that everyone is seen, heard, and cared for. Equity is not just for the people that work here, it's for our patients and the public that we serve. And so I think that will continue to be our guiding principle. It drives how we continue to innovate and think through our access, our affordability, our science.