With a family that supports you in all your endeavors and a mentor who guides you through every step of the way, life was easy for me than what most womenintech face, Until I started standing up for womenintech initiatives.
Where I come from?
My coding journey started when I was a schoolgirl and was taught programming by one of the most passionate teachers. I fell in love with it immediately. I kept up with it through college C, C++, Java, Javascript, PHP.
I landed my first job by presenting UG capstone project to my X-boss and forever mentor, and the rest is history.
I started off by learning python, transforming into a Chatbot developer in the next 2 years. The following year I ventured as a backend systems engineer, now I am a DevOps/Backend engineer for an R&D team at Saama technologies.
Womenintech
A lot of people ask me "why womenintech?", "How can you bring diversity if you host women-only events?", "where is equality if you are going to give special attention to women?"
Womenintech events are all about creating safe spaces for woman, this triggers a lot of men claiming "we are not monsters". Of course not.
- For all the times I have entered a meetup and felt like I don't belong
- For all the times' women left unnoticed
- For all the time men felt uncomfortable boarding a lift full of women
Safe spaces are all about creating spaces where you feel you belong. Be it a office space or a meetup venue.
You can't empower everyone
When you are empowered, you feel powerful. You would want to share and spread the word to as many people as possible. But, that backfired a lot. You can only expose people to ways of the world, Empowerment has to come from within.
- It's not your job
- It's a battle you don't have to fight
- It's not worth your mental health
- It's not your fault
WomenInTech in workplace
Walk into any IT company, you would find women developers patiently listening to everything everyone says in a meeting, write minutes for a meeting which was not theirs in the first place.
How often have we communicated our ideas only to our peers in private only for it to pop up in the next meeting as someone else's idea robbing all the credibility?
How often have we felt so voiceless in a meeting?
How often have we been talked over by people with an overpowering voice?
I had to train my voice to be heard, literally.
Being the only women of most communities/teams who support womenintech
- I was asked to bring more women when it was clearly not my job
- The team/community was definitely not woman-friendly.
The Good side of WomenInTech
Of course, just like everything else, it is not going to be a cakewalk, but with the right medium and right set of people, your voice can reach as many people as possible.
Getting Featured in #MondayMotivation by GDG
That moment when #YourStory wants to write your story
Kickstarting women coding Clubs
I got a chance to initiate women coding clubs at three colleges in Chennai, these women are going ahead to make wonders.
Pulling off Womentechmakers events
Spreading Equal amounts of tech, while supporting womenintech
What lies ahead?
The intention of this blog is not to scare people away or to blame anyone. Most of the problems are because of the ideas ingrained into us by our social upbringing.
Breaking those internal algorithms is harder than fixing bugs on legacy systems.
The first step is to acknowledge that the problem exists before getting offended. The second is to work towards creating a world that's fair for/to all of us.
Top comments (7)
I really enjoyed reading this. Congratulations on everything you have achieved and the difference you are making for so many women.
Thank you :)
Wow, I can realize that most of the mentioned points here are so right. I hope, the tech industry will acknowledge that the problem exists and always try to find a way to fix it.
Thank you for writing this article. Hats off to you!
you are awesome! 👍
Thank Raghav :)
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