piXel mind

Every-time I see a post about Women in Tech, I am left a little bewildered. “But”, I find myself wanting to say to someone, “have you looked? There are already many women in Tech.” Tech is a sector made up of many job functions, and you will find many many women in all of those. Here, off the top of my head are women I have worked with: Amy, Ann, Jan, Jenny, Jill, Rochelle, Ana, Pegah, Sushma, Nithya, Terri, Terry, Jean, Gemma, Eileen, Caren, Janet, Jen , Nancy, Rama, Ana Helena, Anuja, Anne, Anya, Devjani, Mary, Robin, Lopa. Laura, Kristin, Pratima, Geetha, Uma, Urzula..

Perhaps, the real questions are: How many women are there in leadership positions. How many have a education in hard sciences , math, computer science and are working in engineering functions in high tech. Let me leave the first question for another time and address the second one alone.

When I came to the US almost two decades ago to start my graduate school work, I was truly horrified to learn that there were actually fewer girls interested in Engineering than there were in my school in India. I had naively assumed that in a more Western setting, women would be evenly distributed across disciplines. Today, as as parent of an almost middle schooler, I listen to the laments of mothers, who are starting to see their daughters turn away from math and science because it is seen by their peers as “difficult” and “not cool”.  Here now is something I can truly lament. Children, at the very moment that they should be introduced to the joys of a subject being turned off it for what seems like a ill informed fad. Let us design an environment where they can explore and learn to their hearts content, where they understand the inner beauty of some of these subjects – then choose to persue them if they so desire. This is vastly more important than insisiting that several of them appear at the far end of the funnel.

Any talk of women in tech must atleast be vaguely cognizant of the fact that if they are in tech , then there is someplace where thy are not. As my mind tries to find purchase on a local loss, I realize that she too was a woman in tech. A  rocket scientist no less. I remember her as someone who organized the school play last year and put in hours of work for three months – so that my son could be the loudest rooster to grace any stage in any universe (period).

So, then this: perhaps if they women are not in tech, they are somewhere else, where the need is greater, the good they do greater.