This article was originally published by me on the Campus Diaries website; one can find it here. It was then re-published by TheRepublic, which can be found here.
Background Research
I grew up in an environment where both my working parents shared responsibilities and struck a perfect equilibrium between their work and family lives. I, myself, was much of a nerd who loved mathematics and logical puzzles and never had issues with confidence.
When I first came to a co-educational environment, I noticed that while the boys actively participated in technical discussions and attempted to pioneer the next big innovation, the girls kept their hands down. We didn’t believe we had it in us to change the world. This means that 50% of the world’s technology users formed less that 15% of the technology creators.
This followed a brief, yet disturbing phase where I battled with lack of confidence, frustration and changes in my belief. However, at the end of it, I decided that the existing numbers needed to be changed.
Aim
Increasing the number of women in technical roles to match the high number of female technical users.
Methodology
Over the past few years, I have adopted a 5-step approach to help girls and women discover their love for technology and programming. The approach is as follows:
Step 1:
I set up a Women TechMakers community in Manipal in 2014, to learn to code collaboratively. This community is the first of its kind in the university town. Us, community members get together, discuss work on various projects, participate in programming contests and conduct hackathons and competitions to keep the momentum high. I even made a video featuring many WTM community members from around the world stating why they love to code. This helped motivate my team further.
The first WTM meet up that saw over 35 girl participants.
The WTM international video
Step 2:
I believe that the best way to help someone is to inspire them to follow their passion. Often, young girls and women don’t choose a field of their choice or don’t stay in their chosen field because they don’t believe they can amount to much in the future. To solve this problem, I started a YouTube channel called TheSpectacularFemale, that brings examples of successful and dynamic women from all walks of life. Through these, girls and women can understand that they can excel in any field of their choice and have support from women like us.
The Spectacular Female Episode 1
Step 3:
In a digital world, programming and logical thinking are ways of life and not merely skills. There are people in remote areas, especially in countries like India, who may have access to mobile phones but no knowledge of English or the English script. Even within these communities, boys have a better chance of being educated than girls. In an effort to help these young girls, I have built a compiler for the Sanskrit language, through which these children can get a glimpse into programming and the power of computers, thus fuelling a beginners’ interest. This application will soon be expanded to include many other international languages.
The UI of the Sanskrit Compiler
Step 4:
I believe that empowering women is just as important for girls as it is for boys. Men are no strangers to oppressing stereotypes themselves. Involving them will help them understand our perspective better and incorporating their perspectives will help us attain better success. Thus, in all my attempts, I make sure to keep the boys involved. They have played pivotal roles in helping me organise and realise many of my projects and ventures.
Step 5:
The best possible way to lead is to become what we preach. Thus, I make sure that I am an active participant and occasional winner in the contests, hackathons and events that are conducted for Computer Science students. I also ensure that I include female beginners and coders in my team, for every contest. Our all-women’s teams and mixed-gender team have proudly achieved top ranks in many events.
Results
Due to these continued efforts, WTM Manipal members have fared brilliantly in many contests in the past year itself. We have had scholars to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (India, 2015), Google Summer of Code selects, Microsoft and Oracle Hackathon winners and we also formed nearly 50% of the top company recruits from our campus in 2015.
Future Scope
With this foundation in place, I plan to continue my attempts to excel as a Computer Scientist myself as well as lead other girls and women around me to do the same. I also plan to take this new-found momentum to schools so that students can get an early start with real-world problem solving using computers. I am confident that with all these efforts in place, women like me will significantly lead the next generation of technology innovators.
Mehul Smriti Raje 