The privilege of being part of a diverse gender-balanced tech team

My team of technologists at Stanford Medicine got a front page mention on Stanford Connected last week on account of our diverse gender-balanced technology team. We build infrastructure, tools, and services used by researchers, patients, participants, and clinicians to collect and combine data to make discoveries and to improve human health and wellness. We launched our first product, a clinical data warehouse (CDW) in 2008, an year ahead of HITECH act. Our CDW has been foundational to thousands of research projects at Stanford in the last decade leading to hundreds of publications and clinical trials. The last two years have seen the second wave of growth and we have been bringing in petascale data and enabling AI in Medicine for Stanford.

It has taken me much longer, three decades, two of which have been in Bay Area, to go from feeling like a minority (immigrant, female, physicist, biotechnologist) in a team to being part of a large, diverse gender-balanced team. I have been building teams for two decades in Bay Area and I can proudly say that all my teams have been diverse. As an immigrant, you learn early that successful professionals come from all walks of life. In Bay Area, if you open your mind to merit, finding diversity is an achievable goal. Gender balance, on the other hand, has eluded me until now.

Stanford Medicine attracts passionate individuals who are excited about the mission to improve human health. It is not unusual to find individuals who have spent decades of their professional life at Stanford. It is even customary for us to celebrate 5 years, 10 years, 15 years and more. Recently I celebrated a colleague retiring after 40 years at Stanford! However, the gender balance in my technology team is sufficiently unique even for Stanford. I have been asking myself the reason and the best I can conjecture is that our team has been fortunate to have had women in leadership roles for greater part of the last decade contributing to an inspiring and supportive workplace for women. I am grateful.