The Sisterhood that is shaking up the Tech

Women in tech didn't matter to people until tech started mattering to people: Rachel Sklar (Change the Ratio)

I recently read a book titled Geek Girls Rising and since it happens to be International Women's Day today, I thought of sharing its message with you all . It is a truly inspirational and motivating read and broadly looks at the women who are working to change the gender ratio in tech. In this book, Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens have brought to light the relentless and inspiring stories of women who have truly risen to power and position with their resilience, passion and perseverance. The writers take us through the journey of some of the women entrepreneurs and technologists who are inspiring and enabling more women to enter and stay in the industry.

The book leaves you with a renewed sense of energy to work hard in achieving your dreams and also emphasises on helping other women in their journey, through collaborations and guidance , forming a lasting sisterhood along the way. The book shines a spotlight on a number of women in tech, but I have picked five whose story I'd like to share, to encourage and inspire all of you, irrespective of your gender.

Kathryn Minshew

CEO & Founder at The Muse - a career development platform.

Kathryn founded Pretty Young Professionals, a networking site for women, before launching The Muse with two co-founders. After having graduated from Duke university, she worked as a management consultant and at the Clinton Health Access Initiative before embarking on the entrepreneurial life. When she was just starting her entrepreneurial journey, Kathryn was sometimes tagged as being too nice to run a business and was in fact advised to take a cushy office job and quit.

Kathryn along with her co-founders had participated in the Y Combinator where she faced a lot of sexist comments about the product itself, since they initially pitched the Muse to be the ultimate online destination for young female job seekers.

"Some actually said,'I am just worried you will lose all your clients when they turn thirty-implying that all our users would stop being users when they turn thirty because they would be having babies and not care about their careers"

Today, The Muse is amongst world's most innovative company list and Kathryn Minshew was listed among Inc. (magazine)'s Female Founders 100 List, In October of 2018, Muse co-founders Kathryn and Alex were awarded the New York on Tech Innovators and Disruptors Award, given for the first time that year in New York City. 

Yunha Kim

CEO & Founder of Simple Habit

Kim left her Investment Analyst job in 2013 to start Locket, an app that lets people customize their lock screens. The app was named Google's best apps of 2014 and raised $3.2M. Following that , In 2016, Kim turned her focus to meditation and built her own meditation platform called 'The Simple Habit'. In 2017, Simple Habit was part of Y Combinator's Winter Batch.

"I would say that the number one obstacle to being female in startups or in the tech industry is believing that being female is a disadvantage. Instead of listening to that voice , think more about the fact that there are plenty of other women who have all succeeded."

Yunha wrote a famous post on Medium, titled What I learned in My First Year as a Female Startup CEO, where she highlighted the pros and cons of being a female CEO. She writes that ultimately it is all about how you frame your perspective.

Today Simple Habit, also nicknamed as the Netflix for meditation, is the YC backed 5-minute meditation app for busy people , is ranked #1 in the app store.

Dona Sarkar

Head of the Windows Insider Program at Microsoft.

If you’re one of the people using Windows and if you’ve ever looked for an app or setting on your computer, you’ve probably used the search box that Sarkar’s team made.

Dona's story is about perseverance and self belief. For Sarkar, the position is part of a long-held passion for empowering people through technology, a desire that started when she was a teenager growing up in inner-city Detroit. At the time, she knew no one who worked in software but had read about recent college graduates starting their own companies to solve big problems using technology.

"We want tech to be this invisible fairy godmother who makes things happen, so you don’t have to stitch the gown or arrange for transportation. We just want you to go to the ball."

Most recently, Sarkar led the developer engagement program for Microsoft HoloLens, enabling enthusiasts to make rich holographic experiences on the Universal Windows Platform. She taught for Microsoft’s Holographic Academy and recently created the inaugural HoloHacks hackathon, a vibrant event in Seattle that drew a diverse crowd of coders, Unity developers, 3D artists, filmmakers and sound engineers.

Laila Shabeer

Founder and CEO at Girls Make Games and LearnDistrict

Laila has worked hard to create a sisterhood among girls who play video games by teaching them how to create them. In the video gaming industry, only 12% of developers are women and Laila wants to empower girls with a much larger role in the market.

Girls Make Games is a series of summer camps, workshops and game jams designed to inspire the next generation of designers, creators, and engineers. She started the educational gaming studio with only twenty girls in 2014 after trying to recruit female game developers to work on a project and not finding any.

I went to MIT. I was in finance. I was at a think tank. I was doing all these different things, and I never felt like I was in a boys' world until I entered video gaming. It is truly, truly a boys' world. That's really mind boggling because women are great storytellers and they love video games growing up."

Today, GMG has reached over 5,500 girls in 51 cities worldwide and has joined forces with Google Play's Change the Game and the ESA Foundation to challenge teens to use their creativity and skills to develop a game idea, and to take their first step towards change.

Alexandra Diracles

Co-founder & CEO at Vidcode YCS16

Vidcode is a programming software and curriculum that teaches students to code through creativity. The curricular approach enables students to create video filters, simulations, augmented reality, and other creative projects -- all while learning the fundamentals of computer programming.

Alexandra started her career as a photographer and business owner. She studied computer programming in graduate school and fell in love with the creative potential of code. Since then, she has made it her mission to create tools that help teen girls find their path and passion to code. She hopes that one day Vidcode will allow teachers to seamlessly integrate computer science in lessons in humanities classes like history, social studies, english and visual arts.

"We want to see girls telling their parents about [coding]. we want girls telling their friends about it. We want the experience that they have on Vidcode to incite those conversations."

Vidcode was voted Best Learning Site 2015 by Common Sense Media

This Women's Day, let us work together to inspire more girls into the STEM fields. Let us work togetHER to normalize, encourage and talk to the next generation of women. Every single woman out there is capable of bringing a change, it only needs a little inspiration and a little motivation.