Superbloom Studios Newsletter

March, 2023

What’s new?

This March, we bring you some good news from around the world. We stand for an equal world free of discrimination and here we highlight some good strides made in that area. Let us talk about it!

Menstrual leaves introduced in Spain:

Women in Spain now have the opportunity to take 3-5 days of menstrual leave, funded by the government. A few countries in this world have made this option available like Japan and Indonesia but Spain becomes the first European country to do so.?Opposition has been raised by a labour organisation in Spain, that this will stigmatise women in the workplace. A recent PIL in India was also raised on the matter and the court decided that this was a policy and not a judicial issue.? They also noted that it might disincentivize firms from hiring women. Over one-thirds of people who menstruate suffer from menstrual pain and shouldn’t we account for this when it comes to designing policies for the workplace? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.?

Seattle becomes first jurisdiction to ban caste discrimination:?

Around 5.4 million South Asians live in the US and in many of these communities, the centuries old oppressive system of caste still affects people’s access to resources and opportunities. Regulators in California sued CISCO for not taking adequate action against managers who were casteist against a Dalit employee, even though the employee had previously raised a formal complaint. The main reason for this is because the US employment law doesn’t formally recognize or protect employees against caste based discrimination.? Equality Labs, a civil rights organisation, found that almost 67% of Dalit employees faced discrimination at their US workplaces and 1 in 3 Dalit students report being discriminated against during their education. A Google employee received a warning and had to leave the company for inviting the founder of Equality Labs to give a talk on caste discrimination. The talk was also cancelled as many employees protested that it ‘hurt their religious sentiments’.?

Wherever South Asians go, caste unfortunately travels and therefore? it is a welcome move that Seattle has become the first US jurisdiction to formally ban caste based discrimination. In 2022, Apple also banned caste-based discrimination in its code of conduct policy. This will hopefully lead to other companies around the work to formally ban caste discrimination and create a fairer, more equitable workplace for everyone.?

What have we been up to?

Introducing a few speakers for second phase of the Superbloom Fellows Program:?

The first phase of the Superbloom Fellows Program has been going really well, headed by Dr. Ramya Ranganathan. In the second phase of the program, we are extremely excited to collaborate with 3 amazing women who are going to deliver sessions with the fellows: Annabelle “Bee” Baumann, Dr. Beth Duckles and Ivannia Martinez. To read more about them, click here.

Introducing Coffee with Superbloom: our very own Interview series!

In this new series, we are looking to interview amazing people from diverse fields, to learn from their life and career experiences working across cultures, time zones and more! We are starting things off with an interview of? Superbloom Studios’ co-founders Dr. Raji Baskaran, Ms. Kalaivani Mattern and Ms. Aruna Seshadri. Check out the interview here.

Keynote speech by Dr. Raji Baskaran:

Our partner Dr Raji Baskaran was an invited keynote speaker at the second annual Wikipedia technology summit, 2023.?

You can watch the talk on gender data gap and why we started Project Hidden Voices in her talk here.

Advisor Highlight: Michael C Smith, Denvr Dataworks

“Business is about trusted relationships” notes Mike in our interview, as much or more so than technical skill or education.? He also sees himself as a “connector” at heart.

He has been succeeding in his business of consulting on strategy, business development & finance since 2003.? Earlier in life, beginning half way through high school, Mike was recruited by an Olympic coach and began training with the Canadian Olympic Track & Field team where he garnered many top awards and was ranked among the top 10 athletes in the world for 10 years as a decathlete.? He was reported to be “in a class by himself” from 1985-1999.? At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Smith was the opening ceremony’s flag bearer for Canada.? He still holds the world's best performance for the 3 combined throwing events in decathlon (shot put, discus, javelin).? When questioned about the mindset he had that enabled him to achieve his many medals, he answered like a true athlete who thoroughly enjoyed rising to the occasions in competition where he would block out everything but his performance and be in a state of confident stress using his training to excel.?

He recalls that he was “comfortable with the discomfort” of training and carries that into his work life.

Smith attended the University of Toronto (1987 – 1991) during his athletic career where he completed the Commerce program.? Today his consulting work is chiefly in business development and venture capital and he currently works with the Alberta-based Denvr Dataworks, one of Canada’s newest tech companies where he feeds his curiosity for AI/ML technology.?

The focus of his passion outside of work and family life is for children and for the environment. One of the ways he walks his talk is by serving as Director, Secretary and Ombudsman for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Calgary, Alberta area.? He is keenly aware of the advantages of the early encouragement and coaching he received and wants to see that more children receive that kind of early incentive for excellence to visualise and pursue their goals.?

Quoting Mike, “Seeing and interacting with the world through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion has the potential to be a powerful force for progress in the 21st century. Superbloom Studios and their Hidden Voices project are shining examples of how we can accelerate and nurture this process to support the improvement of business performance and enhance the progress of society as a whole.”

What are we reading? The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the women who helped win World War II?

Before I picked up this book, I read a review that said the people in the book were ‘so ordinary but extraordinary at the same time’. The book is not fictional but reads like a novel and has pieces of scientific history sandwiched between the chapters. I was fascinated (and shocked) to learn about women who played monumental roles in developing science that quite literally changed the world but didn’t get the credit they deserved. In the book, there is a woman who wants to become a scientist, but ends up being a statistician (who has a super important job!) just because the University refused to accept her into the engineering program. Another woman in the book has to plead with her mother, and get her brother to convince her to just go out and work in a different city. Another woman had to leave her children at home, because she knew that black children weren’t welcome where she was going to go to work. The book is set in a time that had deep rooted social issues and reading the stories of women who lived, worked and raised families in that era, reminds me of how far we have come.?

Coming to the book itself, it is set in Oakridge Tennessee, where people (primarily women) were hired to enrich Uranium to develop the atomic bomb. Here’s the catch: None of these people exactly knew what they were doing. There was strict censorship and even spies to make sure that people? didn’t say too much. Everyone seems to be okay with this. Patriotism mainly drives the decision: If my brothers are fighting abroad, then this is the least I can do to help end the war, opines one young woman. As I was reading, I wondered whether a project like this would be possible in today’s day and age. Will so many ordinary people be okay with such staunch censorship? Homes were destroyed and people were forcefully replaced to construct the sites to build these military complexes. The cost of war is more than just the money that goes into it, it is the families that are displaced and the lives that are forever lost. Many of the people who worked at Oakridge, did so for money obviously, but they also had a deep sense of patriotism in supporting the war effort. It was interesting to see that at the end, the sense of shame that accompanied the pride when they realised what they had exactly been a part of. This might be looking at history with today’s lens but to me it seemed incredibly unethical to involve people, without full disclosure in developing something that took so many lives.?

The people at Oakridge were all new. None of them had any previous connections to each other. Yet, they were able to form a community. There are a lot of human things that happen amidst all the secrecy- romance, friendship, queuing up to watch films and socializing about? anything except why they were actually there. Many of the women remained in Oakridge even after the project ended and the book is a beautiful ode to the people who were a part of a period in history that has shaped modern society. The author keeps switching between characters and while that did help maintain the pace, I felt that I didn’t know any of the women in the book well at the end of it. But nevertheless, it is overall a well written, fascinating read.?

Art Highlight: Manjula Variyam, Attorney at Akona IP PC?

(Suffocating, a study on maintaining appearances. Acrylic on canvas)

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