#VoicesOfIndia- Getting Geeky with Prasha Sarwate Dutra
Prasha feels grateful for a diverse and inclusive team she found herself working with. She tells Aishwarya Chaturvedi how the experience has shaped a podcast that celebrates women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM).
Prasha grew up across different towns in India before moving to the US for a Master’s education. She is a mechanical engineer and works with a manufacturing facility in Rhode Island. This one day, she realized that her engineering team is an all-women, extremely diverse team. And that’s where the journey began.
Let’s begin with how this venture started.
Aishwarya: I read about this letter you wrote to your all-women engineering team, which kickstarted ‘Her STEM Story’. Tell me all about this letter — What did the letter say? What inspired you to write it? What was the occasion when you sent out the letter?
Prasha: So there are a couple of things that led to Her STEM Story.
Part 1:
I was at work. It was August 2017 and we were all women in the team. All mechanical engineers. One of our colleagues was a Caucasian, an African-American, a Chinese, one from Lebanon, and myself from India. So it was pretty cool — all women engineers from different countries.
At that point, I didn’t know a lot about diversity. All I knew were things I read on Facebook, Stanford pages — about how we need more women in STEM. But, nothing about the actual problems or conflicts.
Backstory: My mom was the first woman officer at her work. She worked with the Govt in 1987 and before her, they wouldn’t hire women. So we grew up in a sort of sensitive environment, in that way. Everybody’s mom used to be at home while our mom used to at work. So we were the latch-key kids, we would come home, open the door, stay alone, mom dad would come home at night.
So I felt that someone should be talking about this (women in STEM), and I wrote a letter to my team. THE LETTER.
But it wasn’t received the way I wished it would. I don’t think people understand the gravity of it, especially in an engineering setup.
I started reading about it and found that there are only about 7% women in mechanical engineering, in the US. I then wrote to the CEO that it is important, it has to be important. That got me to thinking this (advocating for women in STEM) is something I can do.
Part 2:
I got married in September 2017 and we were taking a trip to the venue. I was talking to this 14 yo in the car. She was telling me that she wants to travel the world, apply all the makeup by Sephora, and asked how can she do it.
I remember looking at my bridesmaids and realizing they are all engineers.
And I was like —
“Oh my god! Look at these women doing all these things — making 6 digit salaries, traveling the world, breaking societal norms. There is so much to learn from all these women. They have so much passion for telling their stories.”
So that kind of stuck with me. Within a month, I bought the domain. I made a list of all the girls I know. Because, you know, being an Indian we know more engineers than other countries. In my head, I am thinking, everyone would want to share their story.
So yes, the domain was there, I bought it, started the website, and that’s how it started.
On Diversity and Inclusion ….
Aishwarya: It’s interesting to me that you mentioned that you weren’t very aware of the whole situation with the lack of women in technology-driven careers — you didn’t see it as much of a problem. Can you walk me through the journey of what changed your mind? What committed you to the cause?
Prasha: I think on the surface I knew that there should be more women in the field. I don’t think even my mom being a pioneer in her own field realized what she was doing and why it was important but she knew it was important.
I think in India people want you to have a successful career; especially so for women. So they can get married to a ‘’well-settled guy’’, sometimes. And sometimes — particularly in my family — so that they are financially independent.
(In my home) we were always told that if we don’t have our own money and our own job, it’s difficult to lead a good life. But they didn’t realize that there’s a bigger problem out there, a bigger impact — Of having more financially independent women.
With the podcast, now I have finally interviewed 100 plus women in all types of professions- science, technology, engineering, math, arts, communications. After I spoke with all these women, I learned from their experiences why this issue is important.
I learned that diversity and inclusion have become branding issues— you see brochures of big shot companies and colleges, the people on the brochure, especially in the US, sometimes they are all made up, to represent inclusion.
But I think the hack is finally getting to understand it, especially with the emergence of technologies like AI. Because a lot of these technologies fail when you don’t use a diverse picture of the population.
The hack is thinking about diversity and inclusion in terms of business. It will make more sense for the companies to invest in diversity and then invest in education.
Diversity vs Inclusion
So they are two different things — Diversity means you are open to talent and inclusion means how you retain that talent after you’ve hired it.
Now, why is it important? One might ask — Why should I hire a woman, ‘just because she is a woman’?
No, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t hire a woman ‘just because’. You should hire talent but you don’t know that you have an unconscious bias that is stopping you from hiring that woman.
Talent doesn’t have to look like you, right?
With this bias, you only think you’re hiring talent but you’re not. In most cases, people are not even going to colleges outside of their alma mater.
When you look at the higher-level executives, they will always be from the same background. The same color. Same socioeconomic background. And they keep making the same policies because they don’t know any better.
So to break the cycle, you first need to break the unconscious bias and act consciously when hiring the best talent because you can sub-consciously restrict where you get talent from.
Once you hire the talent, the question is about retaining them.
Industries are struggling to do that, and that’s where tech is going all out. You look at Google, Facebook, and such companies — the amount of money they are spending on retentions is crazy. Google has 18 or 20 restaurants in California where the employees could eat for free.
But what they do not realize is that retention is simple. Just treating someone with respect is all you need to do. And we’re just not conscious of it — the whole diversity and inclusion dialogue.
It’s not just about hiring the best talent. Why do you need such talent? I always give people this example. Suppose you’re solving a problem.
In school, at least in India, we have very individual schooling. There aren’t a lot of group projects or groupings in general. But you get into the workforce, and you’re trying to solve the problems on your own. It gets stressful, you can’t solve it because you’re not meant to solve it alone.
Let more people come in the room, people who shouldn’t look like you, they shouldn’t be exactly who you are, and the problem will be solved in seconds, or minutes, because these people are going to bring in a fresh perspective.
And that’s why you have teams while at work, or departments. This is the case for every industry, no industry has only one department that solves all the problems.
So diversity brings in diverse ideas that solve complex problems quicker. And in business that converts to less time and more money. In the real world, it means solving problems like cancer, or the black hole, going to Mars, all that stuff.
So diversity inclusion is not a call for entitlement, it is a call for meritocracy.
Talking about the podcast...
Aishwarya: Have you come across any stories that make you feel that your podcast is making an impact already?
Prasha: I think it’s very difficult to measure impact. This is actually the problem with all non-profits.
To give you a background, we started as a podcast and then we merged with STEM Advocacy Institute, a non-profit think tank based in Boston that’s providing non-profit infrastructure for projects like ours where we don’t know what we are. Some people have a business and then they start a podcast, others try to make money through podcasts. But I realized it early that it’s too difficult in terms of downloads and all that stuff because, you know, Oprah Winfrey has a podcast so why would anyone want to tune in to my podcast. Haha.
That being said, I feel like we needed some support. You need sustainability in any project you do and that’s why we went to the STEM Advocacy Institute and joined their group to their framework of a non-profit and then do fundraising through that.
With a non-profit, there’s a lot of thought into how you show the world that what you’re doing really has some value in it. In the non-profit world, downloads don’t mean anything because that’s not in your hands. So though we built a community of more than 10,000 women and did a lot of work in making those dialogues, we haven’t decided one metric we want to focus on.
But that being said, I know at least 4–5 women who have started their own shows because of our podcast.
I know Shweta, she reached out to me saying she listened to my show and was inspired to start her own podcast, Science with Shweta.
And she’s doing fabulous, she’s probably going to be one of the pioneers in the field in India. Of course, there were a bunch of other factors that motivated her so I can’t take the full credit. But we’re definitely creating some space for women to start their own thing.
We also have Katherine who is an SAI fellow.
So what we’re trying to do through the SAI fellow program is that we create a space for people to submit their ideas and then when we find one worth for a podcast, I will assign it to that fellow. Then the sponsors provide them with the podcasting training and equipment so that they can go start their own show. But in exchange, they need to interview 3–4 women for our show. So that way we get a diverse taste of stories because they would ask different questions as per their own experiences.
Katherine is going to start her own show in August which is called Endocrine Disruptors podcast which is for people who study hormones. And it makes me super happy to see her start her own show because of Her STEM Story.
I can tell you stories of 4–5 women who are actually taking action because of the show. But in my own life,
This show completely changed everything in terms of how I see the world, how I connect myself at work, how I am more conscious and more passionate about supporting the community.
And I do it because I want to and not for any other thing. I am sure more stories will surface and we will be able to make an even greater impact.
Episode Recommendations coming up ….
Aishwarya: Could you share a couple of episodes from the STEM story for our readers?
Prasha: The first one would be episode 3 which is an episode about Britney who works in the biochemical industry.
The title of the episode is great, it goes like ‘Practicing Medicine through Engineering’ so it talks about how the biochemical industry supports in saving lives, how she went through a phase of depression and use engineering to get out of it.
Then we have Episode 4, Path to Paleontology, which is about another Britney who was bad at Math and ended up not getting into STEM classes because of that.
In India, and the US too, we categorize people in the way that if they aren’t great at Math, they can’t study Science. She ended up doing English and History because she loved writing. She then went towards the museum industry in California because she always loved dinosaurs, she always loved Paleontology. And through the museum, she went on a field trip, studied about fossils, and now she is actually pursuing her Masters in Paleontology.
Next, I would recommend Episode 18, ‘On Her Way to Mars’ with Abby Harrison who is going to become an astronaut.
But she started her journey in social media and she had an organization called The Mars Generation and she tries to send people to the space camp and provides scholarships for them every year. She had a million plus followers across social media, and she’s awesome, her story is great.
And then Episode 41, this is the holy grail of diversity inclusion. I think this episode taught me the most about diversity inclusion and is also the most downloaded episode. This was my conversation with Brian Downtime, he is a diversity and inclusion expert in the UK, works with Fortune 500 companies.
The episode is called ‘Confessions of A Working Father’ which is also the name of his book. It is a twist on the confessions of a working mother in the way that he’s trying to support his family and his father by being at home, helping his wife do what she loves doing, and he’s talking from a standpoint of being a white straight man in this field of diversity inclusion.
How can you solve the problem without including a white straight man? You just can’t because you need to educate the white straight men. So, this episode is hands down, one of the best conversations I’ve ever had.
And finally, episode 53 called ‘The Space Geologist’ with Raquel Nuno. She is the wife of Derek Muller, the guy behind the YouTube channel Veritasium.
When I did the podcast, I had no clue who he is. But I am glad that I didn’t know who he was because if I knew, I would’ve taken the story a little bit towards him. And I didn’t even mention him, it is crazy.
My teammate then messaged me that you know she’s his wife, right? I looked him up and I was like, oh my God, he’s so huge, what the hell. It definitely was a great conversation because I didn’t know who she is in terms of whose wife she is, and the story turned out to be all about her.
She used to work in the Air Force, spent 14 years in the Air Force, then came back, went to community colleges and then got an internship in NASA. She then went to UCLA to study Paleontology. Now she works on NASA’s Lunar Radiometer Science Mission and it’s just fantastic.
On Team …
Aishwarya: How big a team have you built around this podcast?
Prasha: Yes, so I have worked by myself for the longest time. Then in February, I realized I can’t do it all by myself because I felt the need for more diversity in my thinking, for more people to pep me up, and not just do the work but do it more creatively.
I have tried my best to keep my team on the creative side while I still do the work. You know, a lot of organizations work the other way round. I wondered when I was a volunteer what was it that I didn’t like.
When I was a volunteer, I didn’t like that I was treated like an intern. And I didn’t want that in my organization because then people wouldn’t work for us. People give us time and I want to make sure that I use them the best I can and keep them on the creative side of things.
That’s where the new logo and the new look comes from. All these ideas, all the suggestions for groups we can interview, all the ways we can do it. Since my current teammates joined, we’ve almost doubled the downloads.
And my team is so diverse! I promise I didn’t do it on purpose, didn’t even realize it. This is what diversity truly means — when you are open to solving the problem, you attract the right people and you are not consciously or unconsciously biased.
And then a month or two later you step back and realize you have people from all over the world working alongside, on the same team.
So, in the team, we have Fanuel, who is the Founder of the Stem Advocacy Institute because the institute still offers a lot of brainstorming.
We have Katherine Hatcher who is the SAI fellow but also helps with brainstorming and the ideation process.
Then we’ve Sophie Okolo who is the Twitter Manager, she does a great job and we’ve had a lot of followers since she joined us.
Then we’ve Brittany Trinh who is the Branding Manager, she is the person behind all the new looks, color schemes, Instagram page, how should it look, and all of that.
We then we have Suchi, she is our illustrator and animator. She does the illustrations, the merchandise, and all of that stuff.
We have a new team member, Lindsey, she is a biologist. She’s going to help us with funding and with our future envision of providing scholarships for people who want to get into STEM, or to those who want to start their own podcast, all that stuff.
In terms of spreading the word around …
Aishwarya: Could you give us an idea about the number of downloads you’re getting per episode? And where are you getting them from?
Prasha: The total downloads that we have for the entire series are about 15000+ and per episode, it is about 300–350 downloads. In the podcasting world, these numbers are not big at all. But again, that being said, the impact that we’re making matters and the community we’re serving sees value in it.
When I started the show, I knew that even if one person tunes in, that is it. And now it has become more about me trying to have these great conversations.
Everything is organic, we do not pay for any advertisements. We do some Google Ads and that’s how we drive some traction to the website. I don’t know how it drives any downloads.
We don’t yet pay for any analytics to see where are the greatest number of downloads coming from. My goal is 500 downloads per episode and we can then probably start investing in that.
Our biggest community is on Twitter, we’ve about 4100 people following us on Twitter, all organic.
No robots or bots following us. We have a community of about 2200 on Instagram and these numbers are literally three times of what they used to be last year. So,
There is growth — organic, slow, and steady. We’d rather have this than an overnight success. We wouldn’t know what to do with that.
For Podcasters ….
Aishwarya: Do you have tips, tricks or lessons you picked up along the way?
Prasha: Podcasts are easy to produce and that’s the reason they are so popular. It doesn’t need a lot of production value in terms of buying a mic.
Earlier I struggled to release one episode per week. Now, I can release up to 2 or even 3 sometimes and it gets me so excited. This is because I have streamlined the process. Everyone needs to find a workflow but once you find it, it becomes pretty easy. I try my best to record very organic interviews and then not have to edit anything.
I did spend some money initially on a podcasting coach because I think that’s very important if you learning any craft. Don’t do it when you start because you still need to figure out if this is a good choice for you. Once you are 5–10 episodes in, I would then recommend you to go to a coach because by now you know your style.
If you do it early on, it’ll be very overwhelming because you wouldn’t know what you are doing and it might seem like a waste of money. But I do highly recommend a coach at some point because you would get different perspectives, you’ll get to know something you didn’t know.
Plug: We’re also going to launch our own podcasting workshops where we’ll help people learn to podcast. Podcasting, in a true sense, gives you a voice. It is journalism without being a journalist.
On Podcasting in India …
Aishwarya: India is still getting the hang of podcasting. What share of your listeners do you think are Indian?
Prasha: We don’t have many ways to track that right now. But from our Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter analytics, the US is number one in terms of listeners followed by the UK and then India.
I know it’s difficult in India because Indians don’t use iPhones as much. But I think it is going to pick up. Anchor is one of the companies I know that is doing a lot of work in India.
I feel India’s podcasting market is going to be outrageous within a year or two. India has so much creativity and so many narratives. The US is less social, it is not that open a community. India is very open and diverse in those terms.
Podcasting is like grandma telling a story. India loves to chat and podcasting gives you an opportunity to chat all the time. I think it is going to be huge.
