Google WomenTechmakers Chennai — Sep 2018
A meetup where we connected, created and celebrated women in tech…
I have been trying to bring communities that are specific for women in tech to Chennai. When Women Who Code came to Chennai, I was more than happy, but the meetups dropped after a few months. For International Women’s Day this 2018, I was invited by Google Developers group Chennai to speak on a technical topic. From there it took us another four months to formulate Womentechmakers Chennai.
Preview
For the first event, we didn’t market it enough and had only 15 registrations, and four people turned up. It is pretty common at the start of any community. This time we spread the word on Twitter and Facebook, invited people by targeting organizations and succeeded to have 40+ registrations. @Pickyourtrail as always was open to hosting us. With a few other minor logistics, we were all set for a grand event.
The Event
Messages started flowing in the organizer’s group, to make sure every piece of the puzzle fit together. I started an hour early from home, but to my dismay, there was tunneling of traffic at various places due to the M.G.R 100th birthday celebration.
The hour-long journey made me reach the venue right on time. Thankfully my co-organizer was already there. I cross verified final setup, projector, seating, etc. and people started flowing in. Slowly the room was filled with 20+ #womenInTech of different ages.
Introductions
We started off with what and why’s of Womentechmaker Wtm, why is it important to do it in Chennai. We went around the room and started introducing ourselves. Few were college students; few are developers, we had HRs and PHDs. I have been attending meetups for the past two years, and I haven’t met 99% of these people in any of the meetups.
I ended the introduction with my constant story of “How I feel invisible when I attend meetups with dominating male crowd.”
Why C++?
We all would have learned C++ in our college but, would have never returned to it after that. I personally hated them because of the number of lines you need to write to achieve the simplest possible thing. But, here I am seeing the presentation of Dhivya from Amazon and was sold by the idea of why would someone choose C++ over modern languages like Python. To my surprise, it was her first talk in a meetup. Neither the content nor her way of delivery looked like one.
User Experience 101
Dhivya Ramanujam one of the most inspiring women I met. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her profile. Do check it out. I have mentioned in my Developer’s deficiency blog that how techies are opaque to understanding users and how important it is to have such skill. That’s one of the main reasons to have a talk about user experience.
Throughout her talk she shared insights on what is UX and why is it important. Using data to come up with better UX, Changing the way of asking a question slightly to get real data, user personas and its importance, How to achieve more with fewer features? And a lot more.
Networking
After the talk, we all needed a refresher before absorbing any more information. We started the networking session. The idea was to talk about the problems women face in the industry, education, and household. For the next one hour, there were a bunch of the issues and how they dealt with it.
A few points from the networking session.
- In a medium such as Womentechmakers which is focused on women in tech, there is a dilemma on whether to talk tech or problems we face to survive in tech.
- When you want to mentor women to do better and start clubs for the same, the ones who join might be few but are already motivated enough.
- How colleges demotivate girls when they want to get together and talk tech.
- How professors question a girl’s intellect when she is in a project group that has a bunch of guys.
- How parents discriminate the selection of extra-curricular activities based on the gender of their children. The stats are pretty clear because Bhuvana runs a STEM learning center. When guys were pushed to prepare for IITs girl children settle for drawing and music.
- How a woman who is perusing Ph.D. was once an Idol to their extended family, now a black mark because she is unmarried.
- How an HR struggles to find experienced women that fit the role and also could close the gender gap in their organization.
- How the whole twitter talks about sexual harassment at technical meetups, but in reality at least in Chennai, you feel invisible.
- How a family’s dream for a girl starts out and shrinks as she grows up.
- How a man in the room agreed to every point discussed above.
For a long time, we have been “celebrating” women who took care of their husband, executed their parental responsibilities. We have celebrated them for the tasty food to the stainless shirt. Knowingly or unknowingly we are in this constant whirl round of misogyny.
Let’s pause, take a step back and start celebrating them for their intellect, their passion, their drive to achieve something. Let’s celebrate #WOMENINTECH. Join us.
