The STEM Sisterhood: meet the 6 women who are encouraging young girls to take up careers in this field

A whopping 72 percent of scientific researchers across the world are men, according to a report by the World Economic Forum. Only one in five countries achieve what is classed as gender parity with women making up 45-55 percent of researchers. In Asia, women make up the majority of researchers in Azerbaijan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, and Kuwait.

The same report establishes that India has seen a substantial increase in women studying and working in the engineering field, which was once seen as a “masculine” discipline. It also highlights the role played by India’s female engineers, especially the “rocket women of ISRO”, in the country’s space programme.

Despite the welcome advancements in this sector, more can be done to attract young girls and women to STEM. We need more engineers, coders, developers, mathematicians, and physicists. Workplaces need to be more inclusive, and social barriers like gender bias and stereotypes defining women in tech roles need to be broken.

It’s important that women in this field mentor their sisters to learn, develop, and grow.

We focus on a few women who are helping young girls and women seeking careers in STEM. With their support, the new generation of women will go places.

Geetha Kannan

In 1987, Anita Borg, along with 12 other women, launched Systers, a digital community for women. The community aimed to bring together women and inspire them to take up computing. It guided them to learn and provided mentorship to grow in the field. Today, Systers has more than 7,500 members from more than 65 countries, and is the world’s largest email community of women in technical computing roles. The main website AnitaB.org has become a global non-profit organisation that aims at recruiting, retaining, and advancement of women in computer sciences since 1997. In India, Managing Director Geetha Kannan drives the mission of advancing careers of women in tech.

Aditi Prasad and Deepti Rao Suchindran

Sisters Aditi Prasad and Deepti Rao Suchindran are on a mission to inspire the innovators of tomorrow through robotics. Their company, Robotix Learning Solutions, uses robotics as a tool to develop STEM skills, which are an integral part of a technology-driven future. IT provides hands-on robotics education programmes as part of the curricula of several K-12 schools in south India, apart from offering after-school programmes and workshops. Their annual robotics competition, the Indian Robotix League, is a huge hit among enthusiasts. The sisters also launched an initiative called Indian Girls Code, a programme to inspire and educate young girls to learn to code and develop real-world programs for real-world applications. They also want to take tech learning to underprivileged girls and empower them.

Bhavani Ravi

Chennai-based Bhavani Ravi’s aim as a coder/programmer is to get as many people as she can interested and attracted to tech as a career. While learning technology, she realised that sharing was the way forward and laid the foundation for two communities, Build2Learn and WomenTechMakers, to leverage the power of groups to build and learn something new. Build2Learn connects college students with industry experts who are willing to take them under their wings and guide them. Bhavani also joined Swathi B (Founder of WomenTechMakers) to resurrect the community and pulled off its first signature IWD 2019 Summit recently. Word about code got around and more partners came on board, along with women who wanted to update themselves on newer technologies and innovations.

Chaitali Shah

Chaitali and her husband, Ritesh Shah, run RoboKart, an edtech startup that aims to explore, experiment, and learn robotics in the right way, and thereby develop STEM in the country. RoboKart sets up labs in schools and provides the components and training to students and teachers. The training lasts a year and equips teachers with enough skills to take on the running of the lab. The startup has also entered a tie-up with Atal Tinkering Labs to take their concepts to government schools in rural areas. In the future, RoboKart is looking at opening a robotics centre in every city, and launching its own app, which will feature videos that help robotics lovers learn on their own. 

Sneha Priya

Spurred by their interest in practical learning and robotics, classmates Sneha Priya and Pranavan started their entrepreneurial journey with SP Robotics. A few years later, they launched SP Robotics Maker Lab, a smart class based edutainment centre for students between ages 7 and 16+. With curricula in Robotics, Drones, IoT, Virtual Reality, and many more emerging technologies, it has a pan-India presence with 75+ branches across India and organises competitions like SPARC for showcasing talent. Today, it aims to be the gateway to exploring technologies and showcasing innovations by people of all ages, everywhere.

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