 Good evening everyone. Thank you all for staying back. How was your day so far? Great? Awesome? Okay, okay. Great. Mine has been too. Today, I am privileged and honored to be invited as a keynote speaker at Picon India with which I've been associated for so long. Thank you all the organizers of Picon India. Thanks for inviting me. I'll start with a small story. I was traveling to Hyderabad by train with my five-year-old daughter in the last August. A small little girl, a very realistic girl called Tanvi, she became a quick friend of Varsha. And while they were chatting, she realized that Varsha was in Ukegi and of five-year-old. And when she realized that, she quickly turned to me and said, Aunty, you know one thing? Varsha will also be in third class when she turns eight. Oh wow! Yes, that's a nice finding. And also, I realized one thing while calculating that. I would be in twelfth grade by the time I'm seventeen years old. You've got good musical skills, I said. And then what would you do? I asked. She said, I'll study hard Aunty. My mom always insists on that. Good. You should work hard, I said. And then what would you do? I asked. She said, I'll get a good job and do it well. Wow! That's nice of you. And then, my curiosity raised. She said, then I'll quit. What? I was shocked. She said, yes Aunty, I'll quit. Just like my mom did when I was born. This is a real story which has happened just two months back. And later, during the conversations with Tanvi's mom, I realized that she was a software engineer and she could not continue her career with the kid, though she wanted to be. Okay. And Tanvi's mom is not single there. There are so many women dropping out of tech every year. Due to many reasons. Okay. That's a good story to hear. But how is this relevant to PyCon India where we all have gathered here to discuss the awesomeness of Python programming language and maybe related technologies, right? How is it related and relevant? Any guesses on who is? Yes, Guido Vaan Rasim, the creator of Python programming language, which we all love and use, right? In PyCon US in 2014, he announced that he would take questions only from women attendees after his keynote. Why? Why might he have done that? He also says, looking around me, it's so obvious that women don't get equal opportunity in tech. And there are so many things that lead to that. The statistics are very clear. If I look around in the cafe at work, there are tons of women. But if I look around in my own engineering team, there's just one. And I think it's a shame. So few women choose tech and those that do have so many things to fight. This is said by Guido in 2014. And today we are in 2019 and it's quite relevant. How many of you see that, think that there are more than 20% of women participants in this auditorium today at PyCon India in 2019? Not really. Not just saying. He also wanted to close the gender gap as much as possible. That he extended or offered mentorship to women whoever wants to become Python core developers. If you know Python and if you are a woman and willing to become a core Python developer, you get mentored by Guido Van Rossum himself. Why did he do that? Why did he offer mentorship only to women? Because he believes that Python community and any open source communities for that matter and in technology in general can be a wonderful place if more and more women join in. And he wanted to close the gender gap as much as possible. And that is the topic of my talk today. Gender gap in technology and how we shall overcome that. A little about me before we dive into the topic. I have been building beautiful software for over 10 years with Python and have been sharing love for it. And I have been associated with PyCon India since its inception as a volunteer, as a participant and a regular speaker. You would have seen me on stage if you have been attending PyCon India many a times. I am also associated with communities like women tech makers of Google and Pilates to some extent. I am mother of two lovely daughters and I currently work at Razor Pay. And that is a snapshot of my journey in tech. I started my career in 2004 in C, C++ and Java which were prevalent at that point of time. And I got into the beautiful world of Python in 2007 and in 2008 I started contributing to Web.py, a micro web framework in Python. And Aaron Swaj is the creator of that. And I got to work with him in one of his projects which is watchdog.net. I am very fortunate to work with Aaron Swaj who is the internet's own boy. Later I have chosen to take couple of years of maternity break as I wanted to enjoy my motherhood as much as I enjoy the tech. And I post my maternity break, I have been an independent consultant and a corporate trainer to balance my career with a kid. I mean I worked with several startups in Bangalore and several international organizations in that stint like ours.org which led to my career at part of fly. I joined part of fly in 2014 as the first member of engineering team which is a platform to connect women to the jobs that they deserve. Part of fly is a platform which connects women to the jobs that they deserve. And I am proud to be part of it, architecting it and being a core developer of it. This year in 2019 I have started working full time again after eight years of part time and remote to balance my work and life. That's about me getting back to the topic. I am going to talk about gender gap in tech in Indian context and see how can we overcome that and what each one of us can do, not just women, each one of us can do to surpass it. I have conducted a small survey to understand what makes women in tech happy and successful. I will be sharing the data along. Why? Why do we need more women in tech? What if more women in tech joins? If there are more women in tech, how will it be a better place? Because they deserve. Because they are far fewer than they ought to be. These answers come from morality or ethics or from a view of equitable societies. But that's not the way that corporates look at. There has been wonderful research saying that diversity and inclusion are very, very important. They bring in diverse ideas which lead to creative solutions better processes and products. It has been scientifically proven that diverse teams and organizations can work in a much better way and then they bring much more to the table back. All of these hold good even with gender diversity. And that's the reason, if you see there has been lots of push in the corporates, you would have heard women in tech, women in tech many times, only in the recent many years, not in the last decade if you have been in tech. I have been in tech for the last 13 years and I have been hearing about it only recently because there is a push to achieve better products. Okay, so as society and for industries as well more women joining in tech, if it is much better, why does gender gap exist? Why? As Kant says, if we can't understand the causes, root causes of the problem, we just can't solve them. So let's understand what causes this gender gap. Is education a factor? Do we think that education is a factor? Not really. In India even in rural areas nowadays the girls to boys ratios are pretty good. Even in schools in rural areas. And there have been steadily increasing or improving and 31% of students and engineering colleges are women. This is the statistics released by central government of India. 31% is not the best but that's pretty much compared to many other countries which are struggling struggling for low women in tech ratios just because of the biases they have at education itself. Many other countries. But India, we don't have the problem. We have good number of women coming out of engineering colleges. If not education, what else can be a root cause? Let's see, let's understand. Let's play a game. Let's play a game. All that you need to do is close your fists, both of your fists. I'll be uttering few names of professions. If you can relate each profession with a man open a finger on your left hand. If you can connect the name of a profession to a man open your finger on the left hand. And if you can connect that to a woman open a finger on your right hand. Is that clear? Let me repeat. A lot of few names of professions and as you hear them open a finger on your left whenever you can relate it to a man and open a finger on your right if you can relate that to a woman. Are you all ready? Yes. A sports person, an entrepreneur. Now count the total of the fingers open on both of your hands. How many of them are open? Just count them. If you have got five or six just raise your hands. The people who have got five or six as a total on both hands. Okay. And how many of you have got seven to eight fingers open on both of your hands? Please raise your hands. Okay. And how many of you have got ten? Great. It's awesome. I didn't really expect that. Cool. You have noticed that from the raised hands there were more hands raised for five to six than the hands raised for ten. What does it show? That many of us think that few of these professions are related to either men or women, not for both. Though we have seen or heard, even women pilots, right? Right? We have seen or heard of men and women in all of these professions. But still we try to, we tend to associate these professions to one of the genders mainly. And that's gender stereotype. What is a stereotype? It's a fixed and oversimplified image. But widely held of a particular idea or a thing. Women are like this or men are like this. They tend to do this. They can't do this. They can't do that. Things like that. The ideas or images that we have in our minds. That's stereotype. What's wrong with that? Read those two speeches in the bubbles. To login, user must enter his email and password. And the right side to login, user must enter her email and password. Which one is the most common thing that you have seen? Left one. Isn't it? Whenever we address women, technologists or engineers, most of the times it is men are more frequently portrayed as people of authority and technical knowledge than women. What does that lead to? Does it lead to anything? Most of us are, almost all of us are technologists and we do understand machine learning. The basics of machine learning. How it works. So the environment is what we see every day, what we experience, what we see, what we read, what we hear. Everything around the world surrounding us is the environment that we learn from. It's just the training data that our brain is using to learn and to act. Those learnings lead to actions. Right? And if the training sit is biased in a machine learning, what happens? The model also gets biased, isn't it? It's just the same thing with our brains. If you pass biased data, are saying that the persons or the people with authority or technical knowledge are always men. If that is what being passed to our human minds every time, that is what we learn and that is what we think and that is how we act. And all these preconceived notions unconsciously work on our minds and they reflect every time we act, we choose, we decide. Anything, anything in general. All our actions are having that unconscious bias. Can you see what's wrong with this cartoon? Not the cartoon, but what's there in the cartoon. When two men talk about a mistake, it's addressed as you. And when the same mistake is done by a woman or a girl, it's addressed as girls suck at math. It's not just that particular lady. And it's not just limited to cartoons or stories. It happens in real life. I have had a first experience of it when I was a junior programmer. I was interested in one particular company, a startup, which was into transliteration when I was a junior programmer. I've seen a set of three problems on their hiring page and submitted solutions in Python to them. I knew that I have done them well and I've got a call for a face-to-face interview. After the nice talking talks that we had with the CTO, who was a very nice person, actually. It was a small team of engineers who were trying to do transliteration into Indian languages. He said one thing at the last. David, yours was one of the best solutions that I've got so far. Believe me, I could not really think. I could never imagine that girls can quote this well. He said that to me as a compliment. But unconsciously, what does it mean? It means it's a demeaning thing to women in general, isn't it? And similar biases exist in our minds, in hiring, in promotions, in appraisals everywhere. How does it affect the hiring? There is a clear research which shows that whenever there is an ambiguity in a person's skills or competence or qualifications, the evaluators tend to fill in those gaps with the assumptions drawn from these gender stereotypes. So if you have two applications with similar backgrounds, with similar education and skill sets, they think that men are more suited for the same job. They are likely to pick the application by men than of women. It is proven by research. It's not just guessing. There are many certain ones that are affected by our unconscious bias. What is it, poetry? Because most of the people think that men are the authorities of technical knowledge. They tend to bypass the women who are there in the technical meetings or even by business meetings. I have a friend who runs a company with her husband, a startup. She runs it along with her husband and she says, I never got used to be recognized as a person of authority or technical knowledge. All the conversations were turned towards my husband who was coming along to the business meetings. And she was CEO of that company. She is a capable woman. It no longer happens fortunately for her but it is a truth. How do you feel if you are let out being a capable person? That was one of the challenges. Having a gender stereotype was one of the challenges. And there are many more. When you all feel very productive and creative at work place, when your voice is heard and your work is valued and you feel that you are understood by your team and by the organization, isn't it? You tend to work more, you tend to put in more hours or energies or thinking into the work that you do when you feel all that. You feel belongingness to your company or an organization. And that's what exactly the data shows from the survey that I have done. If you see, 50% of the respondents have said that it is the relationship with my team that is making me stay at my company. Unless we feel that I belong to the team, I belong to the organization, you just can't work productively. You don't feel like going to the workplace tomorrow. If you feel that you belong to that organization or a team, your ideas flow without really getting stuck in your own minds. Thinking whether they're right or wrong, should I say it out or not. Without thinking that, your ideas flow out. And your ability to take risks increase tremendously without really feeling insecure or embarrassed. And this state of mind, they call it, researchers of Google, call it as psychological safety. And they say that this is one of the most important attributes for any highly successful team, psychological safety. So that you can open up. But unfortunately, women are reminded that it's not for them in everyday life at their workplace. Many of you might be knowing the story of a fox and a crane in your childhood. Have you all heard of the story? A fox invites a crane for a dinner with a delicious meal cooked for the crane. And as the crane enters the house of the fox, she enjoys the sweet smell coming out of the dishes. She gets in and sees the food offered in a plate from which she can't really have the food. She likes the meal. She can enjoy the meal. But not if it is offered in a plate. That's how exactly women feel at workplaces. In most of the workplaces, unfortunately. Why? What makes them off? Here the crane is made off by the plate because it can't enjoy the food or take the food with its beak from a plate. What makes women off from the workplace? Meetings that run into late evenings, uncomfortable off-sides. Most of you would have been in corporates and understand what it means. In flexible hours, women always tend to wear more hats than men to balance their work and life. They have many more hats to wear. And these inflexible hours, they come on her way to do that, to be herself. All of these make her, this is not for me, or moves up the career ladder. Leadership aspects of a person come in. Everybody aspires to grow. Everybody, everything which is having life aspires to grow in nature. So are women, even in corporate world. And that's where comes the position where it's perception of others about your competency. How others perceive your competence becomes more important when you grow to a mid-level engineer. How others feel about my competence becomes as important as my own competence, really. And unless I can prove to many people, or unless there are many people supporting me that I am competent enough, I can't really become a leader. Along with that, to, once you are a mid-level engineer, software is not just code, right? It's not just working code. It's a solution for somebody's real problem. It is not just working code. And to provide or create solutions which are technical or non-technical, one has to have a bigger picture of the organizational needs and the problem itself. And socializing and networking come into help in all these aspects that I was telling. To have support for your competence and to be able to navigate through other teams in your organizations. Networking and socializing helps. But women tend to be a little conscious about the way that they network. Not to overdo it very much. They tend to be a little conscious of informal networking, which makes them a little low. Lack of mentorship. When I was working for AMD, which is a processors company that you might know, I was only one engineer or the floor of 100 male engineers. Forget about mentorship. I didn't have one more woman to speak to. Now things might have changed a bit. But how many women have the privilege to look upon to another woman who can be a role model at their workplace? Not many. And the promotions and performance reviews as we have seen, they might have unconscious biases around them. All of these stand on the way for a women's journey into leadership, making it tougher for her and motherhood. It's a cherishable phase of any women's life. Any women's life. But in India, unfortunately, the family structures have changed a lot, but not the societal expectations of a mother. Not the support systems built like the quality childcare in India at this juncture. They're still evolving. The support systems are still evolving. Professional needs or professional childcare systems are still emerging and evolving. Whereas the family structures are no more supportive. At this juncture, she has n number of questions in her mind. How do I have good leave policies at my workplace? If I get back to work after six months of leave, how's the kids growth and the safety are taken care? The kid is just six months old, not even weaned. How can he or she be taken care of? What if I have a childcare at work? It would be awesome, isn't it? But I don't have a one. What if I take a longer break? If I take longer break, can I come back? Do my position still exist after that break? How can I catch up with the changing technology trends if I take a longer break? All of these questions are there in a woman's mind during her maternity. And the answers are not supportive, not at all supportive. In the survey that I've done, I've asked a question. Would you give up a better opportunity for the sake of your family? 30.4% said, yes, happily I would give up my career or a better opportunity for the sake of the family or a partner. And I was one of them in that 30.4% that I've taken two years of maternity break. But after that, during an interview after that, a company has rejected my application just because they didn't feel that I'm serious in my career because I've taken a break of two years of maternity. And they have, they invest a lot in diversity and inclusion now. To other question, to one other question that I've asked in the survey, what would you help, what would help you to continue your career after maternity? The biggest things are parental leave and childcare policies as expected, family support that's also as expected. And the biggest other thing was written to work options after break. We do have them, but very sparsely. Only large organizations have all these. Parental leave, it's a mandatory thing. But childcare policies and written to work options, all these are very, very sparse. What are the challenges if you take a longer break? For that question that I asked, many people responded that catching up with changing technology's trends is the biggest problem for them. And then comes the work-life balance. And it's not just the statistics. One of my friends who was an engineering manager at a company, she went into the maternity break and all her teammates who are very bright, whom she has nurtured, they're not anymore on her team by the time that she is back after the maternity break. Can you imagine that, how it feels? And one other friend says that she was not even considered for an appraisal cycle when she was in maternity break. All her hard work went in vain what she has done during her pregnancy. There are many more stories, things like that. But the future is bright. There are lots of traction gained towards women tech to support these systems. What are people doing about it? There has been lots of community efforts that's being done. There are lots of communities. Girls who code. Pi ladies. Pi ladies, we just had a lunch in the afternoon. The awesome ladies who support more women to join and to learn the programming languages of their choice or the network or any other frameworks or anything that they want to learn to inspire, to mentor all these communities are there. Anitha B. Arg Institute. That institute runs Grace Hopper celebrations of India every year. It's to lead women into leadership, more leadership roles and inspire them into entrepreneurship and lead their way there. There are many more things. There are travel incentives for women speakers in many conferences these days. And childcare initiatives. You might have seen that there are many kids playing today. And it was very heartening to see that. It was very heartening. If it was not there, not many young mothers would have come to Picon India today. It's very heartening to see. In 2011, I was at Picon India with my elder daughter who was one and a half year old by then. And all that I could do was sitting under a tree with her. And today it's so nice to see a room dedicated and a childcare for them so that women can meet to the conference. A great applause to the organizers. Thank you. And there are many more now. And there are corporate efforts too because corporates are realizing that more women in their teams, more the diversity it is, they get back great returns to their tables. There are lots of diversity and inclusion initiatives written to work programs, childcare at workplaces. There are companies who are offering remote jobs, fully remote jobs like Elastic, GitLab, DugDugGo. There are many, many good companies, I mean big companies who are offering remote jobs. And there are many companies offering flexible jobs. All of these do exist. I mean they started existing. But we are not yet there. Still there is a lot of gap. Lot of gap. This is just a starting. What we can do, we all have a role to play. What each of us can do. As a women, share your opinions or concerns widely even at your organization. If you don't feel safe or secure or if they have late evening meetings, whatever is your trouble or concern, open up and speak about it. Unless you speak about it, they just don't know. Make use of community support. We have just seen how many organizations or communities are there to help us women. To move up our carry ladders. Make good use of it. Seek mentorship. If you don't know what to do in a particular situation or you don't know how to grow or anything, seek mentorship. There are many, many people who are offering mentorship and offer the same to the people who need it more. Take time to learn. It could be your maternity break or not even. But take time to learn. Conferences and meetups, they really give you a good breadth of technology. Technology trains. You understand what to learn from conferences. And once you know what to learn, go and do an online course at your own pace. Show up, speak up, write blog posts or go to meetups and speak about your learnings and your successes. Even at your organizations, speak about them loudly. Hey, I could solve this bug immediately or I could fix that network issue. Whatever it is, it could be small, it could be big. Pat on your back and share it so that you inspire others as well. And lastly, don't give up. I can't really stress on this very much. We have been or we are standing on shoulders of many good-hearted souls spanning across generations to be here, to be women of 2019, to be privileged, to sit in conferences, and to serve many, many, many men. It's so many people, so many people of so many generations that we are standing. And don't give up amidst of your career. We have to pass on the energy and inspiration for the next generations to come. So please don't give up if you are a woman. It's not just women who can do this. As an individual, what I can do? Share. Share your learnings widely. Not many people can take time or understand, take time to understand or learn things. Maybe you have got a very good resources or maybe you have seen a good course on a particular thing on an online course or a blog post. Whatever it could be, share it widely. Mentor and encourage. Take inspiration from our own Guido whom we have seen. He is mentoring women, not just women maybe. You can mentor anybody who is seeking mentorship and encourage them. Provide critical feedback, but don't criticize. All women are like this, yeah? I hear this a lot, right? They tend to be emotional for every silly thing. Don't say that. You can put that in a critical way, a better way. Don't criticize. But do offer critical feedback to women. Beware of your own unconscious biases. We have seen how unconscious biases work in our head. Deal with every person with respect, irrespective of their gender. They might have come here, coming across many challenges in their lives. And what can I do if I am a corporate? This is the biggest thing actually that the corporates can do. Parental leave and quality childcare. These are not basic, these are basic needs. They are not luxury. They are as basic as restrooms for women. Parental leave and childcare policies. If corporates are investing a lot in getting more women in recruitment, and don't provide childcare facilities, they will not have mid-level managers or senior level women in their companies. That's for sure. Offered or arranged unconscious bias training for recruiting personals. This is very important. Offer flexible hours and offer flexible jobs and work from home options. Not just for women. If the corporates offer work from home options and flexible hours only for women, it makes women still feel low because they are the only ones who will use it. They will not be updated on the communications. Why shouldn't men take work from home options? They will all surpass the traffic of Chennai or Bangal or whatever it is. We all like work from home options, not just women. Say no to late evening meetings if you want to hire more women. Design workplaces for transparency and openness so that the safety and security concerns are addressed. And you feel alive to see everybody out who is doing what. Design the workplaces for transparency and openness. As an individual, as a woman, as a corporate, we all have a role to play to overcome the gender gap that we see. If we can all do that, we shall overcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thanks for being here. I hope that we all make one step towards gender parity where we all respect every other colleague or people that we come across. Irrespective of their gender, their race, religion, anything, they are with us. We are all one. Thank you. Thanks a lot. There are many friends who have helped me in getting the presentation done and referring many articles. I've been through lots of articles on the subject. Thank you all, my friends, colleagues and many more. And here are the data sources that I've been quoting from. Check their authenticity. You can check their authenticity. And there are a lot more references at the end. Hence, once more. Thank you all for staying back late. Thank you. Take this. Thank you, Devi. That was such an insightful talk. I think people in the room now, they are aware of all the unconscious biases that are happening in your brain. Your brain is not as smart as you think so. Now you can help breaking the stereotypes. I think we have time for questions. Ten more minutes for questions. If you have any questions, just raise your hand. Yeah, there. Hello. Yeah, you mentioned about Power to Fly. I think if you can explain more about Power to Fly, I think it will benefit lots of women who are here. Yes. So I was working for a company called Power to Fly before January is a pay this year. And Power to Fly is an organization with a global team across continents. We used to work remotely. It's a fully remote team. And I used to work part-time. And it's a platform for women to get connected to the jobs that they deserve. They have remote jobs. They have flexible jobs. They have on-site jobs also. Many times I get questions like, how did you manage to be working remotely for so many years? And nowadays there are sites like Power to Fly, which I'm proud to build. Thanks. Any more questions? You said there's something about no late night meetings. But if the client is in the US, we have to spend time from 7pm to 9pm. Yeah, what I meant was they can be taken at home, right? It doesn't need to be in office. Though women might feel that, oh, my kids are coming home or I need to prepare something or anything, n number of things, that's what I had in my mind. So I used to work for Power to Fly and I had my other team in the US. And I definitely attended many meetings, which were at 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock, many a times. It can be taken from home, but not in office premises. They have to be back at home by the evening. Okay, it's still very tough, right? Pardon? It's still very tough, right? Which one feels tough? There are many people who take calls after coming from home, I guess. Next question. Any more? Yeah, one more. So you talked about the unconscious biasness, but I wanted to ask, have you faced any like biasness on your face and how you have dealt with it if you have faced? Myself? Yes. So one example I have told on the stage when I applied for a startup, and many a times in the interview panels, we sit in the interview panels, right? Hiring junior engineers. And if there is a male colleague besides me, the person who has come for the interview, they always tend to look at the male person. Have you seen that? Have you observed that? It's very common, actually. Only once you start paying attention to these details, it becomes very, very clear and evident. Unless you try to observe, pay attention, this is not very clear. But once you know that you have unconscious biases, we can overcome that.