 Hi, everyone and welcome to by these experience sharing sessions. I hope you had a great time to allow and attending various Experient sharing sessions. So this is something which is going to be I think Really impactful and very different and a lot of you will actually relate to it so we have we have a guy here who is the founder and CEO of jobs for her and she will be talking about why we need more women in tech and What are her experiences and her career journey of you know rejoining Workforce after having a career break. So Neha over to you and with that I think Thanks. Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm just going to share my screen and Run you all through a presentation. Whatever questions you'll have do keep posting it in the chat session So that we can take some of these questions at the end of the session Alright Okay, hope you all can see my screen. Neha Rekha. Could you give me a quick? Yes? Yes, Neha. Yes Perfect. Okay, so to start with I would like all of you to think of the name of a successful CEO of a tech company Now there are studies that show that the majority of us would have imagined a male CEO like you are seeing here You know like Sundar Pichai Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg And you know, you're not alone even Google seems to think that the CEO of a tech company must be male Very few of us would have thought of Jenny Rometti from IBM. So You search for a nurse most of the search results will show you a female and If you search for a computer engineer, you guessed it. It'll be male In fact a few years ago Google tested an email feature which was designed to predict What some what someone wants to write, you know a future feature I'm sure many of us have also used frequently and many of you might be working on how to build as well Now it turns out that Google's algorithms were making biased assumptions Referring for instance to a nurse as her and an engineer as him Google took quick action and said it ended up Before launching the feature in me They realized that they needed to fix Google translate also because otherwise it was only describing men as doctors and they had to change that so that the Translation could be either she's or he is a doctor what artificial intelligence and machine learning mimic the biases of the human creators and as many of AI systems look for patterns in huge troves of data such as what we say To our voice assistants or what images we post on social media They start imbibing the same gender or racial prejudices that we have and putting it out there Given that algorithms are happening and being deployed by banks healthcare companies big businesses governments this built-in gender bias is a cause of great concern for our current and future generation What's more we are moving all this decision making responsibility to a system and then trusting that system to be unbiased But over time it is hard to predict Why a machine has missed over time? How do we stop that from happening a? Male technology industry would also end up creating products that neglect the needs of women as users also Very often tech products are born out of personal experience with a problem that the founder is trying to solve Take jobs for her for example So the reason So what I was sharing was that the reason why I know all this firsthand is because of the career journey that I myself went Yeah, I graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is with degrees in marketing and finance Right after I graduated. I started my first education startup It was called Paragon and I have brought the advanced placement program back to India And I did that in Bombay, which is the city where I was born and brought up and then marriage got me to shift to Bangalore Because of which I shut down Paragon and that became my first big career shift that happened in my journey And I joined my husband's family business which was in pharmaceutical manufacturing Now the the shift was very difficult jumping from finance to education to pharmaceuticals, but it was a great learning process I loved it and you know, I never thought I'd stop working there That's when motherhood really came into my life And like I like to say that a baby gave birth to a mother and I took a break for three and a half years in my own career When I wanted to get back to work after three and a half years I realized the challenges that women face when they want to restart that their careers Luckily for me, I had a family business that I could jump into and which is why I got back to Kimwell But when I restarted my own career I realized what a positive experience it was to get back to work And I started questioning all those around me on why they weren't getting back to work When I realized how deep rooted these problems are in India it prompted me to start jobs for her Because it was extremely important that we figured out how we can get women to accelerate their careers And today I'd like to talk to you about three different types of women That where it is imperative that we solve the problems that they are facing if we want to increase gender parity in the Indian workforce First and foremost, let's look at what's happening in the women's returning space The first generation put in to make that happen But out of those 40 women, only eight pursue a career and out of those eight, 50% drop out in three years Which means there are 20 million women in India who want to restart their careers But the challenges that these women face are manifold and it requires a management degree of a whole different type Women attorneys are often found Figuring out how to manage their guilt of being a bad mother, wife, daughter How to manage the time between the family requirements and work responsibilities How to manage the fear that they feel that the world has moved on without them And they won't be able to catch up and how to manage the plethora of biases around them Starting from home where people question them on why is there a need for you to work To the office where peers question them that are you really serious about a career? And there are several things that companies can do to fix this one Removing biases from the minds of recruiters, hiring managers and also sensitizing colleagues about the loss of confidence that a woman faces when she's on a career break Two, mentorship and buddy programs that will help in building up the confidence of that woman return Three, returning internship programs, which work very similarly to an internship for a fresh graduate But at the end of which that woman can be rehired as a lateral joie And fourth, re-skilling initiatives that will help women in updating their skills and getting back up to speed with the latest technologies and latest trends Let's move to the second section, which is on women and technology Today there are only 26% of women in engineering roles in India and Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, all of which are shaping our current and future lives They employ less than 20% women and The reason why it's imperative that we fix the participation levels of women in tech is because all our futures lie in technology and Given that algorithms are rapidly becoming more and more responsible for more and more decisions about our lives This built-in gender bias is a cause of great concern for our current and future generations And for an engineer for an industry in which there are three times more male engineers to females The biases are going to be large and omnipresent In fact, the AI industry employs the lowest proportion of women in the tech sector And there are just not enough female voices which are influencing machine learning and artificial intelligence So what can companies do? First and foremost, we need to change this bro culture and organizations and realize that what an engineer can look like includes women Second, we need to change the rules of the game. We need to be more flexible to the needs of women Expect less than it's instead of thinking about 24 hours a day and seven days of week kind of a work schedule Think about trading in hours of work for quality of work And we need to create strong skilling mentorship and networking programs for women in tech So that they have the tools support and inspiration to grow in their careers And these initiatives benefit not just the next generation of young girls That tech is a viable career option for women also Lastly women in leadership And which is why we have built her tech which is a platform that is specifically for women in technology So that they can showcase their skills through challenges. They can learn from industry leaders through master classes They can find the right kind of job opportunities in family friendly companies They can connect with other like-minded women in tech and grow their network All so that women in tech can accelerate their careers Let's look at what's happening at the women in leadership space In most companies in India today At the entry level you will find they will have 30 percent women But that number will deplete to 10 percent of the management level and then 1 percent at the CXO level And the need for women leaders is obvious As research shows companies which have both genders in the executive committees far outperform Those companies that have all male committees at the end of the day better diversity equals better results And the COVID pandemic was a great way of realizing how important it is for us to have more women So I can just pick up from there where You know that the reason that we need to have more women leaders in companies has become even more exacerbated By the COVID pandemic. Yeah, if you see the kind of company kind of countries That have managed the pandemic very successfully Have one thing in common and that is that they are being led by women But to get more and more women to lead companies Is going to take a whole generation of work and companies need to work very hard to make that happen First and foremost, we need to ensure that there is pay parity between what a male employee and a female employee are Secondly, we need to have structured leadership development programs for women So that they can overcome the race roadblocks that they are facing in their careers And thirdly, we need to ensure that we are creating the kind of workplace policies Environment culture etc that also enable women to succeed and not just the average employee that currently is a male Because only if we do all of that can we ensure that tomorrow the kind of women leaders that we see out there Are far and plenty and not the exception to the rule And which is why jobs for her we have actually started a club called the her key club where Women network learn together grow together and reach to the top of their careers and achieve their full potential All of this is really to ensure that the next time When we search on google for a computer engineer, it doesn't show up all male results It shows up male and female results