International Women's Day 2023 Live Updates: Women Tech Leaders on "DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality"

Seema Ambastha, CEO, BAM Digital Realty

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, seeing women accomplish so much in STEM and other fields is heartening. Today, women in the technology sector have been playing a significant role in both innovation and leadership. The need of the hour is for the organizations to hire, retain and grow more women for an inclusive digital ecosystem and provide them the impetus to lead. Here is wishing more strength to women to continue to be the drivers of change and innovation.

Archana Khosla Burman, Founder Partner, Vertices Partners

International Women's Day gives us an opportunity to celebrate the success of women achievers and ruminate on the road ahead to build an inclusive ecosystem for growth. Women entrepreneurs and professionals have been playing a significant role in driving the economy. Entrepreneurial ventures and start-ups founded by women are generating employment at a considerable scale. Their journeys are inspirations for other aspiring women entrepreneurs.

However, to make a deeper impact on the economy and the GDP, there is an urgent need to create a level playing field for women entrepreneurs. They have proven their mettle in the highly competitive start-up ecosystem by setting up successful businesses. The time has come to create an enabling ecosystem for them so that they shape economic growth and make it inclusive in the true sense of the term. Setting up gender equity is the need of the hour to ensure equitable outcomes for women professionals and founders and for the economy as a whole. Promising women-founded ventures should no longer remain as missed economic opportunities due to the absence of funding support. It's quite encouraging to see the government initiating measures and schemes to address funding requirements of women-led ventures to accelerate growth.

Puja Srivastava, Co-Founder & CTO at spocto, A Yubi Company

A report published by the McKinsey Global Institute in 2019 estimated that if women's participation in the global economy were to match that of men, it could add $28 trillion to the global GDP by 2025, which represents an increase of approximately 26%. To achieve this, we must start encouraging women to take up STEM as an academic and professional option. And most importantly, women need to be taught to make financial decisions.

Equality and diversity should be more than just buzzwords in organizations. They should be actively pursued as a core value and an actionable outcome. We, as organizations, should strive to create an inclusive and welcoming culture for individuals from all backgrounds and demographics. Individuals must begin treating men and women equally by abolishing biases by asking men and women the same questions, not stereotyping women into some specific kind of roles & most importantly, changing the ideology that the part of the primary caregiver is only limited to women. Adhering to the same, at spocto, we have initiated extended parental leaves that allow men to be caregivers.

I'm very proud of the diversity at spocto is at a whopping 63%, comprising many women leaders. Be it HR, Legal, Pre-sales, Marketing, Sales, Technology, or Engineering, almost every vertical is being led or co-led by a woman. That sets a very good example for other women joining the workforce."

Anita Kukreja, Head - Marketing & Channel Sales, IceWarp India

Every year, we celebrate the determination and strength of women in technology industry during our International Women’s Day campaigns. This year, we are especially thrilled to have created a platform for the encouraging women leaders of our industry to share their thoughts on the potential of our community while speaking up about ways to create a more equitable and inclusive society that seeks out the best in all of us. Through our #IceWarpSupportsEquity campaign, we are glad to have stirred up an important conversation for the industry and the society at large and certainly intend to continue doing our part in creating a more supportive and diverse workplace for everyone.

Rohini Ahluwalia, COO, Blaupunkt

Women in technology not only make significant contributions to the sector but also offer distinctive viewpoints and life experiences that can lead to positive outcomes and problem-solving. Highlighting the achievements of women in tech can demonstrate a company's commitment to diversity and inclusion, which can improve its public image and attract a wider range of customers and talent.

The truth is that companies managed by women are more likely to care about improving society and fostering productive working relationships. Women who work in technology add to innovation, the community, and business success. Women have enhanced the tech field in several ways where male dominance has been historically prevalent. Such examples are women who bring diverse perspectives for innovation, collaborate and communicate effectively, Serve as role models in leadership positions, help address bias and discrimination in tech industry and above all break the stereotype and inspire young girls to pursue careers in STEM fields

Khushboo Jain Tibrewala, Founder of The Health Pantry, Nutritionist and Diabetes Educator

"Womens day is a day that aims are bringing attention towards the unique and irreplaceable contribution of women in every aspect of our lives. While this is a great thing, the need for a day like this itself in my opinion is a little problematic. Mainly because this day has now become all about brands pushing their respective promotions. Workplaces are all also simply doing basic things for the women in their team. This day and all the effort around still has not really translated into an actual change in mindset. In my opinion, this day would be a lot more valuable if all this effort was spent in actually spreading awareness about where we are going wrong.

While there has been a great mindset shift, across the country, a day like Women's Day may not have contributed to it.

Padmini Rajan, Director, Cloud Services in Opentext

What’s stopping us from being our best, there is nothing in the world which can limit us from what we want to achieve, it’s our self-limiting beliefs ingrained with stereotypes and societal conditions which prevent us from doing the best. Nothing is impossible, they can be overcome with patience, practice and confidence. Let this be your day one. We came this far on our merit and just need a mind shift change. You need to be your own advocate and teacher to take your mission ahead. After you achieve something, pull along the other women too. We are breaking the glass ceiling, if someone can do it, we can do too. If not you who else can do it and if not now when? We need to pose to ourselves. We need to continue working very hard, our previous generation women opened the doors for us to get into workforce in large numbers, our generation is showing that we can work at top levels and expect the current and future generation to be in large numbers at the top, so that we don’t need that women tag of women leaders, women CEOs, women achievers etc. It should be gender neutral, women should be known for their competence, grace, knowledge, leadership skills. We shouldn’t be competing with men but complementing each other.

Manisha Saboo, President - HYSEA, Delivery Head - Infosys, Governing Board Member, BBCIT

We are extremely privileged, we are privileged to be born, as 3323 girls in India are murdered before they are born every day, somebody in our family took the decision to welcome us, only 30% of women in India have the privilege to have the education we have, someone spent money to educate on whatever we aspired for.

Sushma Mudigonda, Head of Process at QualiZeal

We provide a supportive environment and offer a happy place to work and facilitate career growth. A growing number of new emerging jobs are being created due to advances in technology, from artificial intelligence to collaborative intelligence, and we want that women should be part of this journey. We believe in encouraging girls and women to opt for careers that require knowledge of STEM so that they can occupy the corner office, are part of boardroom discussions, and become significant contributors to a nation’s economy.

Dipali Padia, President -Banking Alliance and Partnerships at Neokred

Every individual professionally and personally strives for recognition of their work and existence. When we tap into the myriad of potentials by means of acceptance, creativity and newness that each individual exhibits, we enable a pool of phenomenal changes resulting in quantum achievements. The simplest way to get to this is also through ‘Gender Inclusivity’. This can bring about legendary & philanthropic milestones for all across the globe.

We’ve so far seen how the Western and European nations have greatly benefitted by placing women in commanding positions that include names such as Sheryl Sandberg (Ex COO Meta) to Jacinda Ardern (Ex NZ PM) and Angela Merkel (Germany). They have singularly and consistently utilised their professional positions to alleviate non-inclusivity thereby depicting that women too are positive trend setters and are equally capable of outperforming commanding positions across industries. When opportunity meets talent, there’s that desired magic to witness continually.