When I did a Google search for ‘international women’s day,’ these lines were amongst the top results of that search:
“About International Women's Day (8 March) International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.”
While I was reading this, I was trying to find the word ‘technology,’ or something of that sort. I couldn’t find anything, maybe they didn’t think about it. I don’t know. But I know people who did think about it. PyDelhi, with other tech enthusiast communities, came together and organized a mega-meetup on 11th March, 2018, the theme of which was International Women’s Day.
The place for the meetup was the hall at Adobe’s Noida Building. A giant structure decorated with bold colors all around it with the dominance of dark grey in the middle. It looked like a great place for a mega-meetup like this one. Not only venue, Adobe also provided us with great food. Not once, thrice. And Guarav, the guy from Adobe, was really helpful and supportive. Thank Adobe!
In this meetup, there were three major talks. Curious case of JAVASCRIPT BY Neha Sharma was the first in line. The talk was about Javascript, as you must have guessed. She explained some nice points related to Javascript. In order to have a taste of the talk, check this out:
1<2<3 is true,
3>2>1 is not true.
Don’t think that there’s something wrong with your math, it’s the Javascript.
Second in line was Tannu Bansal on Amazon DynamoDB. She made a pressing point of why DynamoDB is a better choice over other options and explained ways of keeping the cost down. This session was not all theoretical, Tannu logged into her AWS account and gave some practical demonstration to the audience.
Although it was a quite informative session, yet I think the best part was when she offered that if any women who have left the industry for some reason and wants to join it again, she can contact Tannu for that.
The third talk was ‘Infusing AI into your apps’ by Ruhani Arora from Microsoft. We all know how popular and powerful this topic is. From explaining the concepts to discussing the wide range of uses of AI, all was covered in the talk. Along with that, she covered that how Azure can play a vital role in achieving the desired results.
As you must have noticed that all the speakers above were women. Even in the audience men were outnumbered by women with a big margin. Not only that, somewhat same was the case with lightning talks also.
Lightning talks was the next session. The chance for everyone to let others know what he/she have got. As you all know, in lightening session, people from the audience are given five minutes to talk and present whatever idea they have. Wearable electronics, an app to pass on academic resources, natural language processing, android development for small businesses, amongst others were some topics presented by people from the audience.
The purpose of this meetup was to encourage women in the tech world. So is the purpose of this blog post. But when I completed the draft of this post and sent it over to a friend for proofreading, he pointed out a flaw in the post which I didn’t know how to correct.
He pointed out that the content of the post is well on its purpose, yet it might work the other way than expected. If women got encouraged and increased their participation, this will, in turn, encourage even more men and disbalance the sex ratio again.
Although he has a point, but we can’t correct it. Nobody can.
Jokes apart, we sincerely want and hope for more and more women participation in our meetups and the whole tech world. With that, we have come to the end of another meetup. But before we sign off, let me tell you which were those communities, other than PyDelhi, because of whom this all could become possible:
Women Who Code, Women Techmakers, LinuxChix India, Women Who Go, PyLadies Delhi, Mozilla Delhi Open Community, Women in machine learning and data science
It was nice working in collaboration with all these groups. PyDelhi wants to thank them for coming together for this meetup and look forward to working with them again in future.
Ok then. See you at the next meetup. Till next time. Happy International Women’s Day.