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 Cover Story

 

BITSian Women - You go girl! 

BY Himabindu Chitta ('02), Krithika Kalyan ('00), Bharathi Balakrishnan ('00), Deeptha Ganapathy ('95), Aditi Pany ('00) and Dileepan Narayanan ('00) 

Engineering and Technology

In an article called “Can science be women-friendly?” , the noted journalist and Chief of the Mumbai Bureau/ Deputy Editor of The Hindu, Kalpana Sharma talked about how difficult it would be to comprehend and administer the larger issues of "gendered" science - the need to evolve a system of knowledge that integrates a gender perspective in its approach and direction. While there are laudable efforts in this direction like the special “Women’s Scientists Program” by Department of Science and Technology’s which pledges to make concerted effort to give women a strong foothold into the scientific profession, help them re-enter into the mainstream (post “break in their careers" arising out of motherhood and family responsibilities) and provide a launch pad for further forays into the field of science and technology, both from the point of view of pure science and its application to societal development, there is an urgent need to address the more immediate concerns plaguing the women in this arena .  The most significant of it being the reluctance on part of the women to specialize exclusively in any of the organized and niche areas of science or engineering – areas considered beyond their realm of capability. 

Infact, as recently as five years ago, when a well-known all-women's college in the United States, Smith College, announced that it was offering a degree in engineering, an electronics magazine ran an article with the title, "Is Female Engineer an Oxymoron?" The author claimed that in his 32 years as an engineer in power electronics, he had never worked with a woman engineer. He concluded that women did not have a love or aptitude for "real" technical work. These women defy any such hypotheses.

Shoumi Das (now Sen), (EEE,  1997-2001) is one of those lone rangers, who has focused on a career in the noticeably underrepresented area as far as the number of women working in it is concerned  -  the HVAC (Heating, ventilation and Air conditioning) industry. She works as a Project Engineer at Carrier, the famous air conditioning company and has, so far , not met a single engineer in her company who happens to be a woman. She was at the receiving end of incredulous looks from customers and colleagues alike initially. Infact, in her training programmes at work, her instructor keeps referring to the team as "gentlemen" and adds the word "lady" as an afterthought!! But of course, the men had no choice but to get used to having her around, especially she is so dedicated. The RF industry is no different story either, points out Sangeeta Iyer, who is working as in RF engineer at LCC International in North Carolina.  More often than not, women have to deal with pre-conceived notions from their peers of the opposite sex that women will succumb to the relentless work pressures and long hours. But of course, over a course of time and due to tremendous perseverance by the women to prove themselves, the men have begun to have second thoughts about their notions. Maybe the rest of womenfolk around can let Sangeeta and Shoumi show them the way.

It is a sobering truth that several sectors have continued to be male dominated even today, let alone a couple of decades back. Sangeeta Patni (EEE,Batch of  1981) reminisces on her managerial stint in the mining industry where there were just a couple of women working and mostly in a secretarial capacity, but none apart from her as a manager. “In this job, there were people who used to drive miles from the mines to see me, the chick that worked in the mines!” she says. Men apparently even stood behind curtains to sneak a peak or two at her! When speaking to some of these men on work-related matters, some men simply did not know where to look. Some refused to meet her eye and some stared steadfastly at the walls…. Professional meetings were a mixed bag- More often than not, she was not "heard", and in some, she was the ONLY person who was heard. When she went down to the mines, where she was working on getting a plant constructed, she had the infamous reputation of being the cause of accidents, because when mining men saw a woman walk past, they were so shocked that they dropped things they had in their hands!

While Sangeeta’s anecdotes seem to paint a hilarious picture of the situation, in retrospect it was anything but. The lack of more than a handful of women in areas of engineering such as mining, HVAC, cement plants, construction, manufacturing and process industries is an indicator that the steepest challenge faced by women is not handling the tougher and sometimes physically challenging conditions at work, but rather the stereotypical thinking of the social milieu surrounding them, due to which women  tend to garner fear that they might  not be taken seriously if they opt for a career in science, engineering and technology. Often, women have to go farther, work harder, and accomplish more in order to be recognized. Sangeeta adds on a more heartening note that it got better with time, and by the time she quit, after 4 years, people had  acknowledged that women could meld in and work in all
kinds of situations. Due to her sustained efforts in hiring and recommending women to be recruited in roles such as hers, there were 8 women in about 2000 men, when left the mining company. These days, when she has a chance to visit Udaipur, she sometimes meets with the women she hired, and is filled with a sense of pride to hear about the increasing trend in the number of women engineers and accountants now working in the company.

Of course, over the decades, remarkable progress has been made in analyzing this concern of gender inequality in science, engineering and technology. Despite the roadblocks, women have responded by making significant headway, if unevenly into these arenas. Women are being bestowed with greater opportunity in these fields both in terms of wages and responsibilities. It appears that improving women's opportunities in science has benefited both the sciences and the cause of women in general. Just as Marie Curie's achievements excited the imaginations of women around the world in early last century, the escalating percentage of women entering these areas has become the thrust for breaking traditional thought processes and taking all due credit for the growing social justice and for providing an example of what is possible far beyond the borders of scientific and technological institutions themselves.

A few of our very own kind have contributed immeasurably to this changing paradigm.

Mitra Priya, Technical Director at CSL Tech, is a B.Tech from BITS Pilani and Postgraduate from the IIT, Bombay and a Certified Quality Assurer. Mitra has a rich experience of over 13 years in the Software Industry. Mitra has handled several large scale projects for clients in Europe, USA and India. She held Middle and Senior Management positions at TCS, Citicorp Overseas Software and MBT. Her experience includes execution of a Large and Middle scale applications Development, Deployment and Production Support in areas such as e–Business, Mainframe Systems as well as Client Server based solutions in Verticals such as Manufacturing, Banking and Securities. Mitra was instrumental in steering COSL to attain SEI-CMM level 5 in October 1999. Mitra was heading the e-Business initiatives of MBT for IBM platforms before joining CSLTECH as its Technical Director.

Archana Bandari (1980-1984, Chemical Engineering ), presently the Principal Engineer, Mitretek Systems, Inc was the recipient of the 2004 National Women of Color Technology Special Recognition Award. She holds a US patent for “A computer program product and a method for using natural language for the description, search and retrieval of multi-media objects”. A key contributor to Mitretek’s corporate objective of applying leading-edge technologies in the public interest., she successfully worked on projects in the area of health care, criminal justice, national security, unemployment insurance, and transportation, related to Knowledge Management and Representation, Customer Response Systems, Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval and Visualization.

27.jpgKanchana Natarajan Mendes (’88, Biological Sciences, MMS) is an Instructor at the M. D. Andersen Cancer Center. She is an Institutional Training Grant Fellow, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York. She was awarded the National Eye Institute Award at the Annual Meeting of Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 2001, and the Research Fellow Award by the Annual Meeting of American Society for Virology in 2000. Kanchana has also been invited to speak at the Annual Meeting of American Society for Microbiology and was a nominated member of Sigma Xi, Scientific Research Honors Society in 1998. 
Kanchana has completed her PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. As an exceptional student, Kanchana was awarded the ASM Student Award, the Edward A. Grula Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, Oklahoma State University and the Cora Downs Award for Outstanding Presentation by a Junior Graduate Student. Ofcourse, she has to her credit publications and reviews in several peer-reviewed journals.

Soumya Krishnamoothy (94B3A3) works for the Maryland center for Integrated Nano Science and Engineering, a multidisciplinary group at the University of Maryland working towards applying nano science towards changing the world profoundly, from electronic devices  and medical care to fundamental understanding in the physical sciences, life sciences and engineered systems. Broadly speaking, her work involves developing CMOS compatible biosensors and specifically, her PhD is on developing high frequency resonators that serve as electrical fingerprints that detect the presence of antigens. While her focus is on the device and integrated circuit development, she interacts closely with biochemists at NIH to develop the protein attachment chemistry. She is also part of a group which are involved in a ground breaking the use of the high frequency resonators as pressure sensors in prosthetic legs. This sensor is to be embedded in the prosthetic leg and any applied pressure can be transmitted as electrical pulses to excite the brain. This research is still in its nascent stages and will be included in parts as part of Sowmya’s thesis. Sowmya and her team’s work has garnered many acknowledgements from the academic community with publications in leading journals including the Journal of applied physics, IEEE Electron device letters, Applied physics letters, Biosensors and bioelectronics etc. and has been showcased in an article in Washington Post.

28.jpgAnother young star is Kavitha Venkatesan who graduated from BITS in 1998 after completing a B1A7 dual. She is currently Research Fellow at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD in Bioinformatics in 2004 and has published an article in Nature, one of the most widely read/reputed journals in the scientific community (2005).
Kavitha has diverse interests. She helped to set up the Boston Chapter for CRY (Child Relief and You) and was actively involved in fund-raising initiatives (1999-2001). Even at BITS, where she co-founded and co-organized the first SANGAMAM, an annual classical music/dance festival in BITS in 1997, she has been a pioneer. She believes that a big key to success is to ‘do and dare.’

29.jpgShilpa Sambashivan ( 1997 , Msc. (Hons.) Biological Sciences – BITS Pilani and Phd – Biological Sciences at UCLA) was awarded the 2005 Amgen Dissertation of the Year Award from the Molecular Biology Institute of UCLA. She has also won the Pauling poster-prize at the American Crystallographic Associations’ annual conference in 2004. Her most notable research publication was in the prestigious journal, Nature (Sep 8, 2005 issue) where she wrote about Amyloid research, presenting the new and important insights into neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Shilpa has been actively furthering her passion for Bharatanatyam and has performed at several locations in Los Angeles.

And the list continues…Vardhini Kirthivas (Bpharm, Batch of 1995) works as Scientist –Regulatory Affairs in the Generics Sector of the Pharma Business at Sandoz. Dr. Monica Valluri (MSc. Physics – Graduated in 1987) is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics in The University of Chicago. She also happens to be is the Assistant Director of Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Padma Reddy (Computer Science, 1981-1985),  Head -India Development Center, webMethods Inc, Bangalore. These women have not only done commendable and meritorious work in their own spheres of specialization, they have definitely set an example for the generations to come, to follow their dreams and aspire to achieve their goals.
         

 
 
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