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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.
 Kanchana
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.
 Another
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.’
 Shilpa
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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