Lift as you Climb

My experience of the Google Women Techmakers International Women’s Day Summit

2nd March 2019, Conrad Hotel, Bangalore

Fast forwarding to the conclusion of the event, Lakshya Sivaramakrishnan, the host, asked a ballroom full of energetic girls to shout out their experience in one word and the loudest cheer was ‘inspired’.

What an exciting, empowering, fun-filled and of course inspiring Saturday. Geeks like me most certainly do have a very different idea of fun. So here’s me sharing my experience of the day!

Scrolling through the Women Techmakers webpage someday in January, I saw the upcoming summits for International Women’s day.

Instant excitement! There’s one in Bangalore! Yay!

How about I register for this. I’ve never attended one of these famous Google events. I’ve heard they are amazing. Hmm. Will I make it through the selection? Let’s see what the registration form is like.

What do you think about intersectionality? Talk about your views.

What? Intersectionality? Whatever is that? And how can I present my views about something I’m hearing for the first time, let alone hoping to get selected based on an essay I write on it.

Instant give up? Neah.

I spent the next two days reading about intersectionality, which turned out to be an interesting thought that we as a community very easily turn a blind eye to. For those of you who are just like me and don’t possess an extreme competency in English, to whom intersectionality sounds nothing but a very long word, here’s what it means.

Intersectionality considers different systems of oppression, and specifically how they overlap and are compounded. Here’s an example, “a black woman, has some disadvantages because she’s a woman and some disadvantages because she’s black. But she also has some disadvantages specifically because she’s a black woman, which neither black men nor white women have to deal with.” That’s intersectionality; race, gender, and every other way to be disadvantaged interact with each other.

I know that’s a whole other level of perceiving things, and probably a longer discussion for some other day. Long story short I ended up writing the essay and got shortlisted to attend the summit.

Yay!

Saturday morning, I had a light breakfast, dressed up like a geek and prepared myself like a Spartan warrior, my war… Bangalore traffic.

Upon reaching the venue, I was directed straight for registration. It was super quick and super smooth. I got a fancy admit card, after which some volunteers from Google guided me towards breakfast. Two of my favourite things, smart people and good food! I knew the day was going to be fun.

For those of you who don’t know me well, I’m a software developer, we look at people from Google and inherently go into the fan-girl mode.

Anyway, there was a fun photo booth too. Check this out.

Please don’t ask me why there are 3 of me, there just are, let’s make our peace with that. Some of the creative girls had interesting poses for each of those, sadly I wasn’t among them.

I’m not going to lie, I was super excited about the food that the agenda mentioned. I saw a delicious looking spread of delicacies. Desserts for breakfast? Sure! I saw a lot of tables and people gathering around, randomly picked one and politely asked if I could join them. Of course, I was welcome. Brief introductions followed. We were also joined by a couple of volunteers from Google. We talked about their work and projects. Everyone wants to know what Nooblers are up to these days!

Soon after, we entered the ballroom, only today it was filled to capacity with girls of all ages sharing a common interest in technology. (Men were welcome too, the summit was an all-inclusive event.) The event started, the host welcomed us and the live stream attendees (the room had those huge professional cameras everywhere), talked us through the agenda for the day and the theme.

Lift as you Climb.

Read that multiple times, let the powerful message sink in.

Next, we welcomed the keynote speaker Amruta Joshi, the JAPAC Head of Strategic Cloud Engineering at Google.

Amruta talked about the importance of dreams.

Amruta shared the story of her growing up; how her mother convinced her to apply to Stanford University, even though she personally thought it was a long shot, a waste of application fee and only a hazy fictional dream; how she got accepted; how she fought through the financial and emotional crisis; how she didn’t stop trying.

Dream big and aim high, you never know what you can achieve.

She also emphasized the key role aliases, mentors, supporters played in her career, and how that made all the difference.

The talk was so refreshing and inspiring.

Empowered people empower people

With the boost of positivity in the room, we moved ahead to the panel discussion.

Lots of interesting questions, and interesting answers.

The power of dreams, mentors, aliases, support, gender neutrality, all in one.

History is made when we ask questions that challenge the status quo and build brave solutions that drive meaningful change for everyone.

Lunch was all about a delectable spread and networking. The brief discussions we had during breakfast grew into a comprehensive talk about projects, work, routines, hobbies. I enjoyed the intelligent discussions, food for the soul.

Time for some live coding- The Actions on Google workshop!

Actions on Google is a developer platform that lets people create conversational applications for the Google Assistant. This workshop was all about the key fundamental concepts to develop an Action for the Google Assistant, and how to use Dialogflow, a tool that uses Machine Learning and natural language processing to help build actions that understand what users say.

Here’s the guide to go through the hands-on material https://codelabs.developers.google.com/

Next, the Fireside chat.

If you feel that there’s no seat at the table, you need to be the one to drag that seat up. Speaking up creates opportunities.

That was all about how we #WomenTechmakers celebrated International Women’s Day. But what’s a Google event without some #GoogleSwag goodies. In lieu of the yearly goodie bag, Google Women Techmakers gave all attendees an opportunity to donate $10 on their behalf to any noble cause sponsored by Google GlobalGiving. I made my contribution to providing Computer Access to Young Women in India.

But that wasn’t all, one would have to experience it live to believe the level of enthusiasm in the room when Lakshya announced that all of us are receiving a Google Home Mini!

WOOOOWWW!!!

Apart from the obvious takeaways I’ve already talked about, gender neutrality is what I absorbed. We as a community have moved from women empowerment to gender equality, the next step towards absolute inclusivity is gender neutrality.

All the speakers, panellists talked about their supporters — their fathers, their husbands, their male friends who were constantly there encouraging and empowering them. A hi-five to all the male allies!

Behind every successful man, there is a woman.

Isn’t it valid the other way around too?

Behind every successful woman, there are male allies.

Absolute inclusivity my friends.

Behind every successful person, there are so many allies.

That’s gender neutrality for you.

Ok, Google! Empower all!