UC School Community Essay Anonymous

“How did you fix it akka?” asked Bhavani. I had spent the last three afternoons inside a small room at their school with Bhavani and eleven other underserved students. We had spent hours debugging a section of the code to no avail. Four mugs of coffee, seventeen hours, and fifty-three commits later, I sat cross-legged on the floor grinning triumphantly at the laptop screen.

This was the third team I was mentoring for the Technovation Challenge—a competition that had got me addicted to the tech space. Competing at San Francisco finals convinced me that there was a place for women in the business and technology world.

Around the time I was nine, mom quit her executive job to become a full-time homemaker. By fourteen, I noticed that she wasn’t the only one. I struggled with the logic then, I wrestle with it even now. While the business world is drawing up policies to encourage sustainable employability for women like my mom, they are doing little to mould girls like Bhavani. Our country cannot produce the next Huffington, Sandberg or Nooyi by only changing HR policies.

When I first started recruiting students at Parikrma to learn more about tech, I was shocked and disheartened to find none of the girls raise their hands. I...