'The Smart Techie Women 2.0' sets path to ascend the ladder

It was a unique but quite an informal platform where the women professionals from different walks of the IT industry shared to each other their professional and personal experiences. Though it was a working day, around 500 women could not help making it to the 'Women 2.0' conference conducted by The Smart Techie magazine, a sister publication of siliconindia at Dr Ambedkar Bhavan in Bangalore. At a 'beginning-to-end' dynamic conference, Chitra Kasthuri, IPRC-VP, Alcatel Lucent set a befitting start to the event by delivering a fantastic inaugural key-note in a style of mind boggling narration. She urged the packed audience to dare to dream and be ready to make difficult decisions. "Take up jobs which other people don?t want to. Because either you succeed or lose, you stand to gain," she said.

Eminent speakers like Vanikola from Managing Director, NEA-Indo US ventures; C Mahalingam, EVP and Chief People Officer at Symphony Services; Sharada Sastrasala, Director Strategic Supplier Management at TI; JessiePaul, Chief Marketing Officer at Wipro Technologies; Dr Ramanujan Kashi, Senior Research Scientist at Avaya India and Aparna Pujar, Director, Media Products at Yahoo, to name a few, dwelt upon each and every dimension of leadership by taking examples from their own life.

Most of the speakers touched upon the management of work-life balance, a topic most pertaining to women. "As far as women are concerned, two things are needed to be addressed quickly: increasing attack against them and the matter of giving them the opportunity to make their own choice", opined Vanikola.

Mahalingam, who is fondly called as Mali in the industry circle, had the audience laughing through out his presentation, a perfect proof for the effectiveness of his lively words. "The concept of glass ceiling does not exist in reality anymore, at least among woman techies. All talks about this concept are merely perceived ones. Ladies need to understand this fact and grow up instead of getting stranded in a condition called 'learned helplessness'. "In a speech that was combined with proofs and findings of various achievements of women in general, he went on to the extend of calling the process of women driven economy as "wemenomics".

Aparna, another speaker, also talked about challenges in the life of every woman techie. However, she urged them to look out for challenges, and to get over them in order to be eminent leaders in whatever segments they are working in within the industry.

A catch word in the speech of Sharada from TI was 'negotiate.' "Women are facing huge challenges in their day to day life. They have been assigned with multi-tasks of doing office work, and in the meantime, taking care of their domestic activities and feeding their kids. The only way to manage them easily is to negotiate. Then they can see their life moving in a perfectly smooth way," she said.

The event beautifully swung between key-notes and panel discussions one after the other, keeping the audience energetic and involved through out the whole day.