International Women's Day 2023 Live Updates: Women Tech Leaders on "DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality"

Seema Ambastha, CEO, BAM Digital Realty

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, seeing women accomplish so much in STEM and other fields is heartening. Today, women in the technology sector have been playing a significant role in both innovation and leadership. The need of the hour is for the organizations to hire, retain and grow more women for an inclusive digital ecosystem and provide them the impetus to lead. Here is wishing more strength to women to continue to be the drivers of change and innovation.

Anita Kukreja, Head - Marketing & Channel Sales, IceWarp India

Every year, we celebrate the determination and strength of women in technology industry during our International Women’s Day campaigns. This year, we are especially thrilled to have created a platform for the encouraging women leaders of our industry to share their thoughts on the potential of our community while speaking up about ways to create a more equitable and inclusive society that seeks out the best in all of us. Through our #IceWarpSupportsEquity campaign, we are glad to have stirred up an important conversation for the industry and the society at large and certainly intend to continue doing our part in creating a more supportive and diverse workplace for everyone.

Khushboo Jain Tibrewala, Founder of The Health Pantry, Nutritionist and Diabetes Educator

"Womens day is a day that aims are bringing attention towards the unique and irreplaceable contribution of women in every aspect of our lives. While this is a great thing, the need for a day like this itself in my opinion is a little problematic. Mainly because this day has now become all about brands pushing their respective promotions. Workplaces are all also simply doing basic things for the women in their team. This day and all the effort around still has not really translated into an actual change in mindset. In my opinion, this day would be a lot more valuable if all this effort was spent in actually spreading awareness about where we are going wrong.

While there has been a great mindset shift, across the country, a day like Women's Day may not have contributed to it.

Padmini Rajan, Director, Cloud Services in Opentext

What’s stopping us from being our best, there is nothing in the world which can limit us from what we want to achieve, it’s our self-limiting beliefs ingrained with stereotypes and societal conditions which prevent us from doing the best. Nothing is impossible, they can be overcome with patience, practice and confidence. Let this be your day one. We came this far on our merit and just need a mind shift change. You need to be your own advocate and teacher to take your mission ahead. After you achieve something, pull along the other women too. We are breaking the glass ceiling, if someone can do it, we can do too. If not you who else can do it and if not now when? We need to pose to ourselves. We need to continue working very hard, our previous generation women opened the doors for us to get into workforce in large numbers, our generation is showing that we can work at top levels and expect the current and future generation to be in large numbers at the top, so that we don’t need that women tag of women leaders, women CEOs, women achievers etc. It should be gender neutral, women should be known for their competence, grace, knowledge, leadership skills. We shouldn’t be competing with men but complementing each other.

Manisha Saboo, President - HYSEA, Delivery Head - Infosys, Governing Board Member, BBCIT

We are extremely privileged, we are privileged to be born, as 3323 girls in India are murdered before they are born every day, somebody in our family took the decision to welcome us, only 30% of women in India have the privilege to have the education we have, someone spent money to educate on whatever we aspired for.

Sushma Mudigonda, Head of Process at QualiZeal

We provide a supportive environment and offer a happy place to work and facilitate career growth. A growing number of new emerging jobs are being created due to advances in technology, from artificial intelligence to collaborative intelligence, and we want that women should be part of this journey. We believe in encouraging girls and women to opt for careers that require knowledge of STEM so that they can occupy the corner office, are part of boardroom discussions, and become significant contributors to a nation’s economy.

Dipali Padia, President -Banking Alliance and Partnerships at Neokred

Every individual professionally and personally strives for recognition of their work and existence. When we tap into the myriad of potentials by means of acceptance, creativity and newness that each individual exhibits, we enable a pool of phenomenal changes resulting in quantum achievements. The simplest way to get to this is also through ‘Gender Inclusivity’. This can bring about legendary & philanthropic milestones for all across the globe.

We’ve so far seen how the Western and European nations have greatly benefitted by placing women in commanding positions that include names such as Sheryl Sandberg (Ex COO Meta) to Jacinda Ardern (Ex NZ PM) and Angela Merkel (Germany). They have singularly and consistently utilised their professional positions to alleviate non-inclusivity thereby depicting that women too are positive trend setters and are equally capable of outperforming commanding positions across industries. When opportunity meets talent, there’s that desired magic to witness continually.