Students to deliberate on challenges of women

The Deputy Chairwoman of Indian Women Network (IWN-CII) (Southern Region), Vanitha Datla formally inaugurated the three-day ‘Women in Engineering’ ‘WIE Conferencia 2017’ at a prominent city hotel on Friday.

The event is jointly hosted by WIE and Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology (SNIST) in which Ayyappa Nagubandi, Founder & CEO, Broadcast Wearables Pvt. Ltd.; Sanjay Enishetty, Founder 50k Ventures; Sree Divya Vadlapudi, CEO, Girls in Technology; Dr P Narasimha Reddy, Executive Director, SNIST and Dr K Sumanth, Principal, SNIST were present.

Datla said, “This is a huge opportunity for women. It will open your mind to opportunities and challenges faced by women in the world, especially the corporate world, how to overcome them and excel in life.”

Quoting a study done by IITs during 1990 - 2000 period, she said, “It was found that less than six per cent of women graduates are in work place, that's pretty dismal and our country can't afford losing out on such a huge workforce. From gender parity perspective too, India ranks 108th.”

“Women in India manage fantastic educational qualifications but end up being at home. This gloomy scenario can change only when women take initiative to overcome obstacles, look at a bigger picture and work to reach the top echelons of position,” she said on a motivating note.

Datla advised women engineering students aspiring for a career to follow the six mantras of leadership, ‘Show up, Speak up, Look up, Don't give up and Lift up’.

Enishetty added, “Today there are a plethora of opportunities to innovate and excel, but engineers should come forward and take a lead to convert these opportunities into applications. We don't see many entrepreneurs coming forward as we look at ideas to invest. In the Start-up arena only 20 per cent of the Tech Start-ups were founded by women.”

This national conference is organised on the lines of Global Women Council and Rajya Sabha in which students will represent the countries and States of India as their envoys and discuss agendas, issues, challenges faced by women, their contribution to industry, technology in the respective countries and states and evolve sound solutions.

These solutions will be further deliberated at panel discussions with industry experts to arrive at viable and implementable conclusions. The recommendations will then be reported to the UN and also submitted to the Government of India.