Promoting women power in tech sphere

BANGALORE, INDIA: The university relations wing of IBM organized the first ever Women in Technology Conference in Bangalore today, and saw students and IBM technicians indulge in discussions and opinion sharing.

IBM’s University Relations programme is aimed at creating a conducive environment for student innovators to work in unison with IBM, to serve the larger ecosystem of research, development, and laying down roadmaps for future innovation, embarked into a new territory for the very first time – reaching out to women, in order to exemplify their contribution to technology, and the possible traction between the industry and the women community.

The core ideas of the conference was to graduate from a reactive and defensive mode of software and hardware development to a more agile, positive and imaginative way of working, aimed at innovations that would ultimately lead to better products – software or otherwise.

The Women in Technology conference focused also on using technology to empower women, as an attempt to complete the give-and-take lifecycle, where technology is looked upon as a facilitator for women and working backwards to foster innovation from women to feed the technology ecosystem in the country, and the larger worldwide community.

Conference tracks ranged from translating innovation into practice, to consciously making green innovations to more serious topics like the business of converting innovations into a product that can be sold in a marketplace.

A special track on technology careers was one of the most popular with discussions ranging from technology being a fast-shifting environment where all companies are beefing up internal programmes to include higher percentages of women in technical fields, irrespective of global economic conditions.

The broader vision of motivating women students to stream their mindsets towards technology as early as the K-12 level of education was stressed upon, keeping in mind also the already technology-inclined individuals who are looking to streamline their innovations into workable, sellable solutions.

The event also saw representatives from IBM’s India Software lab interacting with the student community, on the functioning of the IBM Lab, which caters to software product development across Rational, LotoSphere, Tivoli, Websphere and Information Manager, targeted specifically at the needs of the regional market and mid-sized companies, besides contributing to the overall global offerings and R&D activities of IBM’s software business.

Integrated product development of this nature, IBM expects, will foster leadership both in the management as well as the technical side, and a large number of these innovators could well be women.