Sai S.

I think I've drawn inspirations from everybody along the path. My parents have been inspirational and supportive of everything I have done, and they've always been great mentors that I draw from. At work, I've had people who have been good, and I've learned from them. I pick up everything. My kids are my mentors in learning what's current today, what is relevant, and what makes sense. I also teach Sunday school, so a lot of my children bring up topics, and you're always inspired by that. I have peers who come from diverse backgrounds, so you're learning every day. That's how I draw my lessons from and my learning. Sports has helped me to continue to grow and learn. There's books, podcasts, YouTubes. I think the venue is so much today. Your religious context and religious texts provide you support. I draw inspiration from all of it, so I think it just comes at a point in time. There is something that will come to you.

I would say travel the path that's untraveled. That's how I've seen the opportunities that have come to me. It's only because I made choices that people just wouldn't take up, because it was not conventional, it was not always the path traveled. It could have been less traveled, but I think the first step is to travel the path, to first take the step. You don't know what the path is going to lead you to. There's always going to be unknowns, there's always going to be challenges, and this is true of any path. Take the adventure. I feel the journey opens up for itself. You'll find help, you will find people who are willing to be there for you. You'll probably test your own strength to say, hey, I could have taken it, and you would never know it if you hadn't taken it. So, I always tell that, just take the first step, and then the rest falls in.

I think engaging women in tech, at all levels, especially mid-career and above, has always been a struggle. I think it comes from a perspective of equal pay, which we are still learning. There is also what goes hand in hand with enabling a woman to be successful. The successful stories I've read, like in Africa, there was a project where they enabled a grandmother, and that enabled an entire village to be successful, taking care of their own electricity needs. There's a lot of inspirations that you can drive from, but I think we need it to be a holistic approach, where people bring regulations, they provide opportunities for women, but at the same time, enable what will make them successful. As long as they're going to be a caretaker, and mothers are mothers, you can't replace them. But if they're caregivers, how do you facilitate them so that they don't give up their dreams trying to help somebody else? There's many aspects that I see that need to come together and make that conducive for women to be successful. People really need to understand that it's a holistic approach, and how do we do that is what I see as the biggest struggle. I think we have predefined roles, which barriers need to be broken. We were always assigned as teachers, nurses, and if you look at Texas technology, they'll put them as QA testers. But I think women can think beyond that, and are we really leveraging them? The same goes with the other sex as well. We might have great chefs who are men, men who are stay-at-home dads, and probably they would be the next generation influencers in their own way. So I think rather than bucketing anybody into a category, we need to take an individualistic approach where we say, hey, what are you good at, and how can we enable you? Doesn't matter who they are and what background they come from.