Women Engineers and Product Managers Helping WiSE (Women in Science and Engineering)

Thrive-WiSE is a charitable organization that strives to support women, primarily women of color, in development, engineering, research, and other technical fields where they find themselves without the infrastructure, resources, and support to thrive.

It began as CodeChix, having been founded by software engineer and product manager, Rupa Dachere. Throughout the variety of professional roles she played over the years, she noted the absence of other women in similar high-level technical positions and sought to find out why and to make a change.

Rupa founded the organization in 2009, and it has continuously grown to its current scale. As an international speaker traveling to various conferences, she quickly found like-minded women who were also willing to commit to the improvement of conditions for women within technical industries. She is a huge proponent of Open Source and created PiDoorbell in 2012. Rupa has received awards from the IEEE, Anita Borg Institute, and more. Read her IEEE article here.

The Unique Challenges That Women Face in the Tech Industry

Women have been historically excluded from positions in technical positions like developers and engineers. While some of the outright exclusion has now been lifted, there are many other factors that continue to lead to fewer women reaching high-level technical positions.

While there is no shortage of women reaching technical fields, they leave these fields earlier and at a higher rate than men. Despite the wealth of support found throughout schooling for women in STEM fields, we don't see any results at the senior levels on either the technical or management ladders.

In general, this comes down to three key factors. Within technical fields, women find themselves without the time, resources, and support that they need to thrive. Thrive-WiSE is committed to fixing that by providing resources that are more in line with facing these unique challenges.

Many women find themselves severely pressed for time as they reach a point in their lives where they balance both a career and a family. The industry hasn't been structured with this balance in mind, with many positions prioritizing exorbitant time commitments that cannot be reconciled with the commitments of having a family. Engineers and Product Managers (PMs) are overloaded with tight deadlines and keeping up with new tech while working on current or old technology on a daily basis. As such, women find themselves pushed out of an industry that doesn't respect their time. The leading cause of dropout of highly skilled technical women is lack of advancement, promotion, and pay.

Women also find themselves with less reliable access to valuable resources within the industry due to time and scheduling restraints. It is even more difficult for women of color to break into a white network and/or a men's network, thus reducing the chance of advancement greatly. Thrive-WiSE is changing this by developing resources that better suit the needs of women in the industry. This includes their Thrive-WiSE Micro Conferences that gives greater access to networking, which is one area in which women in the industry regularly face challenges. The SRI International Technical Mentorship Program is another created to support and help grow women engineers' skills while making an impact.

A lack of support is also a serious limiting factor in the tech careers of many women. Thrive-WiSE is committed to developing more support in the industry through several of its endeavors. They provide mentorship programs for women in tech, both 1:1 and in group formats. Through these programs, Thrive-WiSE seeks to help women create more meaningful and reliable connections within their professions. Networking through volunteering and learning from other members in the organization provides opportunities to have 1:1 interactions with senior executives at companies that could lead to finding and landing a new job.

Furthermore, Thrive-WiSE offers avant garde programs including the TW Safe Space and Ally Training Program for Engineers and PMs, piloted at a fortune 100 company in 2020/21. These highlight the hidden factors (covert and overt) in the workplace that women can't talk about due to the fear of retaliation. "We anonymize our findings to shield the women and present our findings to companies so they can learn about the real problems and determine methods to mitigate them to create a more equitable and safe workplace. We are the pioneers in this method and hope to see real impact towards our mission through these programs," shares Rupa.

Support Thrive-WiSE This Giving Tuesday

Thrive-WiSE has already developed a wide range of partners and supporters, including public figures like Donald Knuth and Radia Perlman. They work with a variety of companies to promote women in tech and break barriers, companies like VMware, Walmart Global Tech, NetApp, The Linux Foundation, and Amazon AWS.

November 30^th, 2021, is Giving Tuesday, a day dedicated to unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world. This Giving Tuesday, Thrive-WiSE is seeking support to continue its aim to retain accomplished, driven, and stellar women throughout engineering and science.