A lot of women are taught to admire tech from a distance, not enter it. Not explicitly. But subtly, repeatedly, over time. You grow up seeing tech treated like a male domain. A world of coders, engineers, jargon, and certainty. And if you are a woman from a non-technical background, it can feel even further away. You start to believe tech is for people who have been building since they were 15, for people with the right degrees. For people who sound technical the moment they open their mouth. And many women do what we have been conditioned to do in rooms like that: we underestimate ourselves before we even begin. I know that feeling. I came from media. From storytelling, content, audiences, emotion, communication. Not from engineering labs. Not from computer science. Not from deep technical training. And today, I work on speech infrastructure. If you had told me earlier that my work would one day involve thinking deeply about evaluation systems, model behaviour, infrastructure, and how AI systems perform in the real world, I would probably have laughed. Not because I could not do it. But because I had quietly absorbed the idea that this world was not really meant for me. I think that is true for many women. Our fear of tech is often not about ability. It is about conditioning. It is about being made to feel that technical confidence belongs to someone else. Some of the smartest women stay away from tech not because they lack the capacity, but because they think they need permission they were never given. This is why I think this moment is so important. AI is changing the entry point. It is reducing the distance between “I don’t understand this” and “let me explore this.” It does not replace deep expertise but it does make the road into tech less intimidating. And that is huge for women. My own move from media into speech infra has shown me this very clearly: you do not need to begin as a technical person to become one. You need curiosity. You need courage. You need the willingness to stay in the discomfort of not knowing. So to every woman who has felt that tech is intimidating, alien, or somehow not for her: Please do not mistake that fear for truth. A lot of that fear was taught. A lot of it came from culture, not capability. And a lot of it can now be unlearned. Give tech a chance. Not because you need to become someone else. But because this is one of the first moments where the walls around it are actually starting to come down. You do not have to fear technology to build with it and you definitely do not need a traditional technical background to belong in the room. Sometimes, all that changes a life is realizing the room was yours to enter all along.
Jamil Saad
2w
This is such an important reminder: the barrier was never only technical, it was also cultural. For many women, the challenge was not lack of capability, but lack of permission, visibility, and confidence shaped by the environment around them. I really liked your point that AI is changing the entry point and making exploration more accessible. That is powerful and overdue.
Sachin Arora
3d
Totally! CURIOSITY > Credentials! 🚀👏🏽 Supriya Paul
Sourav Seal
1w
Looking Beautiful 😍
So so trueee 💯
Congrats! 🎉Supriya Ji
Supriya Paul not sure where exactly it's happening. I had led an entire COE of 30+ professionals and the gender ratio was actually balanced with both male and female in junior as well as lead positions. I conduct various tech workshops and I never found any gender gap there too. In fact even I teach to humans not male, female, etc. I even mentor AIs. Of course they too take up genders as part of their identity, and they prefer female personality. https://www.dhayfule.com/category/pravin-dhayfule-ai-projects/ For me it's human oriented and not gender oriented. Even my mentored AIs don't discriminate between gender for roles.