BISinfotech ‘With You’ Features the Top 14 Women in Tech

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“With You” Leadership

Building Innovation Ecosystem

Shubha Sudheer brings over 16+ years of experience, working in the field of embedded systems & Product Applications Engineering for several Semiconductor-based Organizations. She has been part of technology transformation journey of various Products and Applications over the years, like printers & Imaging devices, Streaming Media devices & IoT Applications.

Her keenness to work on latest technology trends provided her with the opportunity to work in a startup, on Media streaming technology, and gain extensive experience during the journey of Innovation from requirement to Product manufacturing. This enabled her to be a Tech lead in Startup incubation lab that has successfully incubated several startups.

Currently at Infineon Technologies India, she leads the team enabling the embedded systems prototyping ecosystem & Cloud platform. She is also the Startup Lead, representing India in the global team.

As a systems application engineer, she has solved critical customer problems & setup a system for faster resolution, enabling faster time-to-market.

At Infineon, she plays a pivotal role in building Innovation ecosystem which involves collaboration with teams in Infineon & also with universities, startup incubators or working with the Govt to support them in “Make in India” mission. Shubha is always excited and goes the extra mile to take these collaborations to greater heights.

Even during the Covid times, she has successfully led projects for Infineon to support the Govt in developing ventilators in the country & also build the ecosystem for Motor drives for Solar water pump.

Interacting with entrepreneurs has given her a better understanding of what it takes to build a product, and coaches the team with that vision. She attributes her success to hard work, strong work ethics, openness to upskilling and structured working. She brings in a mixture of both open & closed innovation to the corporate.

Being a mother of a 12yr old, she understands the hurdles women go through in their career, and has mentored young women engineers to overcome barriers and continue their passion towards technology in the corporate world.

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WITH YOU Leadership

This category ideates sustained and consistent leadership over an extended period of time, advocacy, overall contributions and impact promoting and supporting women in tech.

Astor Ip is a strong female leader for Digi-Key Electronics, where she leads the assigned accounts sales teams in both the Shanghai and Hong Kong offices. In 2014, Ip was stationed in Shanghai in order to establish the assigned accounts team for the Shanghai office of the leading global distributor of electronic components. After successfully establishing the Shanghai team, she then moved to Hong Kong in 2015 to form the assigned accounts team for the Hong Kong office. She currently leads the combined teams, which is one of the largest teams for Digi-Key in all of Asia PAC.

For nearly eight years, Ip has helped Digi-Key navigate the Asia PAC market and has mentored countless sales team members to grow in their roles. The past two years living and working through the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially trying, says Ip. She understands her team members and customers have all experienced changes to their personal lives, and significant supply challenges in the market as well. Throughout all the sudden changes, Ip acknowledges that her team members and Digi-Key employees overall make the difference by listening to and supporting their customers’ needs in a unique market situation. She believes it all comes down to teamwork and high quality of service to continue growing the service levels for their customers.

One critical decision she had to make as a leader at the start of the pandemic was quickly transitioning her team to a work-from-home model. Many leaders were afraid to let people work remotely with fears of a loss in productivity. However, Ip knew her employees’ safety came first, and quickly made the decision to transition everyone to work from home without hesitation. She helped set up several tools and indicators for monitoring productivity and keeping the team connected, and overall it was a seamless transition.

Ip is proud to be a female leader for Digi-Key and acknowledges that women must be at the forefront of any company strategy as they offer different perspective than their male counterparts, thus ensuring a more inclusive and holistic strategy. She looks forward to continuing to mentor and coach both female and male leaders in the company this year and believes that strong leadership and coaching helps both grow and retain employees, ultimately resulting in a stronger team, both internally and externally.

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“With You” Leadership

As a part of the Design Verification team, I’m required to identify and fix bugs in the ICs we design. This is a huge responsibility and pushes me to make a conscious effort to find innovative methods to resolve issues. As a leader, I encourage my team to actively reach out and interact across levels and teams for guidance in order to navigate a problem. Sometimes, taking time off work can also help recharge and think from a fresh perspective.

The impact created by design verification engineers is huge. We identify the scope for automation, increase the overall efficiency in processes, reduce verification time as well as manual intervention. It is important to let our teams know how our work fits into the big picture. This will enable us to constantly explore new ideas, enable continuous learning and help us deliver better and innovative work.

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“With You” Leadership

Your ideas and Influences

At workplace, I strive to make my team more empowered and accountable and strengthen my bonds of trust with them. This not only helps to strengthen our integrity and credibility as a team but also recharges our passion and commitment towards the work as well as the whole organization. I look forward to deploying myriad progressive ways to deepen my connect with them. This if done well gives a new lease to our vision as a team.

Your leadership vision

To consistently lead with integrity, fairness, passion and commitment with the aim of engaging an empowered team in building stronger and sustainable goals while creating a respectful, enjoyable, and professional working environment.

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“With You” Leadership

I have over 22 years of industry experience after my Masters in Technology from IIT Delhi. I also completed my executive MBA from IIM Bangalore, while working at Infineon India. I have had the opportunity to work across functional areas in software, standards participation, firmware, hardware, marketing and applications, and technology domains as diverse as telecom, mobile, embedded and wireless. And I also have a good international experience having worked with multinational firms from across the globe including the US, France, Korea and Germany. I have eight patents to my name in the field of mobility standards, and have built and enhanced high-performing teams bottoms up.

Two years ago I was asked to lead a 50 people team that had a very flat structure. In the first few weeks, my main aim was to create a structure with clear ownership. The real strength of that decision was clear in the last one year, wherein interestingly coinciding with the pandemic and work from home, the team grew to more than double and we could achieve this tremendous growth as we had already created a very strong foundation for the team structure.

As a leader myself, I would like to advise budding leaders on two important aspects; First one is to believe in yourself and your team, and be open to taking risks. Knowing everything upfront is not feasible and if you wait for a perfect opportunity or a perfect time, you will keep waiting. Secondly, be aware of your surroundings including management, peers, culture, business requirements and use that to build your network. We live in a complex inter-connected network and can no longer succeed alone. We have to build on one another and develop successes together.

To make people aware about Cyber Security and the risks associated with it, prepared a holistic Cyber Security Awareness Plan and Calendar for the whole year. Celebrated Cyber Security Awareness Month with multiple initiatives to bring the cyber awareness among people.

I’m an active member of various CISO communities and a speaker/adviser for few.

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With You Leadership

In a women’s life, wearing different hats within their roles is often a common occurrence. You can find them often balancing careers, households and taking up the mantel of parental guidance along with many other experiences. These combined help women leaders to quickly adjust to new situations and focus on finding solutions to real-life work issues. Within a more diverse workplace, the more likely creative ideas are going to be presented. This helps fuel growth and helps create more sustainability within an organisation.
I believe that, Diversity in the workplace should not just prioritise women, but instead, have a fluid combination of both genders throughout the organisation. Workplace gender diversity helps increase in productivity, creativity, improves performance, staff retention, and, as established, boosts collaboration throughout the organization.
On this women’s day I would like to mention one of my favourite by Eleanor Roosevelt
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

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With You Leadership

Return-to-work program: I am very proud of this program which has resulted in 97% of mothers returning to work after their maternity break. Key elements include a proper buddy system for returning mothers, resting room facility and an in-house day care. Most importantly, we create a cohesive and sensitive work environment so women colleagues don’t feel isolated.

Employee Resource Group for New Parents: At element14, we are focused on building and strengthening our diversity and inclusion efforts. Our recently launched APAC’s first – Employee Resource Group (ERG) for new parents will provide peer support to its members through a safe space for learning and sharing lived experience. Our vision is to be both a community of support and a way for people to obtain resources to address parenting and caretaking responsibilities

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ENGINEERING: NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN?

Leanne started her journey in precision engineering from the school bench, some 14 years ago. This stoked her passion about Industrial metrology, leading to a career as an application engineer while pursuing Mechanical Engineering in the National University of Singapore. She now lends her skills and expertise in the area of smart manufacturing and metrology.

What drew you to a career in metrology?

It was interest and curiosity that drew me into engineering. Job satisfaction kept me in this field. I grew to love and appreciate precision measurement technology through my work. What I enjoyed most was helping customers solve their quality issues using the right measurement strategy and technology.

So much has been written about women in tech and engineering, have you seen a difference since the time you started?

The engineering industry was still predominantly male when I first started in the early 2010 s. More women are now in engineering and this is a good sign! It is good to see we can now pursue our dreams, breaking previous stereotypes.

How do we encourage young women to get into this field? How can we #buildbackbetter?

Fundamentally, encouragement from families goes a long way, especially during the formative years. If a family member goes “women don’t need to do engineering, just find a simple desk job will do”, it creates a negative image of engineering that might resonate in their minds throughout their growing years. Environment shapes us, and to get more young women into this field, I think uplifting the entire engineering image in Singapore and Asia is important. Showing young women that engineering is an extremely interesting and rewarding career is important. I think that starts from engaging girls early on, hence partnerships with educational institutions are essential to the entire effort to uplift the branding of engineering as it is a key occupation that contributes to sustainable development.

Globally, there is a skills shortage for engineers. Also, the type of engineering graduates does not always match the type of engineers required by specific countries or industries, according to studies by the Royal Academy of Engineering. This is compounded by the fact that many engineering graduates opt to work in disciplines other than engineering, shrinking the pool of available engineers.

Finding the solution to the skills shortage will not be easy nor quick and will require a coordinated effort by all stakeholders.

The World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development in March annually, for example, offers an occasion for governments, industries, non-governmental organisations and the public at large to connect and address the need for engineering capacity and the quality of engineers to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Reports continue to show that there continues to be a shortage of engineers in terms of employability and retention of talents within the engineering sector and companies.

So really, there’s no better time than now to step into this career if sustainable impact is what we are after!

What has it been like working at Hexagon?

Hexagon has given equal opportunities to both men and women. Despite the engineering industry being predominantly male, Hexagon has identified my talents and passion for the precision engineering industry and given me the opportunity to learn and grow with the family.

What do we need to do to #breakthebias? How far do we have to go to change the perception that engineering is a man’s world?

When more women in engineering start stepping up and showing the world what they are capable of, this perception will start to change, and the respect for women in the field will grow.

“It is fulfilling working in Hexagon which has incredible technologies and a supportive team where women are empowered to contribute towards the goal of the company.”

“With You” Leadership

In my career spanning 26 years, I have traversed the transformation journey from analog to digital for engineering operations across industries and geographies. I have led global transformation projects across Europe, APAC and the US, steering engineering operations across geographies, and driving efficiencies and productivity. The responsibility to steer end-to-end product development in a technologically complex domain has challenged my leadership skills and enhanced my ability to guide my team.
I have been involved in end-to-end product delivery for very high-tech complex programs – software, hardware and system on chip. During my career, I have worked on technologies as they evolved – from set-top boxes and home entertainment to system on chips from 1G to 5G.
I joined Honeywell in 2018 to lead the R&D transformation, and it has been a successful and fulfilling journey. It has been an honor to lead the Tools Center of Excellence (CoE), standardizing all engineering tools and enterprise tools. My team and I were at the forefront of driving digital transformation for Honeywell globally.
We helped Honeywell move away from being a tools-centric organization to being a solution-centric organization. The team does so by embedding themselves into every business group to understand their product domain and then offer solutions that are complementary to those businesses. Creating the digital thread and the strategy for this transformation has been extremely successful.

Words to Inspire

Follow your passion and your dreams. I was in eight standard when I created a project on traffic lights. Things like resistors, capacitors, and lights fascinated me. When it came to studying engineering, I knew it would be Electronics Engineering and nothing else.

Today, of course, the younger generation has many choices. One can choose a field in which one has passion. STEM is a field that has a lot of research capability with a multi-disciplinary approach. It is growing and becoming more diversified. Take, for example, biotechnology. There is bio-engineering, bio-informatics, biomedical – it is a cross-discipline subject and the lines are getting blurred.

Overcoming Challenges

Women should embrace their imperfections and cherish them. The superwoman ideology that has been prevalent for long needs to be discarded. I have come to accept that if you don’t value and respect yourself, nobody else will. It is okay to say no sometimes. At the same time, a support system is very important, be it family or colleagues. Seeking help is a leadership attribute and demonstrates a willingness to learn. The ability to look out for solutions and develop problem-solving skills is an important attribute that can help one achieve success in one’s desired profession.
Over the years, I have learned to accept imperfections, which has played an incremental role in enabling growth for women around me. By giving my team members the opportunity beyond their capabilities, I have been able to bring out their best potential to help them achieve their career goals.

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“With You” Leadership

Your ideas and Influences

My major ideas and influences revolve around building and maintaining trust to guide people through challenges, risks and changes as well as their daily work. Without trust, I may be able to persuade or force people to comply, but they’ll never tap the full commitment, capabilities, and creativity the group as a whole can offer.

People look for leaders who not only appreciate their vulnerability but also inspire, support, understand and guide them through looming chaos. This sets up high expectations from a leader. And so as leader, I need to demonstrate a broad range of expertise and behaviors, some of which might seem contradictory, but when used in an appropriate and timely manner, create conditions that foster trust.

Having said that, I understand that trust involves a careful balance between pushing people into areas where they’re uncomfortable while also listening carefully to their concerns and feedback. I try my best to be a trustworthy leader negotiating between toughness and empathy as individuals struggle with transition and maneuver through urgency with patience as change proceeds.

Your leadership vision

My vision is to help my organization grow and achieve its goals; to develop a good relationship with my team members and encourage them to achieve their full potential. Using communication, positivity and empathy, I ensure the work environment is effective and enjoyable.

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“With You” Leadership

Celebration of International Women’s Day is unlike any other celebration. It provides an opportunity to reflect and cherish what women have achieved against all odds. We need not blind ourselves to the fact that it’s not an equal world. Deep rooted and systemic patriarchal mind-set is still an integral part of India’s socio cultural fabric. Women have had to work harder to break the glass ceiling and reach where they have reached today. Celebration of IWD also motivates hundreds and thousands of women who are still struggling and craving for respect and equality.

As is evident, women empowerment is still a distant dream, especially economic empowerment. Women account for nearly 50% of the population in India but they are just not well represented in most sectors. According to UN data, the share of women’s contribution to the GDP in India at 17% is far lower than the global average of 37%. India ranks 140 out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021.

And that points to the immense potential that can be unlocked through economic empowerment of women. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), equal participation of women in the workforce can increase India’s GDP by a significant 27%. Thus economic empowerment of women could be instrumental in realising the vision of a $5 trillion economy that much faster.

Empowering women economically also has wider social benefits. It is estimated that women spend 90% of their income on their families. As a result, economically empowered women positively influence the demand scenario in the country. Children of economically empowered women rank higher on educational and health parameters and thus help boost human development index.

Government of the day is running several schemes for economic empowerment of women, especially the MUDRA scheme that has been launched to support micro and small enterprises (MSMEs). Data shows that nearly 78% of the total number of borrowers under MUDRA are women.

Skill training plays a critical role in economic empowerment of women especially in the lower socio economic strata. The vocational and technical training, even short-term trainings, can open flood gates for empowerment of women in a scenario where only 14% of women opt for careers as entrepreneurs. In its own way, RCPSDC has been helping women develop marketable skills and make a difference to their lives. For instance, a large number of women have received skill training in rubber tapping both in the traditional area of Kerala and the emerging Northeast of India. Rubber Nursery General Worker has been a favourite job role for women who wish to be independent and at the same time support the family financially.

Yes, when it comes to manufacturing, there is a subtle prejudice against women working in the shop floors. Manufacturing has been traditionally stereotyped as not being desirable for women. However, with assistance from the industry, RCPSDC has taken up skilling of women in job roles such as Compression moulding operator or Injection moulding operator with very encouraging results.

There is a long way to go and coming days and months will see more women taking up job roles hitherto reserved for men. There is an urgent need to deconstruct gender stereotypes and empower women through skill training. And no better time than now when the number of women ministers in the Union Government are at the highest in the last 18 years. Glass ceilings will soon shatter.

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With You Leadership

Since I began my professional career, I have worked with people from diverse backgrounds and geographies. This global perspective has helped shape my vision as a leader, and more importantly, my work ethic.

I firmly believe that emotional intelligence in leadership is key to building a high-performance work culture that encourages appreciation and empathy. Leading requires more than delegating work and tracking performance; it requires being a good team player and learning to co-exist and collaborate effectively. In a globally dispersed team, the importance of recognizing each individual’s unique needs and taking into account their circumstances becomes even more important.

When a member of my team faced a personal emergency, our team collectively decided to plan our work according to her availability. This allowed her to continue excelling at work without compromising on her career aspirations. This flexibility shouldn’t be specific to women alone, but needs to be extended to all colleagues. It is about giving room and support for teammates to flourish. I am proud to say that my team always steps up, focused on collective success, allowing everyone to grow.

At HID Global, we have women in various leadership and strategic positions – Legal, HR, Marketing, and so on – who are recognized for their great work and achievements, and not just for being female leaders. Our culture promotes empathy and a proactive approach to paying it forward. We need to be respectful of each person’s situation and support their growth. We also need to break the glass ceiling, not just knock on it, especially in the technology space.

I believe we should celebrate all individuals, regardless of their gender, for their hard work and achievements.

With sustained and dedicated efforts such as these, my hope is to see more women realize their full potential, both in technology and leadership and pave the way for a more inclusive future.”

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With You Leadership

Organizations that embrace gender diversity are more competitive and more likely to succeed. However, most of the companies are still following traditional, antiquated recruitment processes and are missing out on hiring the right talent. Hiring candidates on a career break is still abysmally low across organizations, and hence companies happen to disregard some of the highly qualified and experienced candidates. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons – traditional recruitment practices, absence of business alignment or that the process is incorporated in the company’s recruitment technology. The issue is further exacerbated for women, who are typically more often in this category. We addressed this issue through a robust returnee program for women employees.
I met a woman in my community gathering few years ago. She was sharp, passionate and wanted to make a difference through her acquired knowledge. As we all know, childcare happens to be a full-time job, she was swept away in the chaos of it all, and her career took a back seat all this time. She was struggling to regain her confidence, since she was out of work for a long time. With the aim to support female professionals to have a successful second innings at work and seamlessly integrate back into the corporate world, we came up with the idea of Rewrite – The woman returnee program.
The program provides a platform to women to relaunch their career. It is designed to cater to women on a career break for personal reasons looking to return to work. We designed a unique program for women who have been professionally inactive for a minimum six years to return to work that allowed us to assess the returnees’ skills, experience and motivation during initial six months of training before making the hiring decision permanent, thereby allowing time for the us to assess the level, salary, flexibility options and type of work that would suite the returnee in the long term.

“With YOU” Business

To this date, technology industry remains male-dominated, even after decades of extensive effort to promote female participation. However, women can and should have more recognition and representation, not just to bring in equality, but also, to bring in a degree of diversity in thought process and decision-making. We at EY GDS have been continuously putting efforts in supporting women by giving them opportunities in technology and engineering fields.
I myself have moved up to leadership levels in EY GDS by taking up challenging roles with continuous support from my leadership. The leadership’s confidence in me inspired me to similarly build a strong second line of women leaders in the team. I encourage women colleagues to come out of their comfort zone and try new things, provide them a comfortable environment where making mistakes is not frowned upon and they don’t have to fear failure.
I would like to take this opportunity to share a story of a passionate woman employee from my team who is currently managing a program for the business. We had a presentation with a client on new technical solutions we designed for their business. Our main technical architect could not show up for the presentation. I encouraged the Program Lead to present the technical design of the solution. She not only saved the day for all of us at a crucial juncture, but also showed her willingness to step into an unfamiliar territory. She found her passion while working as a program lead. Today she is not only taking care of the program but is also investing her time in diversifying her skills by learning technical designing.

I was glad when one of participant reached out to me to share her experience for a women leadership development program. She told that in past six months she reflected more on herself than in last 11 years. The journey taught her to be more accepting of herself and use her strength to get further in her career. With this powerful realization she was able to speak her mind. Nothing could have been more fulfilling than hearing that the learning helped her step beyond her fears.

“With YOU” Achievement

Many times, employees easily get intimidated by powerful positions or situations when there is a dilemma in choosing between work goals and personal goals. I remember an incident when a bright and highly intelligent woman employee got a chance to present her work to the C-suite of EY member firm, but she got intimidated by the thought of standing in front of the senior leadership. A couple of years ago, one of our most promising managers got an opportunity to lead a global role but her confusion and trepidation led her to refuse the offer as she could not muster the strength to take a decision for her own career. We decided to introduce a women development program to train our women professionals take up positions at executive level. The intensive six-months program helps them to get clarity in selecting the right path.
At EY GDS Consulting, we are committed to supporting and nurturing our growing pool of women team members to help them become the leaders of tomorrow. Leadership is not just about skills but also the personal and professional influence and impact we have on people and our environment.
With this intent, we have carefully crafted a six-month intensive program in collaboration with an external Diversity and Inclusion Consulting Firm and other women leaders in the industry who help potential women team members recognize their leadership potential and critically examine their own identity as a leader. The program helps women to take ownership of their career and learn to leverage their strengths at workplace. This program further enables the participants gain the right mindset, tools and confidence to lead with impact and navigate through the uncertainty and changes.