Women in Tech: Serial entrepreneur Poornima Shenoy believes innovation has no gender

Women in Tech is a special series of testimonies of women who have driven barriers to make it huge within the Indian tech space, which continues to be largely a male domain. In this series, we ask them what it’s want to be a woman in Indian tech, the challenges they face and lessons they could proportion from their journey with aspiring women technologists.

Poornima Shenoy wears numerous hats. A serial entrepreneur who has founded numerous groups, founding president of India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), an independent board member for 2 organizations and currently the co-founder and CEO of THE GAIN, an international acceleration platform for progressive generation startups.

With no engineering background, Poornima has marked her presence inside the era space over the last 30 years. An active contributor to dialogues on entrepreneurship, girls function models and activity introduction, she says that generation is an incredible leveler. “It removes the barriers of geography and constraints of time,” she says.

While she says she might not have reached this position nowadays without the help of her family and detail of good fortune, she believes that today, as a girl in a leadership position, she does no longer face bias. “People understand that you have reached there via virtue of your functionality and tough work and recognize it,” Poornima says.

And on a bigger degree too, things are slowly converting for the better, she believes. “Our Institutes, in particular inside the Biotech, Electronics and Computer Science streams, have women constituting 50%+ of the elegance,” she says, including that employers too are reaching out to girls personnel, that’s a notable signal.

However, even as entry-level hiring isn’t a lot of a hassle, there may be a need to hold extra women on the mid-stage. Poornima says that ladies want flexibility within the place of job, with a purpose to assist retention. “Retaining and attracting girls to the tech space will help to capitalize each on the fresh approach of entrants and the revel in of others,” she says.

And with a purpose to deliver extra ladies into the sector of an era, she believes that mentoring and pay parity is extremely critical. “Research indicates that an extra quantity of role models builds a higher pipeline of talent into the group of workers,” she provides.

Into her third mission and with over 30 years of enjoyment in the field of generation, Poornima now focuses on mentoring marketers in the product engineering area. She facilitates with their boom, with getting right of entry to capital, lively mentoring and imparting them with getting right of entry to international and home markets. And while there are many younger girls getting into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) space, she believes that there may be a want for extra girls within the chip design area.

With the revel in of founding several companies and mentoring some of the ladies inside the era space, Poornima says that industry our bodies inclusive of IESA are an extremely good way for entrepreneurs to exhibit their groups and its talents. IESA desires to be inclusive and actually, works to attract each entrepreneur and commercial enterprise leaders.

And her recommendation for ladies trying to startup within the technology space? Be resilient, Poornima says.

While she believes that innovation isn’t based totally on gender, she says, “In my experience, investors need not supply special blessings to women marketers however have to provide them with a stage playing field. Often, girls entrepreneurs are asked a whole set of personal questions and must continuously show themselves. This is senseless.”