'Aspire for Her' to raise number of women in tech in India to 10 million by 2030

POLICY

Aspire for Her is a startup focused on bringing and sustaining more diversity into India’s workplace, where the number of women in tech fell from 34% in 2006 to 25% in 2020, according to Madhura DasGupta Sinha (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Aspire for Her.

In just the two years since its launch, Aspire for Her has more than 120,000 members across 60 different countries, with a goal of more than 1 million in the workplace by 2025 and 10 million by 2030.

“We notice that four out of five women have no successful, professional women role models in their immediate network,” Sinha said.

Since the organization’s founding, CEOs, CXOs and other women leaders who want to mentor others have contacted Sinha to be a part of Aspire for Her. “They want to give back,” she said.

Sinha spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Women in Tech: International Women’s Day event. They discussed Aspire for Her’s five-point model, examples of success stories, and its partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc.

Creating options for all

AWS is one of Aspire for Her’s many partners that use the organization’s resources to help achieve diversity goals. SheDares, a free online education program designed by AWS to help women enter the tech field, is one of the biggest contributors to Aspire for Her’s success.

“The SheDares community is meant for all women who want to be in tech careers, whether today they’re in school or college or they’re working in non-tech fields but are interested in technology as a career option,” Sinha said. “We just started two months ago, and today we have more than 10,000 members in India. And we’ve had some fantastic stories also emanating from the SheDares community in AWS.”

Aspire for Her isn’t just focused on helping women get purely technological roles either. It focuses on all industries for women, including new-age careers as well.

“Whether it’s an Instagram influencer … somebody who’s opened a pâtisserie for the best brownies in town, we like to celebrate all women and all their career paths,” Sinha said. “STEM is a very important part of what we do, because we know that the STEM skills gap in India and globally is a very serious problem. And if we train women and reskill women in STEM, they will automatically gravitate towards those roles which will open up in the India of tomorrow.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Women in Tech: International Women’s Day event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE