Welcome to the Season 2 of the Outliers Podcast.
We start the year with a conversation with Bhumika Goyal, a 22-year old computer science graduate with a passion for the Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS), and is already among the top-ranked Linux Kernel contributors.
In a year when a lot of talk is going to be focused on job losses in the country’s over $100 billion IT sector, Goyal’s choice of career and passion for Open Source does appear brave.
“I just love the way the open source community collaborates across different geographies and cultures, demographics,” she tells me. “While there is clearly gender bias that works against women in the sector, I am yet to experience it and I believe things are changing.”
It’s tough for me to doubt her optimism, notwithstanding all the challenges faced by women in the technology and startup ecosystem that we keep flagging and chronicling at FactorDaily.
Everything appears to be working fine until young, female programmers enter the ecosystem. It’s later in their careers that many of them face gender biases.
One only hopes that Goyal and her generation of young, supercoders not just help build a healthy work environment with equal opportunities for everyone but also stun the software universe with their mankind-changing work.
Do listen in and have a fulfilling year ahead!