WE Local India, the fourth annual conference of women engineers presented by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), will be held in Bengaluru from April 11 to 13.
The three-day event is the flagship programme of SWE designed to give a boost to the research and career interests of women in science, technology and engineering fields.
Started in 1950 in the United States, SWE is a non-for-profit educational and service organisation where members get to network, hone their skills through professional development workshops and outreach activities.
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In India, the first WE Local was held in Pune in 2016.
“We started with 50 members. Now, we have 437 members,” says Suchismita Sanyal, publicity chair on the WE Local India advisory board.
Women engineers at any stage of their career can be associated with organisation. “Apart from organisations, we also have representatives of engineering colleges as members,” said Suchismita.
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Members get to participate in a host of programmes conducted by SWE, and these include research papers, mini-conferences and round table meetings.
“The best part of becoming a member of SWE is that we get to pick and choose programmes that we like. For an organisation, it’s a platform to promote the company and also utilise SWE’s strong research arm,” says Shirin Salis, Vice President, Human Resources, Ingersoll Rand, who will be conducting a session on career management at the upcoming conference.
Ingersoll Rand, for example, has been associated with SWE for the last two years.
At the career centre, companies get to post their job requirements.
As the company has signed up for ‘Paradigm for Parity’, a coalition of various companies to achieve gender balance by 2030 in the United States., we are leveraging SWE to achieve our goals, says Shirin.
The sessions
‘One surprising secret of how people become successful leaders’, ‘Systems Thinking and its importance for technical leadership’, ‘Strategies for navigating bias in engineering workplaces’ and ‘Unconscious bias - defeating it in ourselves and others’ are some of the sessions at the three-day event.
On April 13, a career fair will be held. For details, visit welocal.swe.org/ bengaluru