Reshma Saujani, an Indian Lawyer-turned-activist in the United States. Her parents lived in Uganda, but had to leave the country in 1973, when the dictator of Uganda had announced that all immigrants would have to leave the country immediately. They shifted to the United States and settled there. Born in 1975, Saujani graduated from Yale Law School, worked in a law firm and then in finance. These were not jobs she preferred, because she always knew that her goal was to serve for the people of the United States and give back to them, however, she first had to take these jobs in order to pay off her student-loan debt, and quit as soon as she did.
Saujani ran for the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives in New York’s 14th congressional district in 2010 and was the first Indian-American woman and the first South Asian American woman to run for Congress. She ran as a Democratic candidate for New York City Public Advocate in 2013, coming third in the primary. Even though she did not win, she says that it was during her campaign that she came across the idea of her current, national, non-profit company: Girls Who Code. Her goal is to bridge the gender gap in the IT sector and hence, help girls train and achieve their goal of working in their dream jobs. Her company focuses on the fact that even though a lot of girls want a job in technological areas, most of those jobs are given to or occupied by men. The company is now twenty times bigger than when it started and has recruited over 185,000 girls across all 50 states in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. In 2019, Girls Who Code was also awarded the Most Innovative Non-Profit by Fast Company.
Despite all the setbacks, Saujani has never given up hope and has always found a way to stand up against it, as it is these setbacks that have led her where she is in her life currently. It was during her campaigns, when she realised that women are highly underrepresented in the IT sector and decided that she wanted to do something to change that. She has dedicated her life to building a place for women in the IT community. It is to reach this goal, in her TED talk “Brave, Not Perfect” she focuses on spreading the message of teaching girls to be brave and to take risks and that it's okay to fail at something instead of trying to be perfect at everything as most girls don’t even apply for jobs, unless they are hundred percent eligible.
As she said, “I want the next generation of Mark Zuckerberg's and Jack Dorsey's to be women.”
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