Challenge the Status Quo

Be the Change You Want to See: Female executives have the opportunity to challenge and change stereotypes by being visible and vocal about their successes and struggles. By sharing their stories and challenging the status quo, they can inspire change in organizational structures and attitudes towards women in tech.

Be the Change You Want to See: Female executives have the opportunity to challenge and change stereotypes by being visible and vocal about their successes and struggles. By sharing their stories and challenging the status quo, they can inspire change in organizational structures and attitudes towards women in tech.

Empowered by Artificial Intelligence and the women in tech community.
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Sadhvi Sharma
Meta Sales Specialist at influence retail services

For most of my life I was told — quietly and loudly, directly and indirectly — to be smaller.
Be smaller in the village. Girls do not need engineering degrees.
Be smaller in the university. You only got here on scholarship.
Be smaller at Nokia. You are a girl. You cannot do this.
Be smaller in Canada. Your experience does not count here.
I refused every single time.
Challenging the status quo did not start for me in a boardroom. It started the day my parents enrolled me in school when every other girl in my village was being prepared for marriage. It started when I sat in an examination hall surrounded by thousands of students and told myself — I belong here. It started when I walked into DRDO as a young woman from a small village and worked shoulder to shoulder with India's finest scientists for six months.
Every single day of my life has been a challenge to the status quo.
When I arrived in Canada in August 2024 I thought my credentials would speak for themselves. Two engineering degrees. Full scholarships. DRDO. Nokia. 5G infrastructure experience serving millions of users. AWS certification in progress.
1500 job applications. 1500 rejections.
I could have gone quiet. I could have accepted that maybe this country, this industry, this world was not built for someone like me. Instead I did the most radical thing I could think of.
I kept going louder.
I started building an AI and Cloud portfolio on GitHub that nobody could ignore. A Spam Classifier with 97% accuracy. An AWS Cost Monitor using Python and boto3. Real projects. Real results. Published for the world to see.
I competed in Toastmasters and I won — because the village girl who was told to be silent learned that her voice was actually her greatest weapon.
I started Smart Money on Instagram because I refused to let financial illiteracy keep women small the way it kept the women in my village small.
I joined WomenTech Network and I am writing this article because I believe that visibility is an act of revolution. Every time a woman from a village in India stands up and says — I am here, I am qualified, I refuse to disappear — she changes what is possible for every girl who comes after her.
This is what challenging the status quo looks like in real life. It is not always a TED talk or a viral LinkedIn post. Sometimes it is submitting one more job application after 1500 rejections. Sometimes it is publishing one more GitHub project at midnight after a full day of work. Sometimes it is writing an article for a platform and telling your truth even when your hands are shaking.
Female executives have a responsibility that goes beyond their own careers. Every time you speak up in a meeting, negotiate your salary, claim credit for your work, or simply refuse to make yourself smaller — you are rewriting the story for every woman watching you.
I grew up in a village where the story for girls was already written.
I am writing a new one.
And I am just getting started.

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