Khan Academy, tablets, Hour of Code: in the last decade, technology has transformed education. To celebrate Women’s History Month, Microsoft is thrilled to highlight two women working at the crucial nexus of education and technology in Silicon Valley. Amara Humphry and Kristina Peralta are leaders in the #EdTech movement, and their perspectives illuminate the future of education, innovation, and the economy in the region.
I didn’t find technology, it found me.
There was never a specific moment where I realized I wanted to pursue a career in tech. However, there were many moments when I realized I need to change the status quo. While I was growing up in Hawaii, my family would often visit Cambodia–the country where my mom grew up. On one trip, my sister and I explored a temple with two local girls acting as our tour guides. At the end of that walk, two of us would fly back to a world of privilege. The other two might not have enough money to eat. Their world was constrained by the lack of a basic human right: education. How could they escape the cycle of poverty if they couldn’t go to school and learn? I was lucky to have opportunities in and out of school to fall in love with learning. I am determined to give everyone else that right.
But how?
Silicon Valley was not in my vocabulary until I was 20. I remember learning about Moore’s law when I was at Stanford. Here’s the gist: in 1965 Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted that the overall processing power for computers would double every two years. This prediction proved mostly true for the past forty years, and this exponential improvement has substantially increased the performance of digital electronics today (think megapixels on camera phones).
Progress in many other sectors looks sluggish in comparison. In education in the United States, for example, the number of high school graduates who enroll in college has steadily increased over the past forty years. This progress is positive, but insufficient. In the past 47 years, fewer than 50% of white, black and hispanic high school graduates enroll in college. While our machines are getting exponentially smarter, our students’ processing power is not keeping up.
My generation has seen technology progress at breathtaking speed: Facebook can connect people who are friends across the world. Every point on the globe is plotted with directions on the fastest route based on real-time traffic. Drones can deliver groceries, and cars can drive themselves. Yet while the tech industry advanced as quickly as Moore’s law predicted, solutions to global grand challenges are lagging. What if we could take some of that processing power from Moore’s law and rapid speed of development, and apply it to social change? I saw technology as an opportunity to solve global challenges at scale and pursued it.
I did not find technology, it found me. More than a “woman in tech,” I identify myself as a woman working for social change; technology is my tool to achieve that change. Education is a basic human right, yet educational access and opportunity–both nationally and internationally–is rife with inequity. While we have seen local success with amazing teachers or prestigious academic programs, we do not have success at scale. In today’s world, if we can use real-time data, crowd-sourced from strangers on the road, to predict the fastest way to In-N-Out after a Warriors game, we should be able to help every student successfully navigate high school graduation.
How can women evolve the tech industry?
The technology industry is going to continue on its accelerated track, and it should. Is that enough? If we don’t broaden our definition of success for the industry–beginning with defining the problems we seek to solve–we will have bigger challenges in tomorrow’s world than lack of diversity in the workplace. Like me, perhaps women see technology as a means to an end– but not as the end.
“Women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good….
At the interdisciplinary D-Lab at M.I.T., which focuses on developing ‘technologies that improve the lives of people living in poverty,’ 74 percent of over 230 enrolled students this past year were women.”
-Lina Nilsson in a NY Times Op-Ed
Gooru is a technology nonprofit dedicated to building open-source tools to help students navigate their learning. 66% of our team is women; the majority with engineering backgrounds, but our entire team is driven to see change. Like me, our team refuses to accept the educational status quo. Whatever you are passionate about, technology is one way to make that solution go beyond local success. We can broaden the scope of what “working in tech” means and push the industry outward towards a new evolution. We can harness technology to engage with the world–and close its most dogged and persistent gaps.
We absolutely need more women in tech. And, we need people from all backgrounds, who will work to solve the problems that are closest to their hearts and leverage technology to see their solutions at a global scale.
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Amara is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gooru. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in Product Design, Amara realized cutting-edge technology being developed in Silicon Valley could be redesigned to serve students. In 2011, she teamed up with Google engineer Prasad Ram to found Gooru with the mission to honor the human right to education. She wants to empower every student with actionable data to truly own their learning. Amara is developing a learning navigator, a “GPS for learning” that provides teachers with real-time data to help students understand where they are and how to reach their goals. Gooru is a team of engineers for educators, co-creating tools with innovative students, educators and researchers to scale local success globally. Gooru was an education laureate in 2014 The Tech Awards, and Amara was recently recognized as a 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur.
