Rati Thanawala is a trailblazer. Coming to Yale from India in 1972, she became one of the first women of color in the world to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. In her 39-year career in high tech industry, she has consistently broken new ground. She founded Bell Labs Consulting, a business unit within Bell Labs, that advises CEO’s and Boards of companies, globally, on building future communication networks. She also has held executive positions in product management and software development at companies including AT&T, Lucent, and Nokia.

But it wasn’t until she joined the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative as a Fellow in 2018 that Thanawala recognized just how unique her success was—and set about designing a program to support women of color in technology. “At Harvard I started looking at the data,” she said. “I had not realized that even though more women of color were going into tech careers, they were languishing disproportionately at the lower professional levels, and that the first rung of the promotion ladder was broken.” 

Her lived experience made the work personal. “If my daughter went into tech today, her chance of getting promoted is 50% that of a white woman.” For Black and Latina women, research shows, the challenges are even greater. In addition, there is a retention issue: “Unfair managers/management practices” are cited by women as top reasons for leaving the industry, contributing to an attrition rate that is three times higher than that for men.

Thanawala set forth a bold vision for transforming how tech could solve for intersectionality of race and gender. She argued that most managers are unaware of how to support women of color. Lacking direct experiences to learn from, they rely on diversity trainings focused almost exclusively on gender or race. Her intuition, honed from 30-plus years of mentoring and sponsoring women/minority professionals in tech, pointed to using compelling stories, told directly by women of color, on “how enlightened managers have provided excellent support” to them. Engaging first- and second-line managers to learn from these positive examples, is a key element in the success of diverse new hires.

These stories could also be used to train college undergraduates on how to navigate a biased workplace, she pointed out. “If you start from the moment when they declare their interest in tech as a major, which happens usually in sophomore year, and train them on leadership skills using industry mentors as guides, they will make the transition to the workplace with more self-efficacy and will get promoted twice as fast as the norm.” With that argument, Thanawala won a grant from the Women of Color in Computing Research Collaborative, funded by Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda Gates company, to interview 40 women of color succeeding in tech. From her research, she developed “14 Levers” that need to be mastered. She established a multiyear curriculum for a Leadership Academy, which continues through the transition to the workplace and early career. This would lead to career advancement through either promotion or being declared “high potential,” a journey of five or more years.

In 2020, the Leadership Academy was launched with two partners: the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has a National Science Foundation grant, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, which is bringing its state-of-the-art Negotiations Skills Development expertise to these undergraduates. In 2020 and 2021, 87 students went through the six-week Summer Academy. The program is virtual and national, and this year students from 22 colleges participated. 

In year three of the partnership, many key elements of the program—around mentoring and skills application—will be tested. Meanwhile, Thanawala, now a Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, is designing a course for first- and second-line managers. In year four, the plan is to begin scaling the program.

“I am particularly excited that the MacArthur Foundation has featured our partnership’s idea on its Levers for Change website, a database used by philanthropists looking for bold proposals that have already been vetted by independent judges,” says Thanawala. “I am passionate about my big idea – it is a bit of ‘Thinking Outside the Building’, which is what ALI’s founder, Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter inspired us to go for. I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to work with researchers and business leaders to make it happen.”