“Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women in Tech” was written by Pratima Rao Gluckman (pictured) and released in April 2018. One year since it’s publication, the book has seen huge success, and Gluckman, the engineering leader for blockchain at VMware Inc., has had numerous conversations in Silicon Valley and all over the country with women inside and outside of tech who want to continue to smash through glass ceilings, overcome imposter syndrome, and fight the fear of failure.

“When I started to write this book, it was more like, ‘I want to impact one woman’s life,'” Gluckman said. “But what was interesting is, I delivered around 20 to 25 talks last year, my calendar is booked for this year, every time I go give a talk, my LinkedIn goes crazy, and I’m connecting with all these women and men. And it’s just fantastic, because they’re basically resonating with everything I talk about in the book.”

Gluckman spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Women Transforming Technology Conference in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Gluckman’s book and what she’s been learning about women in tech (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Helping women in tech find their voice

The prevalence of imposter syndrome was something that Gluckman had no idea about before her book and started having conversations with many women. But she has seen it continue to play out in younger woman — including a high school robotics team of 13-to-17-year-olds at a local high school that Gluckman was able to support over the past year.

“They were doing all these amazing things, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, they’re … confident women,’ but they were not,” Gluckman described. “And it was because they felt that there was too much to lose. They didn’t want to take risks. They didn’t want to fail. And it was that imposter syndrome coming back, so that conditioning happens way before [women enter the workplace].”

Gluckman has her theories as to why girls suffer from imposter syndrome at a very early age, which tends to then dictate their lives throughout life. She quoted Reshma Saujani, who is the founder of Girls Who Code, from her TED Talk in which she said that we as a culture raise our boys to be brave and our girls to be perfect.

“We want to be perfect,” Gluckman said. “We want to have the perfect hair, the perfect bodies, we want a perfect partner. That never happens, but we want all that. And because we want to be perfect, we don’t want to take risks, and we’re afraid to fail.”

The prevalence of this message toward girls of being perfect and not being able to fail has made Gluckman curious to explore this topic in a further book.

“I want to talk to parents, I want to talk to the kids, I want to talk to teachers, even professors, and find out what exactly it is — like what is that conditioning that happens? Why do we raise our girls to be perfect? Because that impacts us at every step of our lives. Not even our careers; it’s our lives,” Gluckman concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Women Transforming Technology Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Women Transforming Technology Conference event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE