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Influencer Column :Ruchi Sanghvi - Facebook’s first female engineer

Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer to be hired by Facebook, is one such inspiring woman. Ruchi Sanghvi, daughter of a second generation businessman, left India to study computer science in US. Sanghvi became the first female engineer at Facebook, working on its successful news feed. Ms Sanghvi quit Facebook to form her own software company, which was eventually bought by the cloud-sharing service Dropbox. Ms Sanghvi talks about her experiences as an innovator in the male-dominated world of Silicon Valley.

Since 2005, Sanghvi started working with Facebook and was one of the primary developers of Facebook's News Feed feature. Sanghvi, was also involved in the product strategy for Facebook Platform, a feature that allowed third party developers to build apps on the social networking site and Facebook Connect, which enabled Facebook users to link of their accounts to almost any other website.

Sanghvi was undeterred. Impressed by the place, the people, and the product, which Sanghvi, had spent hours using as a student at Carnegie Mellon University; she became Facebook's first female engineer, one of the first 10 engineers hired by the company. Sanghvi's five-year career at Facebook underscores the meritocratic nature of the startup world, where a bright, young engineer like Sanghvi, who was raised in the industrial town of Pune, India, and did not regularly use a computer until her freshman year of college, could play a key role in shaping one of the world's most influential web companies. Sanghvi's story illustrates that despite all the talk of equality between the sexes, women often grapple with a unique set of difficulties when it comes to finding role models in the engineering field and making inroads into what she called ‘the boys’ club”. She wishes that females had a similar culture or support network.

Sanghvi not only watched the company explode into a global network with a population greater than that of the United States, but also built the social network's most defining features. She launched News Feed, which radically changed the Facebook experience by putting friends' online activities front and center on the site; Platform, an update that allowed third-party developers and entrepreneurs to build apps on Facebook; and Connect, which made it possible for the people to link of their Facebook identities and friends to almost any site on the web.

The products developed helped propel the site forward and also rewrote the rules of the web, eroding anonymity on the Internet and ushering in a new age where peoples' real names were attached to everything they did online. Sanghvi describes this connection between offline and online identities as the next big idea in tech, one that will reshape everything from e-commerce to health care. Sanghvi said that ‘Facebook has woven itself into the fabric of our lives and the foundation of the Internet’, and everything will be redefined because people are using their real identities on the Internet’.

Sanghvi said that used to being the odd woman out she was one of five female students out of 150 in a course in the Electrical Computer Engineering department and at Facebook, she again found herself on a team with only a handful of female engineers. Though she looks back fondly on her time at Facebook and describes it as "one of the best companies to be working at right now, Sanghvi said her male co-workers enjoyed a certain camaraderie that she could not match or fully penetrate.

Sanghvi said the male engineers on her team created a "brogramming page," presumably only for the Facebook "bros" who were programming. Sanghvi recalls having to change her working style to adapt to the "aggressive" environment, a shift Sanghvi said affected how she was perceived. Engineers are either aggressive or passive aggressive. You need to just dive straight into it and sometimes there are social repercussions because of it," Sanghvi explained. The impression that people had of me was that I was really harsh, hard-edged, brusque and to the point. All of that happened because I am a woman, and I was acting in that kind of environment."

Facebook declined to disclose what percentage of its current total staff and engineers are female. The company doesn’t have any affirmative action programs and quotas in place to attract female engineers, though Facebook supports and funds interest groups, like Facebook Women or Women Engineers that its employees create. To increasing the number of women in the tech sector is hugely important to Facebook," a Facebook spokeswoman said. "We want our company to reflect the diverse global community that we serve. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also been an outspoken advocate for increasing the number of female leaders.

Men run the world, Sandberg said in a May 2011 commencement address delivered at Barnard College. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women's voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored. To Sanghvi, increasing the number of women in tech requires not only HR initiatives, but also having more female role models in engineering, computer science and other technical fields.

She also noted that women must ultimately be proactive about choosing their fate, and shared what she said is the most important lesson she's learned thus far in her career. Kids in college often look for mentors and role models to model their careers after, and women don't have the equivalent of a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates," Sanghvi said. Even as she is candid about the challenges she faced at Facebook, Sanghvi, who left in 2010 to start her own company, Cove, praised the tech industry for consistently rewarding excellence and ability above all else. It may not be a meritocracy, but it’s the closest thing to a meritocracy in the working world, she said.