Joel Julien

When Mar­i­ana Ram­roop start­ed her first per­ma­nent job about 15 years ago her su­per­vi­sor told her some­thing that has stayed with her ever since.

“You know what my su­per­vi­sor at my first re­al job told me in his first in­ter­ac­tion with me?” Ram­roop told Busi­ness Guardian.

“He said he doesn’t be­lieve women should be in I.T. (In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy),” she re­vealed.

The prob­lem was I.T. was the ex­act field Ram­roop was in.

And one she was hop­ing to make a ca­reer out of.

“I was the on­ly fe­male on the team at the time and that was the first state­ment that he said to me,” Ram­roop said.

“I was a bit shocked. I was young but my re­sponse at that time is that I just smiled and looked at him and I told him ‘I am go­ing to prove you wrong’,” she said.

And she did just that.

“He had all these ini­tia­tives where he was giv­ing prizes for the best per­for­mance and I was the first per­son on his list that he had to give one to,” Ram­roop said.

“And he did ad­mit it af­ter a while, where he said that I did prove him wrong,” Ram­roop told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian (SBG).

That was not the last time Ram­roop had to fight to prove that she be­longed.

Years af­ter when Ram­roop moved on to an­oth­er job at the age of 21 she again had to fight to earn re­spect and recog­ni­tion.

“I was 21 in a su­per­vi­so­ry po­si­tion and the peo­ple who were re­port­ing to me at that time were all in their 40s. They were work­ing in the com­pa­ny longer than I was (alive). It was a team of on­ly men and it was al­ways a bat­tle,” Ram­roop said.

“They saw this very young ‘smal­ly’ girl in front of them and were prob­a­bly won­der­ing, ‘What on earth can you tell me?, What on earth can you teach me?’,” she said.

“And that is where it had to start all over again and I had to prove my­self. I had to learn their job, learn my job, and learn the job above me to make sure that I earned that re­spect from them… It worked even­tu­al­ly,” Ram­roop said.

Ram­roop said she worked ex­tra hours to en­sure she was al­ways on top of her game.

She thanked her par­ents Anand and Jo­ce­lyn Ram­roop for in­still­ing that tenac­i­ty in­to her.

It was her par­ents that led her in­to the field of IT in the first place, Ram­roop said.

At age 15 when Ram­roop was a stu­dent at Barataria Se­nior Com­pre­hen­sive and her class­mates were con­sid­er­ing tak­ing the tra­di­tion­al path of A Lev­els, her par­ents pro­vid­ed her with an al­ter­na­tive op­tion.

“My par­ents have al­ways thought dif­fer­ent­ly so they guid­ed me along a non-tra­di­tion­al path. I did not know about the Trinidad and To­ba­go In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy un­til my par­ents brought it to me and showed me the ben­e­fits and the dif­fer­ent cours­es that they were do­ing and asked if it was some­thing I was in­ter­est­ed in,” Ram­roop said.

She jumped at the op­por­tu­ni­ty.

But un­for­tu­nate­ly, she was too young at the time so she re­peat­ed CXC just so she would be old enough for en­try in­to TTIT.

At TTIT Ram­roop com­plet­ed the Ad­vanced Tech­ni­cians diplo­ma be­fore fur­ther­ing her ed­u­ca­tion and com­plet­ing a first de­gree and then a mas­ters.

“In the IT world peo­ple gen­er­al­ly group mul­ti­ple IT dis­ci­plines un­der the um­brel­la “IT”. How­ev­er in re­al­i­ty, you can go in­to PC re­pairs, in­to the net­work­ing as­pect, in­to pro­gram­ming, in­to all these dif­fer­ent fields. What I stud­ied gave me the op­por­tu­ni­ty to touch on every sin­gle one of them and I made a de­ci­sion at that point, based on the work­ing world, that every­thing is built on a net­work­ing foun­da­tion,” she said.

Ram­roop chose the net­work­ing path, and it has been pay­ing div­i­dends for her and she is now the Cus­tomer Ser­vice Cen­tre (CSC) Man­ag­er at Ca­ble and Wire­less.

Since her first step in­to an I.T. ca­reer, Ram­roop said she has been see­ing the land­scape shift when it comes to the in­clu­sion of women in­to the space.

“It’s an ac­com­plish­ment when I start­ed this ca­reer many years ago, when there were prob­a­bly on­ly a hand­ful of women you would see ac­tu­al­ly get­ting in­to ICT (In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Tech­nol­o­gy). They were more lean­ing to­wards oth­er fields but now I have seen that the num­ber of women in the field has grown. Things have changed. The dy­nam­ics, to me, are no longer as male-dom­i­nat­ed,” she said.

“In my own team right now I am see­ing that we have more girls en­ter­ing. We are hir­ing more women be­cause they are gen­er­al­ly more in­ter­est­ed,” Ram­roop said.

Get­ting to this point has not been a walk in the park, Ram­roop said.

“It has not been easy. It was a chal­lenge. It has al­ways been a chal­lenge be­cause it can some­times feel like you’re in a con­stant bat­tle. Not so much now, but at that point in time you al­ways had to be on top of your game. You al­ways had to be prov­ing your­self. You al­ways had to be en­sur­ing that per­sons look at you and take you se­ri­ous­ly,” Ram­roop said.

This week on April 22 the world cel­e­brates Girls in ICT Day.

The event, which is com­mem­o­rat­ed glob­al­ly on the fourth Thurs­day in April, will be cel­e­brat­ing its tenth an­niver­sary this year.

The theme for this year’s event is Con­nect­ed Girls, Cre­at­ing Brighter Fu­tures.

Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Union (ITU) while girls across the world tend to out­per­form boys in read­ing and writ­ing skills, they con­tin­ue to be un­der-rep­re­sent­ed in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, en­gi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics (STEM).

To cel­e­brate Girls in ICT C&W said it in­tends to show­case all of the women in the or­gan­i­sa­tion who work across the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can re­gion in ICT, in­clud­ing Ram­roop.

In ad­di­tion to this, the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Net­work and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tions (CAN­TO) will al­so have Caribbean women in ICT com­mit­tee that will or­gan­ise one on one con­ver­sa­tions with fe­male sec­ondary school stu­dents from forms 1 to 3 and fe­male lead­ers in ICT.

Ram­roop is sched­uled to par­tic­i­pate in this al­so.

She said her ad­vice for the young women hop­ing to en­ter the ICT world is

“know your worth.”

“Al­ways re­mem­ber, the path to suc­cess re­quires con­tin­u­ous learn­ing and de­vel­op­ment. Keep push­ing,” she said.

She al­so ad­vised the younger gen­er­a­tion to re­frain from hav­ing an at­ti­tude of en­ti­tle­ment.

“Don’t think just be­cause you have a de­gree you de­serve a cer­tain po­si­tion. That has nev­er been my ex­pe­ri­ence. You have a de­gree but that is just a piece of pa­per. You have to work hard and you have to prove your­self con­stant­ly in the re­al world oth­er­wise you will be over­looked,” she said.

It is a les­son she hopes she and her hus­band Lawrence Moy Hing will one day pass on to their five-year-old daugh­ter, San­jana.