Rati Thanawala spent 39 years in the high-tech industry, the last 17 as Vice President at Bell Labs.
Rati came to the US from India on a Rotary Graduate Scholarship and joined the inaugural batch of grad students pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Yale. After her PhD, she joined Bell Labs, which was part of AT&T, in software development.
At Bell Labs, Rati pioneered the creation of techno-economic models for making complex decisions about new technologies. She established a global organization of 100 experts in 13 countries and founded a business unit called Bell Labs Consulting that advises CEO’s and Boards of companies, globally, on building future communication networks. Prior to that, she held executive positions at AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia, including product management, business and market management, and software development. Throughout her career, Rati has been an active mentor and sponsor to many women and minorities. Rati has two daughters – a lawyer and a neuroscientist.
Rati left Bell Labs two years ago and took a gap year to prepare for her ‘encore career’, one which focuses on social impact. She was selected as a 2018 Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University. Her area of focus became Gender, Race and Tech – what can we do so women, particularly women of color, will thrive in their tech careers?
At Harvard, she researched and created 19 Actionable Levers of Success, which, if mastered early, will accelerate career advancement in the tech workplace. Rati is interviewing 40 ‘wise women of color’ who succeeded in tech, and is discovering that these pioneering women, with their multiple dominant identities including race and gender, needed to create unique solutions to the 19 challenges of Inclusion, Influence and Impact. Their narratives provide an amazing compilation of specific “How To’s”, and need to be shared, especially since there are so few role models. Rati is doing that thru the creation of a Technology Leadership Academy for women of color who want to pursue careers in the tech industry. It consists of weekend academies and coaches starting on campus and continuing for 3-5 years after transitioning to industry. Rati just won a grant from the Women of Color Computing Collaborative, funded by the Melinda Gates Foundation, for execution of her 2019 program.