Nita Singh Kaushal, ’03, didn’t notice a gender imbalance in her STEM studies growing up. But when she reached her upper-level engineering courses at Stanford, it became stark. As an engineer at Intel Corp., and later as a manager, Kaushal then witnessed how that inequality manifested in the workplace.
“I would notice that young women in technology, and specifically [those] who were extremely smart in their field, had a difficult time advocating for themselves, negotiating, communicating effectively, and their ideas were oftentimes ignored,” she said recently in a video for the School of Engineering. That’s why she founded Miss CEO, a training organization for young women and for schools, nonprofits and corporations to learn how to support women in leadership. The now 6-year-old startup picked up steam this year as it transitioned from an in-person training model to a “train-the-trainers” system that provides curriculum for teachers around the globe to administer their own leadership training programs.
This spring, Kaushal brought her message back to Stanford with a quarterly leadership class she’s teaching to undergrads and graduate students in the Engineering School; she’s instructing a similar course through Continuing Studies. On April 8, she was also set to keynote Stanford’s Women’s Leadership Conference. “I’m probably going to share my story as a student and how it got me on this path,” she says.
