Pooja Sund, who is from a small town, called Kaithal is continuously striving to help women achieve their dreams. She works as the Director, Engineering, and Finance at Microsoft’s Core Finance Engineering group in the US. Hailed from a modest background, she observed that majority of women are unable to fulfill their dreams because of societal barriers of family norms.
Pooja witnessed that majority of women do not get the chance to get an education. And those women who somehow got an education are forced by their families to choose a particular career such as a doctor or an engineer. They do not get a chance to become the CEO of their dream careers. These family and societal barriers pushed Pooja to do something for women’s empowerment.
She is co-leading the learning and development pillar of women at the Microsoft employee resource group which consists of 24,000 women globally within Microsoft. Through this pillar, the team is organizing monthly series and welcoming leaders to come and share with Microsoft’s global women workforce their success stories, their stories of rejections, belonging, career growth, and how to find the way through challenges to get here where they are.
Furthermore, she is also conducting events around career branding, storytelling, how to ask for promotions, how to establish themselves in the technology field, the art of negotiation with one big goal to improve their career growth and to set them up for success in their professional and personal life.
Additionally, Pooja has been chosen as a leader multiple times in the past 5 years to represent Microsoft at a global conference “Grace Hopper Conference” attended by 30,000 women professionals from across the world.