Meet a Nasty Woman: 5 Questions with Dona Sarkar

Meet Dona Sarkar. Dona is a Nasty Woman, software engineer, author, ethically-made fashion designer, and entrepreneur coach. Dona is on a mission to teach the world to develop technical skills to help them achieve their goals.  

Dona spends her days engineering software as the Chief #NinjaCat of the Insider Program at Microsoft. She spends her side-hustle time writing fiction and non-fiction books to help young professionals have the careers of their dreams, running an ethically made fashion line called Prima Dona that’s tailored in Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, Detroit and Seattle, coaching entrepreneurs in emerging markets on how to turn ideas into profit, sharing these stories on stages all over the world, and coming up with more exciting schemes.   Her favorite, FAVORITE job is being a bossy big sister to thousands of amazing humans who want to #DoTheThing. She was recently named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Productive People and Cosmopolitan magazine's Businessperson of the Year.  Learn what makes Dona tick here. 

 

What makes you a Nasty Woman?

I believe that like reading, writing, and math, tech knowledge is a literacy that everyone, yes, 7.6 billion people should have access to. It the ultimate equalizer and something that brings us closer together.

And no, I don’t believe that tech is a “dude’s field” or that women are not biologically conditioned to love or be good at tech.  What holds women back are the million signals from society that we don’t belong in this industry. I make it a point to never hide my “woman-ness” in tech (despite advice from hundreds of people) because there is no way everyone in the industry will or should conform to some stereotype.

Share an experience that shaped your views or helped get you involved in activism.

I had the opportunity to travel to Lagos, Nigeria, and work with 25 entrepreneurs to start and run businesses to improve their communities using technology. It was then that I realized what a superpower tech was. With access to the internet, a woman in rural Nigeria has the same access to information to any of us reading this.

What advice do you have for people who want to help enact change and push progress but don’t know how to get involved? 

I believe EVERYONE should learn to create technology such as websites, apps, and bots. Even if you don’t want to be a software engineer, you should learn to build tech, rather than just be a consumer. You will absolutely need it at some point and you should NOT pay to pay someone thousands of dollars for something you can so easily do yourself.  You know how to read and write—that doesn’t mean you need to be an author. The best way to learn to build tech is to choose a project in your life: building a website, analyzing your customer data, automating your house…and built the tech for it yourself.  I currently work on Microsoft’s Power Platform--a set of tools to build apps, websites, bots, and automation--with either NO Code or VERY LITTLE Code. 

ALL of the learning tools are out there—you just need to use them to learn and build.  Then go and make others in your life do the same. You are TRULY making an impact if you do this because by 2025, we will live along 80 billion connected to the internet devices and you need to understand how it all works and not be afraid of this future. 

If you could look into the future, 10 years from now, and see that real progress has been made, what does that look like to you? 

I’ll be thrilled when basic coding is a core curriculum as reading and math in every school in the world. I’m writing this on a plane returning home from Ghana, where I implored the Vice President of Ghana to make basic coding mandatory starting in grade 1. He agreed that he will!  

This is the only way we get rid of this stigma of tech is for dudes in Silicon Valley—once it becomes MANDATORY in schools. We never hear learning to read is for women or men or whoever, right? Our friends at Code.org (including fellow Nasty Woman, President of Code.org, Alice Steinglass) are making tremendous progress in this area.

Share with us a favorite wine moment, memory or pairing.  

My favorite wine that I can (and often do!) drink every day is sparkling or still rosé. This is my go-to for when I need to shut down the workday and turn on my creative side.  One of my favorite things to do is turn off connectivity on my phone, sit at a bar with a glass of rosé and write and draw and scheme the night away. I do this in every city I travel to.  My team at Microsoft knows that when they get a picture of a glass of wine and a journal, I’m planning some major shenanigans.

Your wine is called Progress Pink. Talk to us about progress and how tech is helping women rise up.

Women need to do more than support each other. Women need to coach, sponsor, push each other up, open doors for each other, make deals with each other, and actively, actively create opportunities for other women. Dudes do this ALL THE TIME. How many times have we heard a guy say this: “You should hire my buddy for this. He’s great. ”Why don’t women do this more? We absolutely need to. This is the only way we will all RISE UP.

Tell us more about Prima Dona.

I’m insanely excited about Prima Dona, a hand-crafted luxury fashion brand that's made-to-order for ethical, powerful people who have a statement to make.  These garments are made from the rarest & most unusual fabric that I collect on my travels from the far corners of the world. You’re not going to see anyone else wearing your same garment since each Prima Dona item is tailor-made, hand-cut, and sewn WHEN you order it. No two pieces are the same since each is made individually for YOU, not made by the thousands, stashed in a dirty warehouse for years, and then tossed into a landfill if they don’t sell. I have been testing Prima Donas on stages all over the world from giving TEDx talks to speaking at the UN. I’ve never been asked “Where did you get that?!” so many times.  A word of caution for wearers though: this is not a piece of clothing, this is wearable art. You will get more compliments from strangers on this than you've ever heard in your life, so if you’re someone who likes to blend in, Prima Dona is not for you.

Dona is the Nasty Woman featured on our flagship wine Progress Pink Rosé.

Check out Dona’s website or follow her on social media here: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram