In a joint statement published by the Washington Post, 30 women Dalit engineers from Silicon Valley allege that they routinely face caste discrimination. In their letter, the women have urged the American companies to adopt caste as a protected category to eradicate caste-based discrimination in the US tech industry. The women have also hailed John Doe from Cisco for speaking out against the caste hierarchy in Silicon Valley.
“We thank John Doe from Cisco for speaking out because his experience echoes our own. As Dalit women, we have already seen both casteism and sexism during our tech education in India. Many of us have the burden of proving ourselves to our male peers, while also facing multiple casteist assumptions that we are not competent developers,” reads the statement.
