I’m shocked by how many of my lady friends, many of whom are highly educated, have been taken in by Dove’s (brilliant!) marketing sham.

It’s an ad campaign called “Real Beauty Sketches”, which went viral this week. The YouTube video has amassed 6 million views in three days. HuffPo even wrote a glowing article about it here. It’s one of the most effective “viral marketing” ploys I’ve seen in a while.

The campaign’s premise is that women are in reality more beautiful than they generally think they are. And Dove purports to have done an experiment that proves it. In the video, a forensic artist listens to women speak about their own faces and then sketches a likeness based on their self-descriptions, sight unseen. He later draws a second image of each woman based on someone else’s description of her. Lo and behold - the images drawn from the self-descriptions are ugly, whereas those...

Sometimes we take feminism too far, and to our own detriment.

A recent article in Scientific American has been flooding my newsfeeds this weekend. The article discusses benevolent sexism, which refers to nice things men say to women that are still sexist (e.g.,“Women have a way of caring that men are not capable of in the same way.”)

It’s a well-written piece on an important issue.

But, something about the author’s tone rubbed me the wrong way. This paragraph in particular:

Why is benevolent sexism a problem?…Well, for one thing, benevolently sexist statements aren’t all sunshine and butterflies. They often end up implying that women are weak, sensitive creatures that need to be “protected.” While this may seem positive to some, for others – especially women in male-dominated fields – it creates a damaging stereotype.

I felt weirdly offended by this.

I guess because it reminded me...

I felt it important for my first post to be an introduction to me and that which inspires me, as this will be the foundation for everything I write.

Let’s start first with a picture. This is me (at least some of the times):

I’m an entrepreneur, investor, author, singer and wife.

I do start-ups with my husband. I do everything with him. He’s an entrepreneur, scientist, terrible singer and exceptional sarodya.

I’m currently 31 years old.

I’m a Stanford alum, vegetarian, and struggling surfer.

I like to work from home.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma.

I was the first child of immigrants from India. My father is a doctor. My mother was a doctor but left her professional career when I was born, to focus on something more important. They’re great parents.

High school in Shawnee, OK in the late nineties sucked. Fortunately, it coincided with a period of unparalleled greatness...