Baloo is committed to showing other women how they can be their best advocates
FJaya Baloo, Avast’s Chief Information Security Officer, never meant to work in tech. Born in India on International Women’s Day, Baloo moved to the US at age four when her parents started working for the United Nations in New York City. That’s where she had her first exposure to computers.
“When I was really young, I was the only girl in my class who was really interested in computers and getting one and playing with them,” Baloo says. “I just thought it was a hobby. I suppose that came from the fact that I was the only girl. I never considered it as a potential for a professional choice, because there were no female examples. I got used to the idea that this was a quirky, weird thing about me — that I liked technologies.”
Baloo’s interest in tech popped up again while she was in college at Harvard and looking for a way to make some money. She got a job in Cambridge at a “very early cyber cafe” called CyberSmith, showing people how to use virtual reality (VR) stations and training them on how the internet worked and “how computers connect to each other and what you can do,” she says.
But even though she was getting paid, tech was still a hobby — Baloo wasn’t studying anything technical in school. Instead, she’d followed in parents’ footsteps and studied political science at Harvard.
“I did my internship at Freedom House because I felt law and politics was more female-frie ..
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