Pooja Sankar, founder of Piazza, an online social learning platform, remembers vividly the feelings of isolation and exclusion she faced as a female computer science student. While growing up in India, Sankar attended an all-girls high school, but when she got to college, was one of only three girls, among 50 male students in her computer science courses.

She excelled at her coursework, and went on to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science at University of Maryland. Her career included stints at Oracle, Kosmix and Facebook as a software developer, but she never forgot the frustration of struggling with a problem at 2 a.m. with no one available to help.

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