Computer Vision News - September 2021

35 Dorsa Sadigh of the family lives. If you’ve been to the Irvine/Newport Coast area, it’s this pretty Hollywood movie type place. [ laughs ] Everything looks so nice! My parents asked if I wanted to take the entrance exam at the colleges in Iran or move to the US. Of course, I want to move to the United States! That was like moving in the movies! [ laughs ] The choice was easy. I moved to Irvine. I was there for about a year, year and a half. Then I moved to Berkeley in 2009. I have already interviewed many female Iranian scientists, all very impressive. What are the Iranians doing to generate so much incredible talent among their female students? I think about that very good question too! When I was in Iran, I never thought about the gender inequality that we see in the US when we look at STEM. I was thinking that gender inequality was worse in Iran than in Western countries, but never about sciences or jobs. If you look at colleges, they are actually pretty much 50/50 in all STEM fields, which is pretty incredible. There isn’t that mentality that engineering is not for girls. Because of that, it’s actually popular for Iranian girls to go into engineering. There are two things that come to my mind. One of them is, in general, Iranian women are pretty strong, and theywant to prove that they are strong. There is It’s like a gifted children’s school? Kind of, it does have an exam. It’s a different school outside of the usual education system. The organization is called the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. I went to this middle school, and it kind of changed my life to be honest. Middle school is this period when you make ideas about what you want to be when you grow up. I met my best friends. We started taking physics, math, chemistry and some of these very advanced topics that are even taught at colleges. We started learning them in middle school. That blew my mind. We started learning about philosophy and religion. That was so interesting. The middle school continues so I went to that same high school. Mid high school, around 2006/2007, we got our green card for the United States through chain migration: our aunt applied for our family when I was 3, and it took 13 years. When I was like 16, we got our green cards. At that time, I remember visiting the United States. I went to Irvine, which is where my mom’s side