- Source: Ilona Budapesti
Ilona Budapesti is a co-founder of 1 Million Women to Tech which set out to offer free coding education to 1 million women by 2020. She has worked in a number of financial and technology organisations and has used machine learning to identify sexism in Buddhist texts.
Biography
Budapesti studied computational linguistics at Oxford University and Harvard University, Chinese Language at Tsinghua University and has an EMBA from Columbia Business School. When she was President of the Oxford computer science society, she was horrified to find out that only eight per cent of the 804 applicants were women - this was the precursor to her involvement in 1 Million Women to Tech. In 2019, she won Women in IT Silicon Valley's Advocate of the Year award.
Her interest in Buddhism has grown over the years as she discovered inherent sexism in Buddhist writings and practice during travel and academic work. She returned to Oxford to study an MSt in Oriental Studies, and used machine learning models to identify trends in lengthy Buddhist scholarly texts. Although Buddhist women were allowed to be ordained (Bikkhuni), they were subordinate to monks and had to take extra vows before they were fully ordained.
She believes boys are more likely than girls to receive tech-related gifts, and hopes to redress the balance through campaigning for wider access to technology education for girls.
Publications
Budapesti, Ilona. "Past, Present, and Future of Digital Buddhology." D. Veidlinger (ed.), Digital Humanities and Buddhism, Berlín/Boston, De Gruyter (2019): 25-40.