How Being the Only Girl Raised in a Wolf Pack Led Me to Start a Global Female Work Community

Last Updated: March 2023

Like Mowgli in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, I was raised in a wolf pack, which helped me develop particular strengths. My wolf brothers, it is true, were not literal wolves but our last name is “Wolf”. And, in a way, we have more in common than Mowgli’s wolf family because 4 of us shared the tight confines of our mother’s womb: I am a quadruplet — all boys except for myself, with a year and a half older brother to boot. We had - and still have - a close-knit family, which was known as the “Wolf Pack”.

My childhood in the Wolf Pack was fun and chaotic. It was in those early years that I first began to sense how different I was from my brothers. I often wonder why this was so upsetting back then when I might have embraced my uniqueness as the only girl. Perhaps it was the framing of a new role that often left me indoors while my brothers were outdoors; that mandated I alone had to wear a bathing suit top at the beach; that found me helping my mother while they were playing and that demanded I learn more about self-sacrifice than self-confidence.

This sense of being different only deepened when I was diagnosed with a learning disability, which persuaded me that I simply was not smart. I struggled with a word retrieval disorder that left me so unable to express myself that I became known in my family as the “mute” - not unlike how Mowgli must have felt when he first encountered a human village. As the only girl in my family, I often struggled to find my own voice - literally and figuratively - and my sense of self was left behind.

But over time, I was able to build some powerful compensating structures, ones that helped me succeed at some very rigorous schools and survive a prestigious but demanding job at Deutsche Bank.

Yet I also had a nagging sense that I was not fulfilling my own purpose. I needed a different kind of work, one which would allow me to contribute my hard-earned education to building better systems for those who had been left behind.

To do this, I traveled to Vietnam and lived in the rural areas, helping female farmers access much-needed credit to build income-generating businesses. This was my daily work for almost 2 years, helping to build up a microfinance company that continues this work today. Much of the experience I draw from now is a direct result of my time in Vietnam.

In July 2017, I wrote a post on a friend’s Facebook page that would change the course of my life. It was an announcement about:

“Work from Home Opportunities for Ambitious Women in Pakistan.”

I had recently attended a graduate school reunion, where one of my Pakistani classmates suggested that her country would be the perfect place to start a business, given the large number of highly educated women who were excluded from the labor force. This led me to write the Facebook post above.

Within 24 hours, we had more than 200 women messaging us, women who came not only from Pakistan but other countries too.

I flew to Islamabad, Pakistan that August to meet many of these women in person. And what I learned convinced me to quit my current job in New York, move to the Middle East, and start a company to solve a problem that I felt I could fix. That was the beginning of Odetta, and it has been growing ever since.

Odetta is an online work platform that delivers high-end business process outsourcing to technology companies like Google. Odetta allows our female workforce, from dozens of countries around the world, the opportunity to work from home, according to their own hours, within a vibrant community of women committed to succeeding on their own terms. There is a highly educated and valuable pool of talent in the Middle East and South Asia, women who are not participating in the traditional workforce due to constraints around cultural norms, mobility, time, and work acceptance. While freelancing solutions like Upwork existed, female participation on such sites was - and remains - low. This is where Odetta fills the gap.

Today, more than four years later, Odetta has over 350 women working in teams across 21 countries, solving problems for more than 300 technology companies, including many staples of Silicon Valley. There is a waitlist of 15,000 aspiring women who want to join Odetta’s platform.

©Copyright Odetta Inc., for details, visit www.odetta.ai/team

Odetta has always been a way for me to extend my hand to other women who have struggled to realize their own potential — women who mistakenly believed that they would never have a voice, an opportunity, or a job to grow and make an impact. But they do, both at Odetta and in the global world we live in today.

Even after being adopted by humans, Mowgli never forgot the lessons he learned, and the adventures he had, with his own ‘Wolf Pack’. And so it is with my own childhood: I too am a product of that time and will never stop finding ways to use my own particular strengths to give back. Odetta is proof of that.

If you want more information about Odetta, please visit https://odetta.ai/services and reach out to me via email.

ceo postsTayyaba QamarOctober 20, 2019