INSPIRE FEST 2015We recently attended an event called the InspireFest which was a 2 day event focussing

on equality between genders and also lowering the gender gap in various occupations.

There were many keynotes given at this event from many different perspectives but, at

this time we will focus on the Tech Industry.

THE GENDER GAP

As you can see women only take up 20% of the tech market whereas men take up the

other 80%, which is astounding when taking into consideration females account for 50%

of the world population. Many times during InspireFest stereotyping has been mentioned;

how we as people created gender tropes for occupations such as those technology

related for example: The software coder – we as a whole assume that the software coder

is a nerdy male with little to no friends who spend hours on computers and have issues

talking to females. What then of female coders? do they not exist?.

Female coders of course exist and are quite prevalent in their industry as well as men. I’ll

give you an example:

 

Grace Murray Hooper

was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She was one

of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944,and invented the first

compiler for a computer programming language,and was one of those who popularized

the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development

of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She is credited with

popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (inspired by an actual moth

removed from the computer). Owing to her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is

sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”. The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke class guided-

missile destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6

“Hopper” supercomputer at NERSC.

Grace Murray Hooper was definitely not one of the stereo types you see on Tv or

portrayed in Media

IS STEREOTYPING TO BLAME?

At InspireFest we learned there was sadly more to the large gap than just stereotyping to

blame for the large gap

Gender Bias was also a factor

Gender Bias can be unconscious as well as conscious  this means that an employer may

treat the employee wrongly based on their gender. unconscious gender means they were

not aware they were doing it.

Valid points were certainly raised during inspirefest.

Speaking at the InspireFest 2015 panel on A Workplace & Workforce for the 21st

Century, Fionnuala Meehan, director of SMB sales EMEA for Google, addressed the

various issues the technology company found that contribute to the dearth of women

pursuing a career in technology.She explained how bias training is an important step to

further the advancement in female participation and also stated: “The best outcomes

arise from mixed gender teams. Diversity is not the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to

do.”

 

Women Who Code, the fast-growing movement that aims to eradicate the gender bias in

the IT industry by teaching code, will soon be establishing a branch in Dublin, the founder

of Women Who Code UK Sheree Atcheson told Inspirefest 2015.Atcheson said

that Women Who Code has grown to more than 25,000 members in 15 countries.

“We are here to provide an avenue for women in technology and erase this gender bias.

We try to do that by creating a place for women in their local area.

women who code also plan to set up a studio in Dublin in the near future.

 

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

According to new research from Gender Gap Grader, a project to analyse data using

name recognition software, the gender gap in science is slowly but surely narrowing. Of

1m scientists listed in scientist profile database ORCID.org, 33pc are women.

Analysing the gender of the names listed in another researcher database, HighlyCited, it

was found that, while in 2001 women scientists represented 7pc of all researchers, this

number grew to 13pc in 2014.

“We found that there’s been a significant improvement in many fields. For virtually every

single field the representation of women rose from the single digits to double. Except for

physics, where the numbers dropped,” said Gender Gap Grader co-founder Elena

Rossini speaking at Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. in Dublin today.

For some STEM fields in particular, the gap is closing more rapidly: the number of

women engineers listed on HighlyCited has gone from 1pc to 11pc in the last 14 years,

while in maths this has risen from 4pc to 11pc.

 

Hopefully this will continue to rise with the ongoing effort of bias training and incentives

many companies and institutes are using.