Here’s something you probably knew already: not enough women are entering STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses. Mind you, given the skills shortages, you could argue the bigger problem is that not enough people of either sex are entering STEM courses. Anyway, the plain fact is a lot of that skills shortage could be eradicated if more women enrolled in STEM courses.
According to 2014 Higher Education Authority new entrant figures, 17% of entrants to third level courses in ICT were female (a figure which hasn’t changed in more than 10 years), only 24% of engineering entrants were female and 22% of entrants in maths in 2014 were female (which is a marked slump from the 35% in 2004).
I Wish, an award-winning partnership initiative between Cork Chamber, it@cork, and Cork City Council (supported by DFI, Dell, Cork County Council, UCC and CIT), has a started aim of raising the level of female entrants to STEM courses from 21% in 2014 to 30% by 2020. It believes one way to try and boost the number of women seeking careers in STEM is to try and redress the lack of female role models and mentors.
I Wish co-founder Gillian Keating, partner, Ronan Daly Jermyn Solicitors, comments: “There has been much talk about the gender imbalance in STEM fields, and we are all aware that the number of women taking up STEM courses at University level is falling or at best static. We believe that we can tackle this problem by making successful, fulfilled women in STEM more visible and accessible to young women making career decisions.”
The I Wish event will take place on 11 and 12 February in City Hall, Cork. More than 2,000 young women from schools across Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Waterford are expected to visit the event and be given the chance to use interactive hubs to meet “inspiring women” working in a variety of STEM roles in companies such as Dell, PepsiCo, Google, Vodafone and Twitter.
I Wish co-founder Caroline O’Driscoll, partner, KPMG and it@cork vice chair, argues that “the possibilities for women are endless – from food to fashion, sport to social media. I Wish advocates three things: Choices, Chances and Changes. There is a world of choice available to young girls; there are exciting chances and opportunities across all STEM fields and I WISH is about changing the perception of what a career in STEM looks like”.
Role models
I’m interested in what effect role models have in terms of attracting young people to pursue a particular career. For instance, were lots of young men lured into IT in the 90s because of the examples of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison or Steve Ballmer? If so, to paraphrase Mrs Merton’s infamous question to Debbie McGee (wife of famous UK magician Paul Daniels), what first attracted them to those multi-millionaire tech CEOs?
Whatever effect those role models may have had on young males, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t be especially attractive to young females. Not that there haven’t been powerful women in the IT industry, such as Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, but they haven’t been anywhere as well known. In fact, about the only halfway well-known female tech role model that I can think of in popular culture in the 80s and 90s (and she was pretty niche) was Betty Jo, Garth’s girlfriend in Wayne’s World 2.
In any case,the attraction of a career in IT is not purely monetary. Many people have a genuine interest in technology, programming and coding. But there are also many people employed in the IT industry in roles that they could just as easily be occupying in other industries. And that’s where the work organisations like I Wish undertake in countering the preconceptions around what a career in STEM looks like can be significant.
Yes, the IT industry can be viewed as a new and fast moving sector, but technology companies also rely on traditional business roles in disciplines that are as old as the hills. Indeed, with more customers changing the emphasis of their IT buying decisions from the technology to the business case, you could argue that a career in IT may soon be far less niche than it has ever been.
Perhaps a wider issue is changing the preconceptions of people within the IT industry. Diversity reports from 11 of the world’s largest technology companies published last year showed an average 30% of their workforce was female but there were less than 16% in tech roles and 22.5% in leadership positions. Some of that disparity must be down to how companies recruit candidates for those positions and the preconceptions and unconscious cultural prejudices they apply to that process.
All of which, as the CNET article points out, means there are fewer women in positions to influence a company’s product development or strategic direction. In turn, that means there are fewer female role models to hold up to younger women to try and attract them to a career in IT.
And if you want to see the effect the absence of role models has in determining young people’s career choices, you can find a perfect example in a completely different profession but one that is far, far older than IT: teaching. The number of female teachers in Ireland has risen from 63% of the total in 1961 to 74% in 2011. And despite the fact that many people acknowledge primary schools would benefit from more male teachers, the number of female primary school teachers increased to 86% of primary school teachers in the 2011/12 school year. With fewer male role models in teaching positions in their primary and secondary schools, it’s no wonder young males are less inclined to opt for a career in education. In turn, that means there will be fewer male role models to hold up to younger men to try and attract them to a career in teaching in the future.
It’s not just STEM that needs to learn the value of positive role models.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers