The “tech jobs are for men” stereotype is perseveringly pushed into the past. Ireland’s tech industry is not far behind the US’ and actively focuses on women, with a number of great initiatives developing in the last few years.
Two of the Irish initiatives went further and are pioneering in attracting teens to the industry.
The Teen-Turn initiative took aboard fourteen secondary school girls and with the help of several Dublin’s tech companies provided teens with a two-week working environment experience and project work.
Read about the girls’ experience in their own words:
Julia
The program is a summer-time educational event, offered with support of HAYS and organised by the Teen Turn team - Joanne Dolan, leader of Girls Hack Ireland, and Niambh Scullion, founder of CoderDojo Girls, in collaboration with Ireland-based tech companies. It’s specifically targeted at female teens and aimed at providing them with an insight into the real-world STEM working process during 10 days in tech companies, for the noble purpose of STEMinism - increasing the number of women in STEM fields.”
I think having real-time experiences is the actual point of internship. I passed multiple courses online - however, I’ve never gotten to solve actual, real-life problems in a proper working environment (before now).
Sarah
Teen Turn have given me this opportunity, which I’m very grateful for. They have collaborated with a variety of tech companies and gave girls with an interest in IT, the chance to work in a company as such. This is to prove that women can pursue STEM careers and battle against the typical gender stereotypes in this sector!
Have you ever seen the inside of a computer? Well today Becky and I were working with the engineers of the company who are in charge of the help desk and we got shown what their job basically consists of. Did you know that only men work in this part of a company?
I came out now with skills I have achieved and improved. Working in a team alongside with Becky (who I now call a close friend), and performing tasks given by our mentors really pushed me to be more proactive and efficient in the workplace.
Lauren
“People here at Openet, where I’m spending the next two weeks, speak like walking dictionaries. I feel like I’ve learned a whole new language.”
“My understanding of IT and engineering has definitely changed and I see now that it’s much more than what I thought it was.”
“There is a constant changing and developing with everything here in order to keep up with the world and I find that I’m quite fascinated by it (the awe and wonder of IT and engineering”
The second initiative called “I wish” emerged from Cork to “inspire, encourage and motivate” young female students to pursue careers in STEM. Organisers are hoping to do so by engaging students in the talks and interactions with female role models who are at the top of their field in STEM, as well as workshops, experiments and demonstrations.
Julia (our corrector) experienced all of the above first hand.
On the day, she was greeted by the Ada Lovelace (impersonated by an actress). Ada presented herself as the founder of Informatics, and explained that her inventions were forgotten for the time being, so when the personal computers came to life, programming was perceived as a male profession. Why stage a single story though? There were others!
Women are to be praised for the many of contemporary technological advances.
It’s known that the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or ENIAC, the world’s first electronic digital computer, used for calculating artillery firing tables and early research into the hydrogen bomb, was designed by two men. Only, the programming of the system was trusted to a group of women. The ENIAC Girls learned to program without programming language or tools, but by the time they were finished, the machine was doing its job in seconds. The documentary about these six women has been released, it would be really good to watch it, just as well.
Grace Hopper, known as Amazing Grace, was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944 and later invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She taught computer to “understand English” while developing COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.
At about the same period, Hedy Lamarr, a film actress, definitely broke stereotypes with her invention of spread spectrum technology (think unbreakable code in transmissions and Bluetooth) and it’s also went unnoticed and uncredited at the time.
Image credit: Wikipedia
Modern call centres exist because Erna Schneider Hoover invented stored program control. Internet, apparently, has its mother founders, too: Radia Perlman’s invented of spanning tree protocol (STP) and Karen Spärck Jones’ developed information retrieval (IR) techniques that enabled users to work with computers using ordinary words instead of equations or codes before Google used it in its search engines. Katherine Johnson, a NASA section head, calculated the trajectory for the moon landing, and astronauts flights. The Apollo 11 astronauts waited for her to confirm all calculations. She also devised a backup plan in case of the spacecraft’s computer malfunction - the Apollo 13 astronauts used the stars to navigate a safe course to Earth to get home safely. Guess who was the Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the onboard flight software for the Apollo space program? Right, a woman named Margaret Hamilton.
There’re many more incredible role models in the history, hopefully, they will be mentioned in the course of the next iWish event.
However, something tells us that the propagation of textbook’s and inspirational speakers’ examples alone is not enough. Isn’t it much more encouraging to have a decent number of subject hours, a good lab in the school and great passionate teachers, specialists in their subjects? And then the world is your oyster and the world’s olympiads are at your feet.
Stay tuned for the part 2, our coffee talk with tech interns.
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