School talk - Technology Careers For Girls

After a 15 year career in recruiting software engineers and seeing at first hand the under-representation of women in the industry I decided to set up Coding Future Women in April this year. And I'm pleased to say that our first event was Friday 18th October.

Disappointingly representation for women in tech in 2024 is just as strong today as it was when I began my career in 2010 - a recent study by Engineering UK found that women still only make up 21% of all IT specialists in the UK*.

My journey with women in tech began right at the beginning when my client UBS asked for the % of female candidates we had submitted over the course of the past year and I was suprised to see that of all the developers we had sent that year, only 3% were women! Then 4 years later I wrote a briefing paper for Thoughtworks on the state of women in tech and we were given special terms of business to find them diverse candidates.

As I remember the conclusion I drew at the time was that whilst hiring female software engineers was going to improve their own statistics, the more successful companies that did so were really only stopping other companies from hiring any women at all. Everyone was fishing from the same tiny pond and not doing anything to increase the pond size in the first place.

So for a long time I've wanted to do something like this.

I wanted to do something that actually made a difference by getting to the girls before they have even made their GCSE choices.

And so I was delighted that when in May this year Caroline Jordan , the Head Mistress of Headington Rye Oxford got back to me and put me in touch with their Head of Computer Science department, Matt Howe. Matt arranged a year 7 and year 8 lunchtime assembly slot for Friday 18th October and got the word out to the school community and alumni whilst I would find the speakers.

I was delighted to find two fantastic speakers, first up was Grace Jansen who is both a Java Champion and an Advisory Developer Advocate at IBM . She explained her own journey into software engineering to the girls and then wow'd the girls with some of the opportunities this career had given her. I'm sure the girls were pretty impressed that she had just flown from a work event in Singapore and was flying off to Las Vegas the next day for another one!

Next up was Rashi Saxena , Head of DevOps at Worldpay who shared her own amazing story of growing up in India as the daughter of a senior civil engineer and a renowned chemistry professor. Despite coming from a non-tech background, she carved out her own path, first working in different regions of India and then moving 4,000 miles away from home to end up leading one of the most important functions in a tech-based company! She gave a very relateable talk about how software is already part of their every day lives and thrilled the girls with her interactive style!

Next up were 2 recent school alumni who told the girls what their lives had been like since becoming software engineers, with Alice Gammond reassuring the girls that you don't have be top student with the top grades to get a great job in software engineering, and Alexandra Peach fascinating them with her adventures mapping the ocean floor in a small yellow boat on the choppy North Sea!

Following the talks there was a Q&A session where the speakers were joined by two people from the school community Evrim Teke?in , a Director of Dynatrace and Elspeth Briscoe , CEO and Founder of Learning with Experts who were able to inspire the students with their personal stories of professional success as female software engineers.

It was fantastic to have a brief chance to talk to some of the year 7 and 8 girls before they shot off for their lunch, and hear their enthusiasm for what had been discussed and what they had taken away from the talks.

Following the assembly all the speakers sat down for lunch with the school's GCSE and A-Level Computer Science students, which was a fantastic opportunity to answer their more practical and immediate questions about how to convert their studies into a career. And explain to them a bit more about how the industry works from the inside.

Speaking to Matt Howe this week we agreed how fantastic it would be to build upon the student's new found interest and organise follow up events!

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ORGANISE A SIMILAR EVENT FOR PROFESSIONAL FEMALE SOFTWARE ENGINEERS TO COME AND SPEAK AT YOUR SCHOOL PLEASE EMAIL [email protected] AND I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO HEAR FROM YOU.

THIS EVENT WAS ORGANISED BY CODING FUTURE WOMEN A NOT-FOR-PROFIT ORGANISATION SPONSORED BY LOVELACE SEARCH , SPECIALISTS IN RECRUITING WOMEN PROGRAMMERS. LOVELACE SEARCH IS RUN BY MARTIN JEE, PRINCIPAL RECRUITMENT CONSULTANT CONTACT HIM AT [email protected]

*https://www.engineeringuk.com/media/bryloncz/women-in-engineering-2024-update-engineeringuk-may-2024.pdf