On International Women’s Day, Angela Micallef, Jacqueline Harvey and Carlota Rodriguez from Microsoft Malta met students at the BPW Careers Day event and spoke to them about their IT work experience and gave them career guidance. The event was attended by 800 Form 4 female students.
Angela Micallef said that Microsoft Malta was at the forefront in the promotion of gender equality, especially in a local IT sector that is still very predominantly a male-dominated one .
“We are not interested in just promoting gender equality. Stopping at that reduces this important topic to a simple exercise in making sure the numbers match. We are not here to honour some obligation. Our commitment at Microsoft Malta is to make sure that women realise their true potential in IT and to change the common misconception that IT is only a sector for men,” she said
Micallef said that for many years, Malta has been witnessing an ‘ICT gender gap’. Whereas the ICT industry contributes an average of five per cent to the national GDP – one of the highest rates in the EU – on average only one in three of our ICT graduates are women, while just over a third of the gainfully employed in ICT are women, she said.
“This gender gap needs to be bridged in order to strengthen the country’s ICT industry and offer more job opportunities to the increasing amount of female students who would like to pursue a career in IT. One way of bridging this is by making ICT more attractive to our youths, especially to our young female students.”
Micallef said Microsoft wanted to use events such as this one to show that contrary to the common misconception, ICT offers a lot of the flexibility that is necessary. “We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly connected,” she said. “Microsoft understands this and all our employees enjoy all the necessary flexibility that enables them to work productively and effectively.”
Visiting the event, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said: “The numbers for both girls and boys are not good enough in terms of uptake in ICT and other science subjects. The skill-set that these subjects create are crucial in a modern economy, and schools have invested considerably in taking classes into the 21st century.”
He added that it was important to understand that technology plays an important role not just in the subject itself, but also in other subjects like mathematics and languages.“From an early age, in primary schools, we are introducing basic programming techniques such as logic through games in order for students to understand the basic concepts of ICT without the heavy burden of programming languages at an early age,” Bartolo said.