Women have a positive track record in the ICT Industry. Just consider Ada Lovelace, daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, who programmed the first mechanical computer created by Charles Babbage. Today, the president and chief executive officer of HP, one of the largest computer products and services provider is Meg Whitman, who also happens to be one of the founding managers of eBay. And next time you check Facebook, don’t forget that the vice-president for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa, is also a woman named Nicola Mendelsohn.
However, there aren’t enough women at all levels of this crucial industry in the digital age. In Europe, the continent that invented the first mechanical computer and in recent years churned out Candy Crush and Minecraft, only nine per cent of software developers and only 19 per cent of ICT entrepreneurs are female. Less than 30 per cent of the total workforce in the ICT industry is female.
Malta is no exception. The 2015 Global Gender Gap Report revealed that just 28 per cent oftertiary students enrolled in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in Malta were female.
We are thus today joining the rest of the world to celebrate Girls in ICT Day, which was started by the International Communications Union in 2011 to bring together stakeholders and partners to promote career opportunities for females in the ICT industry in 150 countries around the world.
Despite poor figures, there are a number of local success stories. Mother-of-three Claudine Cassar is a successful entrepreneur who launched her own ICT company in 1998, aged 23, and today she is the leader for technology and digital at Alert Digital by Deloitte.
Just 28 per cent of tertiary students enrolled in STEM subjects in Malta were female
Elisa Calleja last year won the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) Cultural Heritage App Call with her mobile app on the Majjistral Park.
The past three editions of Malta Communications Authority (MCA) eBusiness Awards recognised no fewer than three female students for their academic research in ICT-related fields. In 2014, Rachel Bugeja researched about Twitter sentiment analysis for market research, while last year Sharon Grima wrote about the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. Earlier this year, Kelly Steer won with her dissertation on social media as a basis for marketing initiatives.
Several entities such as the MCA, MITA, the Ministry for Education and Employment and other organisations closely linked to employment and the ICT industry are holding events to mark this day.
Such initiatives are actually held all-year round. One of these, Budding Rockstars, is aimed at helping high-achieving youngsters discover a challenging but highly rewarding entrepreneurial career.
During the event, some of the most successful ICT business leaders, such as Cassar, share their experience and give some very important hints on how to start and grow an enterprise both from a technological and business point of view.
Students with the highest marks in the subjects of business, computing and mathematics in secondary schools are invited to participate. Last November, 146 students attended the session and an encouraging 45 per cent of these were girls. The MCA organised the successful event in collaboration with several other entities.
Another international foundation that took the initiative to create the network of clubs aimed at young students is CoderDojo. The MCA organised an initiative through a new partnership which it formed last year with the CD Foundation.
A number of Maltese students aged between seven and 17 took part – nine of the 22 were girls – benefited from this initiative. Malta joined more than 57 countries in promoting software coding with youngsters in an effort to raise more awareness about the importance of coding which in turn could channel more students towards ICT courses and which in due course may lead to a measurable increase in the take- up of ICT careers.
Indirectly, this initiative should contribute to alleviate the shortfall being experienced by the ICT industry in general for skilled software developers, so that the number of software developers increases and meets the increasingly heavy demands of the ICT industry. The MCA is planning more coding sessions this year with the support of the Ministry for Education and Employment.
Neelie Kroes was the chief promoter of the digital society in the European Commission between 2010 and 2014. A successful Dutch entrepreneur and politician, she had this advice to give just before she left her post: “ICT is no longer for the geeky few – it is cool, and it is the future! Only nine per cent of app developers are women? Come on! Give coding a try, see what fun it can be! Tech is too important to be left to men alone!”
For more information about careers in ICT, visit http://eskills4jobs.ec.europa.eu/work .