Two young girls working in IT are on a mission to provide role models for other women, who are still a rare breed in the field. Their project is called MissInTech.

Young girls do not have enough encouragement to take up jobs in information technology, with schools often failing to nudge them into opting for such a career path, web developers Vanessa Vella and Bernine Caruana believe.

The 20-year-olds are both reading for a degree in software development and have been working in the IT sector for a few years already.

But there are still not too many of their gender around. Society, they say, still stigmatises women in IT and many view the sector as “a man’s world”.

The pair work at CS Technologies, where the male-to-female ratio happens to be quite balanced. However, this is not a common characteristic of other companies. Even at the University of Malta, they point out, the majority of their peers are male. Of the 36 students reading for the degree, only six are women.

“I remember entering University and immediately noting a drastic drop in the number of girls in our class,” Ms Vella said.

The problem, they believe, does not lie in the way the sector itself operates – they have never been treated differently by any of their male colleagues. It is to do with a long-standing perception that the world of IT belongs to men. While women are, in theory, being encouraged to take up jobs in the field, young students are still not provided with the proper direction when they come to choosing subjects at school.

If at least we can get those working in IT to come together and be of inspiration to young girls, that is already a giant leap forward

“We experience this ourselves on a daily basis. None of our lecturers are women and the only ones that are, usually come from other departments,” Ms Vella went on.

As a result, Ms Caruana added, it is often difficult to find female role models to look up to, and this is also the case at secondary school level.

“There have been cases where guidance teachers, for instance, would discuss all the subjects with students and then when they come to explaining what IT is, they hand over to a male teacher. What message does that send to students? That needs to change,” Ms Caruana insisted.

Both have also been in situations of having to explain their career choice to those who express a degree of shock on finding out what they do – a reaction they find frustrating given they are perfectly capable of doing the work that they do.

So the two young women have decided to do something about the situation. Together they have set up MissInTech, a project that revolves around getting women interested in IT and providing students with information about the sector.

Since setting up last February, they have taken part in a number of panel discussions, including the recent YouthSpark Live conference organised by Microsoft in Malta and the international summit on technology WebSummit.

One of the things they want to do is share their experiences of working in the technology world with other students.

“We have already held a number of networking events, meeting new people and making contacts, both locally and abroad. The next step will be to hold workshops for students who are still unsure of what working in IT is all about,” Ms Vella said. They plan to hold the first of such workshops in the coming months.

“We do not want to be labelled as advocates or even feminists, because we are not. We just want young girls to be able to have women serving as role models,” Ms Caruana added.

“If at least we can get those working in IT to come together and be of inspiration to young girls, that is already a giant leap forward.”