Paula Brenes Ramírez, Marketing Director, UCenfotec
Tech and IT Executive, CEA Digital Law Costa Rica Node
“Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail.” “Women are naturals at computer programming”; “it’s about time, because this is the age of the Computer Girls”.
The quotations above come from a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan magazine, which also includes a line from the celebrated Dr Grace Hopper: “It’s just like planning a dinner”… Reading the full article today, and considering the historical moment in which it was written, we may well ask what happened along the way. The reality we live in seems like an alternate universe straight out of Marvel.
According to a BBC article published last year, women have in recent decades conquered areas of the labour market once reserved for men, yet they still make up only a small share of the computing sector, holding less than 25% of the industry’s jobs worldwide. The situation in Costa Rica is no different: an estimated two in ten IT professionals are women. Dr Gabriela Marín, a pioneer in the field of women in technology in Costa Rica, explains that “although few women take this kind of degree, female computer scientists are just as successful as men in terms of their chances of graduating, and many of them even graduate in less time.”
The figures from CAMTIC’s technology sector mapping study (“Mapeo Sectorial de Tecnologías”) are now well known: Costa Rica needs 8,000 ICT technicians and specialist professionals. CINDE’s study of demand for human capital, for its part, identified ten university fields and ten technical fields in high demand among employers, with software engineering in first place. Yet young women continue to enrol in degree programmes with little demand in the job market: according to figures published by the Colegio de Profesionales en Informática y Computación (CPIC), Costa Rica’s professional association for IT and computing, only 1,161 of its roughly 6,500 active members are women.
Several organisations in Costa Rica have already made efforts to bring more women into the world of technology: the Sulá Batsú cooperative with its TICAS programme, Red MenTe, Voces Vitales, CAMTIC, Micitt, CPIC and the academic sector. To date, however, there is no national policy promoting gender equality in employment in the digital sector, and only a handful of companies have made public their efforts to bring more women into this field, notably Akamai, Intel, Prodigious, HP, Accenture and Gridshield. Universities such as UCenfotec, UH, TEC, UNED and UTN, meanwhile, report on in-house programmes to attract and retain girls in technology.
If we accept that stereotypes need to be broken, that it is vital to do more to educate the community and families and, above all, to show girls that there is another world out there full of opportunities, then it is essential to give them spaces in which to discover and experiment with technology, to understand what an IT degree actually involves, and to see what can be achieved with technology as a means to an end rather than an end per se. That is how we will bring about change in Costa Rica.
PS: this article by Dr Paula, dated 10 November 2016, is still relevant today
First published in revistapetra
النشرة
فعاليات وأخبار وتحليلات في القانون الرقمي تصلك على بريدك، ولا نراسلك إلا حين يكون لدينا جديد.
