The future of tech is female
Those were the words our guests heard at our final bootcamp session and awards evening last week by the principal of The Studio School Shaun - and yes it truly is!
Over 6 weeks Liverpool Girl Geeks tried and tested a new concept; The Girl Geek Bootcamp, ultimately a 6 week crash course into tech for teenage girls. Rebecca and I sat and conjured up a plan, something that we’ve been hoping to work on since 2013 when we started this adventure as a blog to inspire girls into the sector. We picked out some of the key areas where girls needed help; Confidence, Skill set & Role Models and designed the course so that each of these were showcased, and with a little help from our sponsor SKY we were able to make it a little better…
We chose the age range we did for the current Bootcamp because we had researched quite heavily the age at which girls drop off the radar in terms of tech and digital subjects. What we discovered was that currently at Year 9 (for some schools, the beginning of the GCSE process) there are double the number of boys than girls doing ICT and Computing subjects. That is despite most girls nationally outperforming their male counterparts in those subjects.
Equally it was disconcerting to discover that globally 15% of male professionals say as children that they pictured themselves as a prime minister or president, whereas their female counterparts said they had largely limited their expectations by the age of 9 to something tangible and within what they felt was their realm of expectation. This was further emphasised by a Department for Education study that said compared to only 2.1% of girls, 14.8% of boys asked saw themselves in a role connected to Computing or Engineering subjects. To be able to open these opportunities up to girls we need to be instilling them with the confidence to be the pioneers who are willing and able to be the only girls in the room, as we are confident as Liverpool Girl Geeks that they won’t be the only girls in the room for long.
Empowering women for us has always been about growing confidence, whether that be though a skill, being inspired by a role model or getting up on stage and giving a go yourself.
How does a female become confident? They do this by focusing on themselves, by confiding in their friends, from practicing skills, from health and the wellbeing of your own body - this is FACT and something every organisation who’s aims are the same should be focusing on, because it’s the right thing to do, we want to help our girls to thrive, to become leaders and we do this by raising awareness, by putting on events whether thats in learning to code or learning how to speak out on stage. Whatever we can do we will do, not to make a profit or to live extraordinary lives but for our girls, for them to be the best them they can be.
Thanks to everyone who has supported us, that has helped us DO what we said we were going to do 3 years ago and will continue to do into the future.