Historically, female representation in the tech sector has been low. This is especially lamentable as tech platforms, by their very nature, should be gender neutral. But lack of access and rigid stereotypes have kept girls and women out of the industry. It is now up to the ICT sector to reinvent itself and bridge the gender gap.
For Baratang Miya, CEO of GirlHYPE, the experience of exclusion has been close to home: “Coming from a township school, when I got to university, I found this huge misalignment. We need to inspire our girls and build their confidence to consider careers they wouldn’t normally, in the STEM fields,” she said.
She founded GirlHYPE, a non-profit organisation that empowers women and youth in ICT, because she wanted to formalise girl empowerment, give girls access to positive role models, and help them realise their potential. Since 2003, more than 5 000 girls have passed through their programmes: “We allow them to understand the opportunities in tech, and we give them access. We embed digital literacy at early childhood development level right through to university, and we extend our services to teachers, parents, community members, victims of GBV, and women in farming. We teach girls to code, and we’ve developed apps that allow users to access tech in their mother tongue, as well as a special app for women in the agricultural sector,” Miya said.
For Takalani Netshitenzhe, access and inclusion are key. As chief officer of corporate affairs for Vodacom Group, executive director in Vodacom South Africa, and chairperson of the Vodacom Foundation, she is mindful of her organisation’s mandate: “We have such high levels of income and gender inequality in society. There is a huge gap. Our purpose statement is ‘connect for a better future’. We are fostering inclusion for all so that no one is left behind.”
Access and safety must go hand-in-hand
As Vodacom evolves from a telco to a tech company, said Takalani, they are upscaling tech skills and using their operations to expand on their mandate to bridge the gender divide. “We want to get people comfortable with ICT skills and tech. We have 147 teacher centres; a library corner and internet café to allow members of the public to access our resources for free. We’ve trained over 300 teachers.”
In addition, the company set up a small and medium enterprise innovator trust six years ago, which has empowered 1 500 rural women to access the agricultural value chain. “We’ve also used geo-location capabilities to see where the highest number of GBV-related calls are coming from, and we’ve fed the data back to government to provide policing and resources in those areas.”
Gugulethu Mfuphi, who moderated the panel discussion, noted that the beauty of tech is that it has the power to democratise access to markets, and enhance participation in society.
Emilar Gandhi, Stakeholder Engagement Manager (EMEA) at Facebook, agreed: “Facebook’s goal is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer. We offer free courses for small businesses in order to attract talent, and we focus on hiring and retaining women. We want diverse leadership that reflects the people who use our platforms.”
For Emilar, empowerment and inclusion are a multi-layered issue, but it begins with policy-making – and that must be centred around people and community, and driven by a bottom-up approach.
Baratang Miya agreed that it all begins with policy, but if the reality on the ground doesn’t enable successful implementation, the policy is bound to fail: “Our government has made sure that most schools have CAT and coding in the curricula, but then these schools either have limited access to the internet, or the equipment provided by government is stolen,” she said. So, it seems, security must accompany any policy implementation. For women to thrive in the world of ICT, they don’t only need access; they need to feel safe.
Written by Loren Anthony
Image: Screen capture of Gugulethu Mfuphi, Takalani Netshitenzhe, Baratang Miya and Emilar Gandhi
