THE CEO of a company that provides free coding courses for women across the UK has said “there’s a lot of conversation but not enough action” in helping women get jobs in the technology sector.
Code First Girls (CFG) is the largest community of women coders in the UK, which aims to give women an opportunity to learn the necessary skills to enter the tech industry.
Companies subscribe to CFG and then participants skillsets are matched with an employer to provide them with a job once they reach the end of the course.
Careers range from software engineers to data scientists. Across Scotland, they have done work with Skyscanner, Aviva and NatWest.
CFG’s CEO Anna Brailsford told The National: “We’re not a business so much as we’re a social movement which offers an alternative approach to get women into technology.
“What’s happening at the higher education level isn’t enough. There’s a lot of conversation and I worry not enough action.
“Of the number of applicants going to study computer science, just 17% of them are women.”
In spite of the conversations that are happening, that 17% figure has stagnated and has remained around that level for the past five years.
The classes offered by CFG operate across various universities including Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Participants are able to complete full-time degrees alongside the course, with St Andrews the first in Scotland to accredit it and put it on students' transcripts.
Brailsford was in Edinburgh last weekend speaking at the Data Summit which focused on how data and AI can be used to create a better society.
The company is 91% oversubscribed across Scotland, showing the huge demand amongst women for tech education.
Brailsford also added that many of the women who apply for the course come from humanities degrees as well as subjects traditionally associated with the tech industry.
She said: “You’d be so surprised about the kind of things women study that love technology. It’s all about choice and exposure.
“So many degrees, the likes of sociology and psychology, look at crunching numbers now.
"A woman’s degree doesn’t have to define her but we’re living in a society that’s telling us it does.
“I think it’s about access to education at school. There’s massive levels of variation based on your socio-economic background.
“Something like 88% of women under 35 said they didn’t have access to a form of tech education at school.”
Often those taking on the course do so because they want a career switch. Brailsford says that they have a lot of applicants coming from teachers suffering from “burnout”.
Recent research commissioned by Skyscanner showed that 56% of women in the UK said they would switch career paths if the opportunity presented itself.
Of the Scots polled, 51% said they would consider a career in technology.
However, Brailsford believes there are still several contributing factors though as to why women might be put off from a career in tech, one of which is a lack of role models.
“Pre-80s, coding was a subject associated with women but there was a huge shift during that period. I did a talk recently and asked people to name a female role model. Not one of them put their hand up.
“Well, god bless them one person said me”, she said, laughing.
“We want to create a community of women that felt empowered and supported and felt like they had a space where maybe they could learn and become something different to what they were told they should be."
Brailsford notes how the benefits of getting more women in the industry is two-fold.
Not only is it beneficial to those applying for jobs, but to the companies themselves who will be able to create products and services based on a more diverse way of thinking.
For example, it was only last month that the first female crash test dummy was put to use.
Prior to this, the data to develop these had been based solely on male bodies, meaning women were more likely to be killed in a car crash.
“So many products are created using data which is based on one part of society and that can literally put lives at risk”, said Brailsford.
She continued: “I’ve literally had big companies in the room, a group of CFG women come in and hack a problem and every single one of them asks why they didn’t think of that.
“It’s because they’re all thinking in the same way. It’s recently been published that by placing women into the security sector, we’ve been able to reduce terrorism threats.
“If you build something that looks and sounds the same, it’s more predictable and it can be hacked easier because people know how you think.
“For those companies who we do work with, it’s a lifeline. They'll be ahead of the curve as this continues to grow in the next few years."
