May 20, 2018 "More women gravitating to STEM": Today I found this article by Virginia Galt in the Globe and Mail:
It was a telling moment for Jodi Kovitz
when she went to a youth summit to talk about a severe shortage of women
in advanced technology − and found that the girls were out in force,
conversing easily and confidently with their male peers on such topics
as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and genetic engineering.
Of
the 300 participants, all in the 13-to-17 age range, 40 per cent were
female. Invitations to the youth tech summit, organized by The Knowledge
Society (TKS), were based solely on “intellectual curiosity and a
hunger for knowledge,” tech entrepreneur Navid Nathoo said.
The sheer number of female applicants contradicted a commonly held notion that girls are not all that interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), said Mr. Nathoo, who co-founded TKS with his brother Nadeem, a former consultant with McKinsey and Co.
The sheer number of female applicants contradicted a commonly held notion that girls are not all that interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), said Mr. Nathoo, who co-founded TKS with his brother Nadeem, a former consultant with McKinsey and Co.
“I was blown away by those brilliant and
curious young people” and encouraged by the number of young women in
the room, said Ms. Kovitz, chief executive officer of #movethedial, a
organization she founded two years ago to increase the participation and
advancement of girls and women in technology. “I think this generation
is starting to see a different way [of doing things].”
In
partnership with McKinsey, The Knowledge Society, a Toronto-based
not-for-profit organization, also runs an eight-month program on
weekends to train the next generation of innovators and leaders in the
tech sector. The current cohort of 120 includes 17-year-olds Tanisha
Bassan, a quantum-computing enthusiast, and Hannah Le, who is studying
the potential of advanced technology to accelerate research into more
effective treatment of diseases.
In a
2017 benchmark study − co-authored with PwC Canada and innovation hub
MaRS Discovery District − #movethedial reported that only 5 per cent of
Canadian tech companies have a female founder or chief executive
officer, that women represent only 13 per cent of the average tech
company’s executive team and that, on average, only 8 per cent of tech
company directors are women.
“The
labour market is increasingly demanding higher skill levels in science,
technology, engineering and math,” the TD economics group said in a
study released in the fall of 2017. Still, “women make up less than
one-quarter of employment in these occupations.”
The key is to catch them young and encourage them, alongside the talented boys, before they self-select out, Nadeem Nathoo said.
At the recent TKS summit in Toronto, senior leaders − male and female −
from NASA, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla and Toronto-based
virtual-reality/augmented-reality specialist MetaVRse − talked about the
rapid pace of change and discovery in neuroscience, space engineering,
data science, blockchain and virtual reality. Stay curious, keep
exploring and contact us if you hit a roadblock, they told their young
audience.
“TKS is a very unique
environment … where gender, age, ethnicity, etcetera are factors that
mean absolutely nothing. Everyone is here because we share a similar
mindset of curiosity and goals for changing the world,” said Ms. Bassan,
who will start her final year of high school in the fall.
Efforts
to attract more bright young women to STEM are starting to pay off, Ms.
Kovitz said, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The
University of Waterloo reports that, in the 2017-18 academic year, women
accounted for more than 24 per cent of the students admitted to
computer-science programs in the faculty of mathematics − up from 10 per
cent a decade ago.
Within the workforce, “employers need to
review whether ongoing marginalization is present,” TD said in its
report, Women in STEM, Bridging the Divide. “Women who acquire a degree
in STEM are disproportionately slotted into lower-paying technical roles
…
“Firms that argue there’s
insufficient supply of women need to first ensure the elimination of
attitudes that … cause women to either self-select out of the STEM
workforce or shift involuntarily into part-time ranks.
To have run the gauntlet through a 20-year educational journey, only to experience a fatal career blow due to corporate culture is a loss to society and the economy.”
To have run the gauntlet through a 20-year educational journey, only to experience a fatal career blow due to corporate culture is a loss to society and the economy.”
Attitudes are shifting at
the top, Ms. Kovitz said. “I see it even from the phone calls I get from
people saying, ‘Jodi, you have a great network. Can you help me source a
board member? Can you help me source a female lead engineer?’”
It
will require the collective efforts of men and women to create more
inclusive work environments, said Ms. Bassan, who is undeterred by the
gender imbalance in her field.
She
has chosen to pursue quantum computing out of a passion for the
technology and its potential impact on the future.
“Many times I have been in a room where most people were men and much older than me, however I did not let any of these factors get in my way of pursuing knowledge. If more girls can gain this mindset, then I believe we will see a change in the numbers very soon.”
“Many times I have been in a room where most people were men and much older than me, however I did not let any of these factors get in my way of pursuing knowledge. If more girls can gain this mindset, then I believe we will see a change in the numbers very soon.”
The Ladder: Shiva Amiri: Today I found this article in the Globe and Mail:
University of Toronto alumnus Shiva
Amiri, formerly senior program lead at the Ontario Brain Institute, is
director of data science at Zymergen, of Emeryville, Calif. Zymergen has been recognized as a leading company for female hires in Silicon Valley.
Of the more than 400 people at Zymergen, about 40 per cent are women, a relatively high number for a tech company. I’m the most senior woman in technology.
I work with teams with a data science vision
– what we need to focus on and get the most from data we produce. Our
clients – Fortune 500 – care about products and materials. We build
genetic strains to build materials using machine learning and data
science.
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