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3 years of the María de Maeztu gender and ICT program at DTIC-UPF

Started in late 2015 as a result of the reflection process driven by the preparation of the gender action plan of the María de Maeztu (MdM) proposal, the MdM gender and ICT program at DTIC-UPF aims at contributing to a balanced gender composition in the ICT domain in the future. The ICT world replicates the unequal representation of women at leading senior levels but, unlike most other areas, this unbalance is also already present in the number of women pursuing engineering degrees. The impact during these 3 years can be summarised as:

  • 2.000 girls participating in workshops, summer courses and contests
  • A collaborative effort with organisations like Google, Oracle, NAE consulting, Mujeres Tech, the Catalan Institute for Women, the USA Consulate or Principia and initiatives like Wikimujeres or Technovation, to support the multiplication of actions
  • Targeted actions for different populations: girls, boys, families, teachers, engineering students, professionals, and general public
  • Awareness raising among the members of the department and the university, evolving from being a marginal topic to a growing concern about its implications at all levels

 

Introduction:

The proportion of females in the entire research staff in our department is 25%. They reflect a troubling imbalance which, while present in many other ICT research centres across the world, we are very motivated to rectify. We are already making efforts to increase the gender balance in our evaluation committees, councils, governing bodies and recruitment actions. At the same time, this approach alone is insufficient and in the long run it may be unsustainable, since it imposes undue burden on female staff members to contribute to governance activities far more than their fair share. Clearly, what is needed is to balance gender composition in the research staff as a whole. The only sustainable, long-term solution is to retain talented young females in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields at earlier stages. Some will then continue to higher stages of education and change the reality of tomorrow for the recruitment of staff.

We have witnessed in the last two years an explosion of initiatives for a more equal society at all levels, and STEM fields are not an exception. However, back in 2015, although there was "on the air" a strong motivation by many individuals (mostly female) in our context, there were very few actions actively tackling it. A traditional risk in the explosion of actions around an emerging topic of interest is their fragmentation. Since the beginning, the avoidance of this fragmentation was a central concern, especially as we tend in the academia to create self-referenced programs that lack the required critical mass, are not sustainable over time and, therefore, fade after some time. The approach was to join forces with entities in our network of collaborators which were starting also actions along the same objectives or at least showed explicit interest in taking some action, so that their impact could increase. Only when a gap was perceived, did we only design then a specific action . In addition, given the fact that there were no resources allocated to it, the need for collaborations was also a good indicator of the relevance of the activities and their commitment, as either voluntary work or sponsorships were needed to turn them into reality. The collaboration and support by the UPF Equality Unit and the Vice-rectorate for Social Responsibility was in this sense instrumental.

Description

The program consists of four main lines of action, targeting a different population, each addressing a specific goal. The structure reflects the intellectual process that has taken place with the execution of the program and the active discussions with many other agents dealing with the topic. From an initial girl-ony approach, the program has been getting sophisticated to deal with the broader aspects and perspectives of this multifaceted problem. Other actions around gender equality in ICT have been also promoted in parallel by other units like the USQUID, faculty members or the UPF Equality Unit, so they are also included to give an overall view of all the actions dealing with gender balance at the department. Many other actions addressing the whole university can be found at the web of the UPF Equality Unit.

  1. GIRLS – Tech is for you

Goal: our present society associates an increasing number of activities to a gender, or segments them according to them. The main goal is to break the label that “engineering is for boys” with actions targeted exclusively to girls, replicating several experiences already implemented in other countries

Actions:

  • Girl-only hackatons (#GirlsHack) in collaboration with external organisations (Girls in Lab, Mujeres Tech, Soko Tech, Edukative, eXplorium, DIY Bio, etc)
  • Organisation of the initial pilots for the Oracle program Oracle4Girls, which has now extended to other cities in Spain
  • Girl-only summer courses at the American Space (Library Ignasi Iglesias) and the “Girls in Data Science” courses at UPF Campus Junior
  • Support to girl-only programs like Technovation, including mentoring at schools, workshops, promotion of the participation of our network of collaborators in the program and organisation of events

Expected impact:

  • Provide a first contact to technology that social factors may tend to limit
  • Influence the perception of parents about leisure options for their daughters, as well as to think about implicit biases they could have
  • Influence the general outreach activities carried out at the department in order to include girls as specific target
  • Direct private sponsorship to activities of social relevance

Results:

  • 2.000 girls have participated in the actions
  • New external programs created that have spread outside UPF
  • While there was limited initial interest across the institution in them at the beginning, this interest has widespread and it has become a mainstream orientation at the outreach activities at the department, which supports its sustainability over time
  1. CURRENT FEMALE ENGINEERING STUDENTS – mentoring for professional growth

Goal: provide female engineering students with mentoring from experienced professionals to avoid

Expected impact:

  • Create a first network of professional contacts for students for support in aspects relevant to their career development and to give examples of successful careers
  • Create in students the relevance and usefulness of external mentoring for career development

Results:

  • 50 engineering students mentored during a year by external professionals
  • Increased presence of gender perspective as a core aspect of academic life

 

  3. PROFESSIONALS – support to external networks

Goals: 

  • support existing activities, and promote the participation of our staff in them
  • Support to groups promoting gender equality and / or discussion on the topics
  • Participation to talks and events

Expected impacts:

  • Support to the growing number of initiatives
  • Enhance the visibility of UPF Engineering in particular, and the ICT world in general, as a “women-friendly” environment

Results:

  • Contribution to the growing number of initiatives with the experience accumulated during this period and the resources available
  1. GENERAL PUBLIC – stereotype-breaking

Goal: stereotypes are intertwined with deep societal forces, contribute to fight stereotypes at boys, girls, men and women

Actions:

  • Support to the creation of Wikimujeres - ViquidonesUPF, an active group (both for men and women) filling the gender gap in Wikipedia, and the organisation of collective wikimarathons and workshops (video by Ester Bonet, promoter of the group here)
  • Wisbilílizalas contest to schools, to promote conversation and work about female engineers at the classroom
  • Inclusion of gender perspective in the organisation of all educational programs addressed to school students, such as the support to Barcelona Activa in the training of teachers for the first “#estasON” and “estiu robòTIC” workshops at the network of public libraries, the reservation of 50% of the vacancies in activities targeting school students, now also implemented in other programs in libraries or the organisation of events such as the Mujeres Tech Summit 2017 for high school students (boys and girls)
  • Dorcas Muthoni conferred with a doctorate honoris causa by our University to recognise her commitment to fight poverty and equality using technology

Expected impact:

  • Increased visibility of female professionals, and the promotion of a language free of gender biases
  • Explicit reference that activities like ICT courses or Wikipedia edition should be gender neutral, inviting and welcoming explicitly the participation of women

Results:

  • Consolidation of a regular group of Wikipedia editors, also seed for other actions
  • 3rd edition of Wisibilizalas to take place, with the objective of reaching 100 schools
  • Promotion of the gender perspective in all academic activities

 

CONCLUSIONS

The María de Maeztu gender and ICT program at DTIC-UPF is a good example of a program driven at the level of a university department to contribute to the advancement towards a gender balanced society in general, and in particular in the field of ICT. The program targets several of the factors that may explain the current situation with specific actions designed for it. This multi-faceted approach is considered essential as it allows to create links among actions which otherwise may be just anecdotical, to provide a varied framework to the different tmotivations, capacities and commitments that the members of our community can have and, most importantly, to generate critical reflection both at individual and at departmental level. A critical aspect has been the collaborative approach, to avoid the reduced impact that individual initiatives have shown to have, to increase its visibility, to reinforce the main message that the issue is of collective relevance and to provide multiple ways for its sustainability.

The program aims at disappearing because it becomes irrelevant (which does not seem likely in the short term) or because the activities become mainstream and then are adopted and expanded by other actors, which is already being the case. The initial execution of the program did not find many internal barriers at its beginnings, probably because all actions were directed to provoke an external change. But despite the efforts, our department is still far from having included the gender perspective in all its processes. The future development will, without any doubt, target this internal change.

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