ICS hosted the first Women4IT dconference in Ireland on Oct 30 with great success.
Dedicated to the role of women in the tech industry, the event focused on their representation in the field, speakers shared experiences and opinions on women in tech.
Katie Burke, Technical Consultant for Hubspot explained, through a series of quirky and surprising examples, how sometimes women can be their own enemy when it comes to finding a job in tech.
Ciara McMahon, Cloud Support Engineer at AWS, told us that her dream job of working in the Irish army collapsed when she injured herself. Between pictures of weapons she was trained on in the army, she told us how she lost that dream job but that she turned her life around and started to work in tech.
Gillian Arnold, Managing Director at Tectre, and Christina Todorova, Researcher at the European Software Institute Centre Eastern Europe, explained the importance of having more women involved in the digital world and how companies can benefit from a better gender equality in this department.
The panel discussion reunited all the speakers together and was moderated by Grace Lawlor, research Assistant at Trinity College. The gender gap in IT and digital was tackled during that conversation and the panellists shared many experiences that sparked laughs but also hopes on closing this gap.
The free training to help women start their digital careers started began in September 2020 and will continue in November and January 2021. As stressed by Mary Cleary, ICS General Secretary,
“The final step will be helping the newly trained women to find employment in the digital sector. However, as the Women4ITjob profiles for Ireland have been designed to address the needs of the IT industry, we are confident, that many organisations will seize the opportunity to appoint a highly motivated and well qualified young woman.”
The project “Women4IT” is a multi-stakeholder partnership funded by the EEA Grants and the Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment. The project is supported by 9 Partners from across Europe and the training will be implemented in 7 countries. The aim of the project is to develop the digital competencies of 100 young women, between 19 and 29 years old, who are at risk of exclusion from the labour market, by improving their employability.
If you wish to learn more or to get in touch, visit the page dedicated to the project https://www.ics.ie/about/w4it or contact us at women4it@ics.ie.
