BitDepth#1397

MARK LYNDERSAY

AT AN ONLINE discussion on gender equality in ICT on International Women's Day (IWD), much of the discourse examined the sometimes huge and often lingering disparities in gender in regional and global technology governance.

There weren't any easy solutions raised during discussions on the topic, Empowering Women: Promoting Gender Equality and Creating Opportunities, but a clear note was rung by Desha Clifford, a director at Canto.

While there was justifiable focus on the minority profile of women involved in ICT and the limited positions offered to them in organisations and government, Clifford correctly noted that the place to start is with young girls.

"The conversation needs to be focused on young girls who, based on the type of toys they're sold and the type of cartoons they watch, aren't necessarily pushed into some fields. That probably resulted in the disparity we see in terms of the lack of female representation in these STEM-oriented careers."

There are programmes implemented by Canto and other organisations represented on the IWD discussion panel - 'including the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (Citel), the ITU Network of Women and ITU Women in Standardisation Expert Group" - which target both students and working professional women, but the most compelling change is likely to come when countries decide to make digital literacy a policy imperative and insist on ICT education as a priority in the school system.

The scholarship profile for CAPE results in 2022 doesn't just reveal an almost complete dominance by government-assisted schools and a strong showing by female students at 72 per cent of the 100 scholarships awarded. The list also offers a window into how ICT-related studies are being prioritised in these "prestige" institutions.

The entire scholarship profile of Hillview College, for instance, reflects wins for all eight students in information and communication technology studies.

Counting the female scholarships for ICT studies is easy. Two for Holy Faith Convent, Penal, one for Naparima Girls' High School out of the school's 19 scholarships, one for St Augustine Girls' High School and one for St Joseph's Convent, St Joseph.

Dr Maria Myers-Hamilton, managing director of Jamaica's Spectrum Management Authority (roughly equivalent to TATT), noted that numbers from UWI, Jamaica were indicative of general trends in tertiary science education related to ICT. While the university's undergraduate programmes in pure and applied sciences and technology begin hopefully with a 56 per cent ratio of women to men, graduate programmes drop to 48 per cent participation by women. Diploma programmes are populated by 37 per cent women.

In engineering, the ratios are worse. In undergraduate and graduate engineering programmes, just nine per cent are women.

For Dr Kim Mallalieu, senior lecturer in UWI's Department of Engineering