Sparklers and dry swims don't attract girls to the IT industry

As parents, we know that we need to be with our children for them to bond. However, much of the IT industry is still hoping that girls will be attracted to them without having to dedicate time to them.

All of us with children, as much as we love them, wish they could be more independent so that we could have more time for ourselves. Perhaps we can choose to outsource parenting to our partner or to boarding schools. However, we know that it is punitive. At best, you can buy loyalty, but attachment - hardly.

We in the IT industry probably think we're fancier than most, and are rather unsympathetic to the fact that women of all ages are so skeptical about studying IT and working in the industry. However, you don't have to go far beyond what we consider to be exclusive workplaces and conferences to realize that girls, and even many guys, find "working in IT" to be anonymous at best, and boyish, nerdy and lonely at worst.

Many players in the IT industry, and also other "boring" technology industries, spend a lot of resources on making themselves visible through various events where children get to meet, if not the industry itself, then at least its products. Just as organizing children's parties is healthy for the relationship, it is good that these events are done. However, they are just sparklers, and without a more everyday contact where both girls and boys get a sense of what it really means to spend their adult life in a technology workplace, they will have no effect.

One type of more activity-based event that has become increasingly popular is hackathons, makerspaces and code houses. Better than just a visit or a lecture, sure, but still they don't give a real idea of life as an IT professional. The question of future professional identity inevitably comes up in adolescence, and symptomatically, teenage girls are largely absent from the majority of these events. IT in this guise is simply perceived as irrelevant.

Introducing programming (or the broader and, in my view, better concept of computational thinking) into the school curriculum would be a good thing to pave the way for IT as a possible profession. Similarly, if the initiatives on entrepreneurial learning included in the curricula were developed further. However, even this is only dry swimming in the long run. They give no sense of what IT jobs entail in terms of relationships and problem solving. This requires meetings, it requires presence.

So, for all players in the IT industry who think that the poor gender distribution in the industry is something that should be worked on in the long term, and do not see it as a temporary PR strategy: Join the IT&Telecom companies' Next Up initiative. As far as I know, this is the only broad initiative where IT companies are trying to connect with teenage girls, who are so elusive in the eyes of the industry, in a slightly more in-depth way.