It’s hard to choose one memorable moment from this summer since there were so many. I spent these past four months as an intern at Laboratoria, a social enterprise in Peru, Mexico and Chile that provides education and job opportunities in the technology sector for young women in Latin America.
A definite highlight was when Mariana Costa, Laboratoria’s co-founder, took the stage as invited panellist alongside President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016 at Silicon Valley.
As the rest of the Laboratoria Peru team stared at the screen, watching the live stream from Lima, our hearts beat faster by the minute. Costa explained what Laboratoria is and how it’s changing the lives and futures of so many women. To this, President Obama replied:
“I think it’s important to point out that your success rate has been quite extraordinary already. It’s wonderful.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Angela Youssef is amongst the few women majoring in computer science at the University of New Brunswick.
“You can see that the tech sector is male dominated … You kind of wonder why there aren’t many more women going into this field,” she said.
Currently, women compose only seven per cent of the tech sector in Latin America and Europe and just 26 per cent of the computing workforce in Canada and the United States. Because of this, there are significantly fewer women in leadership roles at tech companies, globally.
For example, only 29.1 per cent of Microsoft’s workforce are women. Of these, only 23 per cent of the women have leadership roles. This same pattern is found in Google, Facebook and Apple.
Youssef, whose dream job is to work at Google, thinks more women in tech companies would boost creativity and ideas.
“Because technology and software are always changing, you always need your brain to think creatively. So more women, more interaction between the two, more ideas, it would just be a party.”
Companies like Google, Facebook and Apple create programs to get women interested in studying careers related to technology. However, St. Thomas University’s Science and Technology professor Nathan Harron explained that popular culture and mass media influence women into having stereotypical interests according to their gender.
This discourages them from getting into tech careers.
Youssef recalls watching the cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory when she was younger, where the plot line span around Dexter having a giant computer and his sister Dee Dee destroying everything.
“He was the genius, and I felt that kind of correlated to girls thinking computers aren’t for them.”
According to the Huffington Post, 218,000 tech jobs will emerge between now and 2020 in Canada. However, there’s not enough IT people to fill them.
This is why the tech sector in Canada desperately needs women. And this is an understatement.
Laboratoria, which emerged two years ago as a startup in Peru enables young women from low economic backgrounds to access education that gets them ready to work as web developers in just six months and supports them for 18 more months of continuing education while they work. So far, Laboratoria has graduated over 300 women in total. Seventy per cent of them are now working in the tech sector and have tripled their income.
The good news is that this model can be implemented into other countries Canada, according to Laboratoria Peru’s partner and director Ana Maria Martinez. It can bring many more women into the tech sector, which is very much needed in Canada as stated before.
Laboratoria revolutionized the standard model of education in three main aspects: the way they teach, what they teach and the payment method. This is based on the idea that innovation and creativity in superior education is highly needed to prepare young people for today’s jobs.
Martinez explains that to implement the Laboratoria model, the first step is to identify a market that is desperate for talent, then create a selection process to identify people with the potential to learn the skills required by the market and teach only what students will use at work. The second step is to have a placement process where the students are connected with hiring companies.
Third, have a strong passionate team that believes in the transformation of the students through individual support.
Martinez believes it’s important to constantly innovate in education “because the vast majority of our schools still follow the principles that were established in the 1800 century. Innovation is required across all levels, but innovation in superior education is highly needed to prepare young people for the jobs of today.”
Arabela Rojas used to work as a waitress and accounting assistant in Peru, but after graduating in Laboratoria’s class of 2015 as a front-end web developer jr., Rojas is now an intern in the information technology department at the Inter-American Development Bank, in Washington D.C.
Rojas is a role model for women like me and Angela who dream of the day in which the technology sector and companies like Facebook and Google have countless women leaders.
And as Harron explained, “role models are vital” because they can help other women “be aware of the various pressures they are going to face, or the experiences they are going to have, and help them recognize they are not alone.”
