This International Women's Day we chat to our newest recruit, Charmaine Conners, Community Engagement Manager (and woman coder) about how we can break the bias in tech.
What does International Women’s Day mean to you?
It’s a celebration and an acknowledgement of all the outstanding achievements of women throughout history whether it's the fight for equality or business industry innovation and so it's really an acknowledgement of how far we’ve come, but also a call-to-action about how far we have to go to reach real equality.
How are you celebrating International Women’s Day?
This year, I’m really excited to attend various events and have a great opportunity to connect with young people. So I'd love to engage them in the brilliant opportunities that we have for careers in tech and digital and hopefully inspire and inform them by sharing my journey and experiences. I hope I can open up more young people to come over to STEM subjects.
What active steps can people take to help #BreaktheBias?
Bias is something that affects all of us and it's not up to any one group of people to eliminate bias. It's really personal experience and I think the work around eliminating bias and operating in a world without bias comes down to largely the work that we have to do on ourselves. There’s a great book that I would highly recommend called Communicate for Change: Creating Justice in a World by Genelle Aldred. It’s all about how we can learn about what bias is and also how we can recognise our own biases and blind spots. As well as approaching difficult conversations around justice and bias to create meaningful change. We’ve come a long way in 100 years but we still have so much more work to do. Women are still underrepresented in parliament, in leadership and in tech. Let’s all take ownership of the contributions that we can make - big and small - and continue towards gender equality and breaking the bias.
At the Coders Guild we are proud that 60% of women make up our Strategy & Leadership Team and 65% of women make up our core staff team.
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