We all know that there is a gender gap in the tech industry. One of the key solutions in closing this gap, is to encourage more girls and young women in to tech and STEM careers.
Joining us to explore this and more, is the remarkable Emily Hall-Strutt, Director of Next Tech Girls.
Next Tech Girls works with secondary schools around the UK to inspire girls to pursue studies and careers in tech, through online events and work experience placements. They’ve seen firsthand the barriers girls face and the misconceptions that lead to them choosing not to enter the tech industry.
Emily is here to inspire you to volunteer to support their work and share their stories with girls and young women.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
We all know that there is a gender gap in the tech industry. One of the key solutions in closing this gap, is to encourage more girls and young women in to tech and STEM careers.
Joining us to explore this and more, is the remarkable Emily Hall-Strutt, Director of Next Tech Girls.
Next Tech Girls works with secondary schools around the UK to inspire girls to pursue studies and careers in tech, through online events and work experience placements. They’ve seen firsthand the barriers girls face and the misconceptions that lead to them choosing not to enter the tech industry.
Emily is here to inspire you to volunteer to support their work and share their stories with girls and young women.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in Again. I am Katie Batesman, the content director at she Can Code, and today we're discussing volunteering, supporting and inspiring the next generation. We all know that there is a gender gap in the tech industry. One of the key solutions in closing this gap is to encourage more girls and young women into tech and STEM careers. Joining me today to explore this and more is the remarkable Emily Hall-Strupp, director of Next Tech Girls. Welcome, emily, hello, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know you're a very busy lady, so thank you so much for taking the time to come and have a chat. We'd love to kick off with a little bit of background about yourself, if that's OK how you got into tech and give us a little context about you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So I will always say that I fell into tech, which I think is a phrase that's used by a lot of people, especially women. Yeah, so we definitely didn't set out to work in tech, wasn't looking for a career in tech. I studied languages at university because I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I enjoyed learning languages and thought a year abroad sounded fun. In my final year of university I was so determined not to graduate without a job that I printed off back in the days of not really thinking about sustainability printed off the Times Top 100 graduate schemes and applied to most of them, had some atrocious interviews. Thankfully, when it got to the civil service Faststream, which is the government's graduate scheme, I'd had enough practice that I managed to do well enough to pass. So it was offered a place on their graduate scheme and it was a rotation scheme, which is really common for graduate schemes.
Speaker 2:So my first six months was in policy and I thought this is definitely not what I want to do Very stressful, very political, very hierarchical, worked with some really great people, but just wasn't a fan of that kind of culture. And thankfully, my second posting was in a digital team. This was right at the start of kind of digital government becoming a thing, I think, like Gov UK and the government digital service was maybe like a year old or something, maybe even less than that, so it was a very small team in one of the agencies of the Ministry of Justice. There were opportunities for me to learn about all different kinds of roles. I decided to focus on delivery management because I didn't have a technical background, so that was something that I could learn or I could really add value as kind of a people person and just learn about agile ways of working, learn about all the different roles and kind of career paths that exist in tech. So it was very eye-opening for me. It was an industry that I never thought of working in, that I didn't know existed in government, so it kind of all fell into place for me from there and that meant that I started to pursue a career in digital government because I realized this is an area of government where it's very creative, it's very collaborative. I'm getting to work with people from all different kinds of backgrounds and it really felt like we were making kind of a tangible, positive, meaningful difference to people's lives because we were making it easier for them to access government services, which in most cases, and especially with the justice system you probably are going through quite a tough time. If you're having to access those services, you might be quite vulnerable as well. So knowing that we were making that process easier for people was really kind of fulfilling for me and, yeah, kind of. Since then have just carried on with that.
Speaker 2:So I ended up in the Ministry of Justice proper for several years, mostly as a delivery manager, also led on their comms and engagement for a while and ended up leading on all their diversity, equity and inclusion work as a bit of a passion project. There wasn't kind of a specific role for it, but it was something that I was really keen to do. It was my first experience of being a minority, basically of being underrepresented. I have older sisters. I went to an all-girls school. I studied languages, which is actually quite like woman-heavy course. At university. There were like two boys on my course, so I wasn't used to being in a forum and where there were hardly any women, and so I was really passionate about changing that and we got loads of data around lots of different areas. We ended up having 12 different areas of diversity and inclusion that we were looking at managed to increase representation in all of them, which was really exciting.
Speaker 2:And then I was actually on maternity leave when I was contacted by the founder of Next Tech Girls, who said they were looking for someone to come in and run the organization and that I had a lot of the experiences they were looking for. So it's kind of perfect timing. In a weird way. It felt at first like the wrong timing because I was on maternity leave, but actually I figured, coming back from maternity leave, even if I went back into the same role as before, it would feel different, it would feel new, it would feel scary. So I thought, in a way, it's the best time to be starting something completely new, because whatever I do, I'm going to fill out with my comfort zone and I really feel like I've found my calling. I'm happy that I'm still involved in tech, even though I'm kind of not directly working in it anymore.
Speaker 2:And I think from my experience of, as I said, falling into tech, I'm really keen to help make girls and young women more aware of the opportunities that exist at an earlier age so they can actually make informed decisions that help them get there quicker, because if I'd known that those roles existed at a younger age I mean, I'm six months into my graduate scheme, so it was kind of as early as it could have been, almost.
Speaker 2:But I know so many women who only really discover the opportunities in tech further into their careers. And switching can be really difficult, not just from the learning, the skills perspective, but more so from the fact that you might be quite well established in your career and then you're looking to switch into an industry where you're the novice, you're the beginner and you maybe don't want to take a massive pay cut or maybe at the moment especially, companies aren't really hiring junior talent it's very hard to find entry level roles. So I think if we can get more girls thinking about it from a younger age and making those decisions to help them get there quicker, it will close the gender gap a little bit quicker too.
Speaker 1:Definitely, and I'm so pleased that you came on here today because on this podcast, when we ask a lot of the guests about are there any supportive networks or women's networks that you work with, next Tech Girls is always somebody, is always a network that is mentioned. So I'm so pleased that you came on here. There's always that yeah, you always come up as that network that more people should know about and more women's section know about.
Speaker 1:So, it's great to have you on here and I'd love to hear kind of an overview of the mission, and obviously you said you yourself you'd experience what that felt like and that kind of aligned with what you wanted to do. But what is the overall mission of Next Tech Girls and how are you going about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess our mission is to close the skills and gender gaps in the tech industry, and I think the two are very much kind of intertwined. So there are studies that have shown that if we had as many women in tech as men, that the gender and obviously the gender gap would be filled, but so would the skills gap. So you can't if you kill too bad with one stone for one of the better phrase, but yeah. So Next, tech Girls was actually set up back in 2016. So it's been going for quite a while, which is really nice thing because it means that when I started last summer, I was able to track down some young women who had worked with us right at the beginning and see what their journey's been since that first interaction. So when we started, the focus was, I say we as pride to be joining, but I feel like I was involved spiritually. When it was started, it was focused solely on organizing work experience placements. So most schools in England and the UK will have like a week, or occasionally two weeks, where they'll ask students to go out and find work experience, and it's at a really crucial age where they're still making decisions about what they might want to do in their future careers, but it's really underutilized. A lot of young people will go to their parents office because it's easy and it's where they've got a connection, or they'll go to something arranged by their school which is normally like a local shop or a local primary school. It often has nothing to do with what they're interested in. They'll be making tea and doing paperwork and it is not exciting. If anything, it kind of puts them off the idea of working in general, which is not going to be, and they saw that as an amazing opportunity to get in there. At that crucial age, when girls are making those decisions, when all the studies show that their interest in tech drops off, to show them what a career in tech is really like, to bust some of the myths around it, make them aware of career paths that they've never even heard of, and get them meeting women in tech, especially as role models, because we've all had the phrase if you can't see it, you can't be it, and I think interacting with women who've had these great careers or who are starting these exciting careers in tech, and learning about how they got there and what they actually do day to day is something that they're not getting from the education system at the moment, just trying to kind of fill that gap and bridge the gap, I guess, between education and employment, so between companies and schools and colleges.
Speaker 2:When I joined last year, one of my kind of main remit, I guess, was to launch online events as a way of kind of future-proofing our work. So they had a couple of years where they hadn't really been able to do much because of lockdowns, had tried doing online placements but it didn't really work as well. Schools weren't keen, and also they were very keen to be able to get out to students who maybe aren't within a commutable distance of a tech office. So online events were a great way to do that. So I launched those last October and it's massively increased our reach, which is amazing. So not just in terms of kind of geographically, but actually the numbers that we can reach because we can have multiple schools joining each online event. So we've actually, when I started, the kind of total number of work experience placements was about five or 600. We've done another couple of hundred work experience placements this year, but we've had more than 4,000 girls join our online events. So the numbers are massive.
Speaker 2:There's a great need for this in schools. Actually, schools are really keen. We don't struggle to get an audience. Schools are really keen for this because a lot of them have kind of benchmarks that they have to hit in terms of interactions with employers and even outside of work experience, there's other things that they have to do to make sure that they're students, are learning about career opportunities and career paths. So it's a really great way for us to help them meet those benchmarks while inspiring young people and also getting current women in tech like raising their profiles, giving them exposure, giving them speaking opportunities and the companies that we're working with obviously helping to align them with the work that we're doing. So we kind of feel like it's a win, win, win, win, yeah, for everyone. We're trying out for something like this and we're trying to fill in that gap for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, incredible, and I love the fact that you said about busting myths and misconceptions of working in tech, and that is something that we advocate, as she can code and conversations that we constantly have on this podcast and speaking to ladies that fell into tech and just asking them did you think it was gonna be like what it's actually like? And earlier you described digital government as creative. Did you think it was gonna be creative?
Speaker 2:Because like, unless you're working it you don't know.
Speaker 1:You said impactful as well. You know you actually have impact on people's lives and you wouldn't think that working if you're not in the tech industry, you wouldn't think that, would you.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think for young people. They think of tech and they think of the big companies you know Google, microsoft, amazon. They don't even necessarily associate social media with it, which is really interesting. So there are lots of studies that show that teenage girls are much bigger users of technology than teenage boys. I think the number of video gamers, for example, is pretty much equal. And then use of mobile phones, of like social media apps, is higher among girls. But there's this disconnect between use of technology and understanding that they could actually be in the teams that are building those things and they're making an impact point. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2:We did some research with some young girls last summer about their aspirations for their future careers, their priorities and what was most important to them in their career and, very heartwarmingly, what came out top was wanting to feel like they were having a meaningful impact beyond making money for a company. They wanted to know that what they were working on was actually helping people somehow. So that's what we really try and focus on in our online events especially is that ultimately, working in tech even if you're working for a commercial organization, if you're in their tech team your main focus is problem solving and is on making people's lives easier. Even if it's just making sure people who need to buy your product can buy it quickly and easily, you know, making sure that it's accessible to people who might have specific needs when they're using your app or your website, even that on a small scale is obviously making a positive difference in people's lives. And then you've got the other end of the spectrum, which is like solving hopefully in the near future things like climate change or cancer. You know technology are going to be absolutely crucial in those areas.
Speaker 2:So it's making girls aware that tech really kind of intersects with every industry now. So, whatever you're passionate about, whatever you care about, working in the tech team is a great way to really be involved in making a tangible difference in those areas. And it's also a foot in the door to whatever you're interested in, because we have this skills gap and this gender gap. Being a woman with tech skills does make you very employable. Just being a person with tech skills does. So, you know, if you love fashion or sports or music and you'd love to work in that industry, but it's so competitive. If you have tech skills and you're looking for tech roles, you're going to find it slightly easier to get into those areas than you would if you were looking for areas that are in kind of other specialisms.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm pleased that you kind of mentioned that disconnect as well between what girls think working in tech would be like and not realising that you can really make an impact, and because I wanted to ask you a bit about why you think there's a lack of girls taking STEM subjects at school. Is that one of the things that we mentioned earlier about you can't be if you can't see it? Is it also role models and lots of other things? It's kind of a mix.
Speaker 2:I think there's loads of problems. I think two of the big ones are like stereotypes. So we talked about busting myths. Our kind of hashtag or slogan at Next Step Girls is smash the stereotype, and there's lots of kind of facets to that. So there's the obvious ones that working in tech means being a software developer, which it doesn't. That obviously some people in tech will be software developers, but actually that's a minority of roles. There's loads of other roles that need to be involved in the tech team that don't require any coding knowledge, and the girls that do work experience with us are always really shocked by that when they meet people who work in tech who don't even know how to code. That's really kind of revolutionary for them. And also just the stereotypes, obviously, about tech being for boys or the boys are better at tech, which is obviously not true, and the media portrayals of the kind of geeky, unsociable guys working in tech who work on their own, don't really collaborate. Or the fact that even schools are still telling students that you have to be really good at maths to work in tech. Being good at maths, yes, might help you with software development, particularly if you're working in like back end in certain languages. That kind of logical way of thinking is definitely helpful, but it's not a reason to rule tech out. I was good at maths at school but hated it, and I love working in tech, and that's because I've been able to work on the more creative kind of people side, and we need people in those areas too. So, yeah, the stereotypes are definitely a big problem, like Hollywood has a lot to answer for that, I think, because they're still showing these stereotypes of people in tech, which are really not helpful.
Speaker 2:Lack of role models is definitely a problem as well, and I think the fact that when you do see women in the media talking about tech, they tend to be white women in very senior roles, which is great. It's great to see women in leadership, because that's not very common. However, it's not very relatable for young people because, firstly, not every young person is white, so it'd be nice to see some women of color in these positions as well. But also, that woman may have been in the industry for 20, 30 years before she's got to that point. So these young people have absolutely no idea how they started out, how they've got to where they are now, even if they know that well, they started out 30 years ago, when things were very different to now. So it's hard for them to imagine themselves following in their footsteps. So one of our big priorities is to showcase role models who are actually earlier on in their careers, who have maybe just started out, who are able to have much more recent experience of being actually in the position of these young people, who only did their GCSEs a few years ago, for example, and can remember what that was like and it just feels so much more relatable, so much more accessible, I think, to young people if they can see someone who's only a few steps ahead of them and know exactly how they got there.
Speaker 2:I mean there's loads of other things. There's the fact that there's still this assumption, which I think stems back to schools, that you have to do a computer science degree to work in tech, which we know is not true. Yeah, if you're a party of girls doing computer science degrees. There's companies that are still demanding degrees in specific subjects, which really is not good for gender diversity. It's also not good for socioeconomic diversity and other kinds of diversity.
Speaker 2:Lack of teachers for computer science.
Speaker 2:More than a fifth of schools in England don't even offer computer science at GCSE, because they don't have the teaching staff and the majority of the teaching staff are male.
Speaker 2:So, again, there's that lack of role models.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because the only interaction they have with someone in anything related to tech is a man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of problems, there's a lot to unpick, but I think from our perspective, a big thing is kind of breaking down those stereotypes, showing them relatable role models, just making them aware of the jobs that exist, because I didn't know about 95% of the jobs in tech until I started working in tech and I was like, oh, we use a research, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:And oh, wow, a delivery manager I've never heard of that before and product management and content design and UX design and all these really interesting careers. There will be girls out there who would love to pursue them, but they don't know that they exist. So they'll be viewing, you know, being a journalist or being a graphic designer maybe, which is kind of veering on tech, but not quite there. Okay, and it's even just opening their eyes to the fact these jobs exist. Women are doing really well in them. There's loads of benefits to being in them. Gets them to start thinking about. Okay, what do I need to be doing now to help me to get there and start taking those steps, that kind of push them a little bit further down that path.
Speaker 1:Yes, and as well I love the fact that you touched upon. You don't have to have a computer science degree, and actually you can fall into tech or switch into tech any time that you wish throughout your career, and we have so many ladies on here that are doing that retraining on maternity leave, although they might have been in work 10, 15 years already, and they want to find something a bit more flexible, and that's okay. I love the fact that you pointed out that a lot of the role models are very senior executives, and that is great and it is definitely something to aspire to, but it's also not what everybody wants to do, and you're right. It is so far in your future that it's so hard to relate to that and you don't hear as well the struggles that they went through to get there and that that is okay too. You're struggling along the way.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things that we really talk to quite a lot, to our role models about is kind of I know I feel like this phrase is really overused about being authentic, about being vulnerable. So when they are sharing videos with us or they're talking, you know they're writing a LinkedIn post or they're writing a blog post or something. It's great for young people to see how successful they've been and how well they're doing and all the benefits of working in tech, but it's also really important for them to hear about the struggles that they've had, because you know, firstly, you could help them not repeat your mistakes, which is great. You know they can learn from where you've maybe gone wrong. But also it does just make you more relatable, it makes you more human.
Speaker 2:And if maybe something's going a little bit wrong for them at the moment maybe they've just got their exam results and it wasn't what they were hoping for If you've gone through something similar but it's all turned out well, that's really inspiring for them. That's really motivating and it helps them to think, because as a teenager, everything is like the end of the world, because it's all you've ever experienced and I can remember like picking GCSE subjects or A level subjects and panicking that I'd be picking the wrong ones and I'd be stuck down a certain career path and would never be able to switch. And obviously I know now that's not the case. I think for young people it still fills that way. So just making them aware that you know, if you go down a certain career path and you realise it's not for you, it's not too late, you can switch. There are those opportunities available for you to try something different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what about government and educational institutions? What more can they do to encourage girls into tech? You mentioned lots of great schools that work with you in that way. I'm assuming more schools should sign up for next tech girls Please.
Speaker 2:We'd love that. Yes, please. So we've got just over 300 schools now, I think, around the UK, signed up to work with us. We've got quite a good nationwide spread now. Previously we were just in London, but this year our focus has been going nationwide, mostly through our events. But yeah, we're always doing more school outreach, always looking for more schools to get involved. Any school can get involved.
Speaker 2:Our kind of outreach is focused predominantly on I can't even say the words Academies. I don't know what happened there, my brain went. Our outreach is focused predominantly on academies and schools that have higher than average percentages of students eligible for free school meals. So that's our kind of proxy for students from lower income families or lower socioeconomic backgrounds, because we want to make sure that we don't just help the kind of default girls and women into tech and then you end up with lots more women but they're all white and from wealthy families and neurotypical, etc. Etc. So that's a big focus for us. Also, girls from ethnic minority backgrounds are a big focus for us as well. So we've done almost 200 work experience placements this year so far, I think, and 80% of those girls have been from an ethnic minority background. 40% have been black, african or Caribbean. We know that black women in particular are extra underrepresented in tech. So we're trying to make sure that we really focus on the people who need that extra support, because they're facing extra barriers that they really shouldn't be, but they are facing these extra barriers to get into tech. So it's making sure that they're getting that experience and that inspiration to help them.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, please, more schools get involved. We're offering them. We're basically like supplementing their curriculum. We're helping with their careers outreach, helping to put them in touch with employers. So, yeah, so this is the. It's a no-brainer to meet you for schools to get involved. It just takes a while to kind of find the right person and get in touch with them. So, any, if you hear this, you want to get involved? Please do. And there's no cost. No cost to schools or students. Everything is free for them, because that's a really important thing for us. We want it to be accessible to everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just finding that person, as you said, and also that advocate within that school, who somebody has told somebody that a career in tech is fabulous, and then that's where it kind of takes off. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about role models. We've touched upon it already in this conversation, but can you tell us who are some of your role?
Speaker 2:models and what. Oh, that's really hard, that's very hard. I'm probably going to mispronounce her name, which is really bad, but I love I resh my cell journey. I think that's how you pronounce her name. I might have to check that and rerecord it if I've got it wrong. She worked in American politics and then founded Girls who Code, who are now an international organization teaching girls to code.
Speaker 2:She's a really inspiring speaker. I only really have discovered her in recent years, but I definitely would consider her a role model. Now, one of the things that I love most about her is that she's very against imposter syndrome, which I've now taken on her stance on it and have been sharing it with people, and it comes across as quite controversial, to begin with, because it's such a popular topic at the moment and I, like a lot of other people, when I first heard about it, found it really comforting knowing that, oh, loads of people experience this and it's totally normal. However, her kind of anti-imposter syndrome thoughts are that, firstly, it tends to be quite gendered, so it tends to be focused quite heavily on women and, secondly, that the kind of reaction to it seems to be that women need to make the effort to kind of fix themselves and become more confident, when actually her argument, which makes perfect sense. When I first heard her speech about this, I was just blown away like yes, how did I not realise this?
Speaker 2:You know, we, potentially women, do experience more of this so-called imposter syndrome, but that's as a result of the society that we live in, where we don't see people like us in positions of leadership, and so if we get to that point, there's no kind of blueprint for us. We feel like we don't belong because we've not seen other people doing it before, or we look around and we're the only one at the table. No wonder we feel like that. But it's not our problem to fix. It's like society's problem to fix within tech. It's the tech industry's problem to fix. It's all those men in senior leadership who need to step up and fix it that way, yeah, rather than the women's networks.
Speaker 2:You know, having a speaker come in to talk about how to solve your imposter syndrome and putting all the onus on us to fix ourselves. So recently she's been quite a big role model for me and in helping me change my kind of thought processes and mindset and just understanding that actually it's just self doubt and everyone has it and it can be a positive thing because it can push you to work harder, it can push you to do better. So it's not necessarily something that you even need to fix. It's just something that it's good to be aware of. So, although I think the conversation around imposter is good to start talking about it and normalizing it and making people realize how common it is, but I think the fact that it's been kind of very heavily marketed at women is a bit problematic.
Speaker 1:Yes, I completely agree. It's something that we talk about a lot on here and I agree it's not always for us to fix, but it is. It does always come up in the conversation of women, especially women stepping into leadership as well. You're kind of already starting on the back foot knowing that, as far as you think, actually I'm going to feel like an imposter when I step into a leadership role and regardless of your gender, it can be daunting to step into a leadership role anyway, because everyone thinks you've got the answers because you're in leadership and suddenly you think, does everyone think I know everything Because you don't need to know everything and you're new, right?
Speaker 2:If you've just been promoted, it's your first time working at that level, so it's going to be scary and daunting and it will take you a little while before you feel comfortable, like you know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Girls wanting to come into a career in the industry. Can you kind of summarize why is it so important to inspire and support those girls that are hoping to come in and maybe on the fence about whether or not they should?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's really important. So we have a real kind of spectrum of girls that we work with. We have girls who are studying tech-related subjects like computer science, who are really interested in coding, for example, or cybersecurity or AI and are very interested in a tech career, and then at the other end we've got girls who don't really know what they want to do or maybe want to go into some other industry, and we're kind of trying to spark an interest in tech. So there's that difference between sparking an interest and inspiring them to be considered in the first place versus the girls who already have an interest. It's about keeping them interested, because we know that girls' interest does drop off in a way that boys doesn't. It's keeping them interested and it's also like you're kind of supporting them as well. So giving them that experience that kind of gives them the extra edge.
Speaker 2:So I think our work experience is the best way to do that. So a lot of the girls that do our work experience will already be interested in a tech career. But I do think doing the work experience is kind of fundamental in actually eventually getting them into tech, because it helps them to realise what tech is actually like beyond what they've experienced in their computer science classes, which, let's face it, like anything that you study in school is very different from actually doing it as a job. So it helps them to see is this something that I just enjoy at school or as a hobby, or is this something I actually want to do as a career? What are the different jobs that actually exist in tech? Because maybe I'm only aware of a couple of them. What are the different paths that I can take when I leave school? Because, again, there's this assumption that you've got to do computer science at university and that might not suit everyone. So it might be that a girl thinks I don't want to do that, therefore I've got to pick some other job.
Speaker 2:So it's letting them know that actually there are boot camps that you can join, there are apprenticeships, there are degree apprenticeships, there are even like kind of entry level school leave of roles. There are all these. You go to university. You study something totally different, like I did and like a lot of other women do. So it's just making them aware of what working tech is really like, what roles are available and what the different kind of roots are. I think that's really fundamental. We've got a young woman in her early 20s who did placements with us when we were kind of just starting out, so 2017, 2018, she was very keen. She had three placements with us in her summer holidays I think she was doing GCSE computer science at the time and then she went on to do it for A-level. She was the only student at her school not just any girl the only student who did it for A-level. She was very lucky that the school was willing to run the course, because I think most women would know, but they were keen to do it so they did.
Speaker 2:And she said that there was a girl in the year above her who came to talk to her and said oh you're so brave. I wish I'd been as brave as you. I really wanted to study it but didn't want to be the only one, so I didn't. And she really credits the work experience that she did with us because she got to be in a group of girls where, although she's the only one from her school, she met all these other girls from other schools who were also interested in tech, who also wanted to learn to code. So it made her realise there is this community out there. Even though I can't see it in my day-to-day in my school, I'm not going to be on my own. There are going to be other people out there like me. And also, just getting that practical experience she said was really helpful in her deciding this is something that I actually want to do as my career. It's not just something that I enjoy for fun. I would actually like doing this, you know, 40 hours a week.
Speaker 1:It must be worrying if you're the only girl in the school. If you see that network outside, you think actually there are other girls. It will be fun. You would be thinking, naturally thinking is this what it's going to be like when I get into the world of work? It's like this is always going to be it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean I know with the schools that we work with, because we work with all girls and mixed schools. It's very interesting because the all girls schools tend to get quite good numbers of students doing computer science at GCSE if they offer it, and at A level the mixed schools are almost always majority boys. There are some schools are speaking to a teacher at an event this morning who he said at GCSE he's currently got one girl in his class and I've spoken to lots of teachers where they start the year off with one girl and they end the year with zero girls. And that's because that one girl joins the class, looks around, thinks I don't fit in here, I don't want to be here, this is uncomfortable, I don't like it. You know they've not got a friend that they can talk to about homework or anything potentially, because at that age you often are a bit cliquey and you stick to, you know, friends of the same gender. And yeah, it's happened so many times. I've spoken to so many teachers where they're like oh, we managed to get extra girls but then they dropped out. So yeah, it's very hard and I think that's why that's the beauty of what we're doing, that we're trying to create this kind of nationwide and hopefully eventually global community of girls that do have those interests, where, you know, with each placement I'll set up a WhatsApp group for them so they can all keep in touch.
Speaker 2:We try to make sure with our work experience that we do get girls from a mixture of schools rather than all from one school, because it does help them to make those connections across different schools, you know, and they'll all be from the same kind of area so they can even meet up with each other afterwards if they want to, and a lot of the feedback that we get from them is how much they enjoy working with these other girls, meeting these other girls with similar interests who you know they're friendship groups.
Speaker 2:They might be the only one who's interested in tech, and I've spoken to so many women who went down a certain career path because it was what all their friends were interested in, and then later I realised actually I kind of wish I'd done something technical, but no one else was doing it and they didn't want to be the only one. So this is really a helpful way to keep that interest going in the girls that already have it, because they'll feel like they have got this community that can support them if they're struggling with their homework or if they're applying to universities to do computer science or whatever it is that they're doing. There's other girls out there that are doing things that are similar that they can talk to about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that you're not on your own and a lot of our listeners they are already women in tech, fallen into tech or took a traditional route. However they got in, they are going to be wondering how can they get involved, how can they encourage more girls to get into tech and to stay in tech, so other girls are not having maybe the experience that they might have had. How can they get involved?
Speaker 2:So I would love for them to sign up to be role models with us. So we have this kind of role model program that we just launched in March of this year and we've already got more than 300 women who've signed up to join, which is amazing. So it's a volunteer program, there's no obligations. There's a form on our website. If you go to nexttechgirlscom, quite near the top, it mentions role models and it says apply to be a role model. You're effectively just giving us your email address and we'll send you an email about once a month with upcoming opportunities. It'll be things like filming a video maybe you'll have a day in your life or answering questions about your career journey that we can then share on social media. It could be speaking at one of our online events. So we'll always have a panel involved in the events and we generally will try and if we're not being sponsored by a specific company, we try to get women from different companies and in different roles and we've taken different routes in as well so they can give that real flavour of the variety. Also, things like connecting us with the team who could maybe organise work experience or who could organise a career insight day, or something like that. There's always loads of different ways that people can get involved and generally we get really nice involvement and feedback from these women, because partly they want to give back and, like you said, they might have struggled to get into tech and they want to make it easier for the next generation, which is really nice. But also there are definite benefits, I think, to doing something like this, in that you're raising your own profile, you're getting exposure across our social media, you might get noticed by senior people in your company because you're talking about what you're doing and you're kind of getting out there and speaking. You're getting speaking experience as well, which is very good for just increasing your confidence in general, and also you're becoming part of our community.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the women that we work with although they weren't our initial target audience, a lot of the women in our community who are already working in tech or looking to switch into tech have really benefited from working with us. They find working with young people very inspiring, but also meeting the other women that work with us on our panel events or sometimes we run in-person sessions they find really inspiring and especially we ran an event in the summer which was majority girls, but we had quite a few. We had like 30 or 40 women come and we ran some kind of career development sessions specifically aimed at the women while we did more kind of tech skills stuff for the young girls, and a lot of the women came away saying how, firstly, how exciting it was to be in a room of all girls and women, because it's so rare and in their day jobs they never, never experienced that so well. The atmosphere is amazing. So that was lovely.
Speaker 2:But secondly, also having conversations with so many women who had similar experiences to them and realising they weren't the only one and that's because there's maybe not anyone in their team who's gone through something similar. So the career changes in particular, talking about feeling like, oh, they don't really belong and they've kind of gone from maybe feeling quite well established in a different industry to suddenly being the newbie who knows nothing or feeling like they know nothing. And meeting other women in similar situations who have also only recently moved into tech from other places, and understanding that that's totally normal and everyone feels like that way when they start out. That community has been really beautiful as well to kind of see that grow organically without us really intending it to. So it's really nice that we've managed to span kind of quite a wide age group and kind of different levels of experience in terms of, and aspiring future women in tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the transition in the age groups. That's something that we love to hear on our live events. A lot of the questions are usually from ladies in their 40s and 50s every training and they're always asking is it too late? And you know, can I get in? Who else has done this and where did you get started? And you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you retrain and suddenly you find yourself being junior or a newbie and you think it's trying to switch the mindset of. Actually I've got all this incredible work experience that I bring with me and I'm not junior, but it's again. You might come in and you think, oh, the imposter syndrome's back, exactly, and to battle that. But I agree, it sounds like there are so many benefits to working with you over your school women in tech or even young girls themselves. We will include details, obviously, of where to sign up for next-set girls, and I'm so pleased that you came on here today, emily, because, as I said, when our guests do mention what women in tech networks would anybody advise to sign up will be part of Next-set girls always comes up, so I'm so pleased that you joined us today.
Speaker 1:So we can hear it from yourself and the wonderful work that you're doing. But we are already out of time and I could keep talking to you all afternoon. But thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I really enjoyed the conversation. Happy to come back anytime to continue.
Speaker 1:You are definitely welcome back for an update. Thank you so everybody listening as always. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you again next time.