Gender Diversity in IT Network

On Nov 13th, FemTech.dk participated in the meeting of Gender Diversity in IT Network. This is a biannual meeting, which this time was hosted by Dansk Industri. The day was filled with inspiring and insightful talks on working with gender diversity and creating societal change. The programme started with a presentation by Richard Larsen, from DI, who presented facts and figures about gender and STEM in Denmark. He also presented some of DI’s initiatives for increasing the number of women in management positions, such as a set of recommendations and best practices. We also got to know about more initiatives seeking to broad participation to IT development, such as Co-coders.dk. Also, Ulrik Kjeldgaard, from DELL EMC gave a presentation on the initiatives at his company to increase diversity in teams, such being part of the Men Advocating Real Change (MARC) framework, which is an initiative seeking to achieve workplace gender equality through effective partnership with men. The discussions were very aligned with what we are doing at FemTech.dk such as highlighting the importance of collaboration in programming (e.g. we use pair-programming in all our activities) and the relevance of Computer Science in society (our activities focus on developing creativity and critical thinking).  It was a really interesting meeting and we are already looking forward to the next one in May 2019!