innovateher
Liverpool
Only 19% of the digital tech workforce in the UK is female, compared to 37%
across all sectors. It’s proven that the gender gap costs the tech sector time
and money, but it also contributes to the challenges we have sourcing talent and
widens the digital skills gap. Our exploration of diversity Our journey began in
2013, as Liverpool Girl Geeks. We created a community of like-minded people in
Liverpool who wanted to progress gender equality in tech. In the beginning we
organised meet ups for adults, but we soon realised that we could make a real
difference if we mobilised the community, so we began running educational
programmes led by industry with the aim of helping minority groups progress. In
2015 we launched our first educational programmes for teens. We recognised that
we needed to work with girls as young as twelve to tackle the gender stereotypes
that are so entrenched within women by the time they reach adulthood. What we
noticed within our first few cohorts of teen girls was the lack of background
diversity. Students that attended were from similar backgrounds, with supportive
parents who may already work in tech (or a related field), from mostly white
families, who could afford to bring their child to the sessions we were hosting
in Liverpool City Centre each week. Our Co-Founders are women who have both
grown up in low income families and wanted to make sure that our programmes
reached girls from different backgrounds. As two (relatively young!) white
women, they were also acutely aware that we needed to work with a diverse set of
industry mentors to ensure that we had a broad range of people of all ages,
backgrounds and identities to inspire the students. This includes working with
male role models too, as we don’t want to exclude anyone from our mission. A
turning point was at the Big Bang Fair in 2016, where we were exposed to
hundreds of schools across the U.K. The students that attended were from
different nationalities, ethic backgrounds and a multitude of faiths. We
realised that to engage a truly diverse range of young people we had to remove
all barriers to them accessing our programmes. Shortly afterwards we rebranded
as InnovateHer and took our educational programmes into schools. We prioritised
working in disadvantaged areas across Liverpool and Manchester. Since then we
have worked with girls from a broad range of backgrounds; including families who
are asylum seekers, looked after children, girls in faith schools and girls who
identify as non-binary, trans or queer.
