InnovateHer

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.