5 minute read
Women In Tech
Making The Industry Accessible To Other Women
By Jessie Taylor
The tech sector has been marked by rapid growth and innovation and offers an opportunity to revolutionise numerous sectors. Yet, only 23% of tech jobs are held by women in South Africa – a figure that highlights the work that needs to be done to transform the sector to reach gender parity.
Globally, women remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, even though women throughout history have made significant contributions to human innovation.
Of the 236 000 information and communications technology (tech) roles in South Africa, women occupy 56 000 of them. In addition, only around 30% of roles in Artificial Intelligence are held by women. Women have a vital role to play in driving digital technology innovation, and they are actively involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
According to the UNESCO report titled: “Cracking the Code: Girls’ and Women’s Education in STEM,” only 35% of STEM students in higher education globally are women. In South Africa, this number is estimated to be around 13%.
Dr Mamoeletsi Mosia, Managing Director of the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA) at the National Research Foundation (NRF), said ensuring the country has qualified talent in the technology and innovation fields should be a priority.
“I feel that if we start at the student level, we’ve already missed the boat, the boat actually starts at the parents. They need to understand what it is that if a child says ‘I want a career in biochemistry’ what it is that I will be doing,” she said.
“We need to talk to the parents, we need to talk to society and that’s where we start educating society in general. We are making science interesting for learners. We have science labs in schools,” she said. However, some South African women are pioneers in the tech field and are using their skills and talent to make the industry more accessible to other women.
Thembiso Magajana
Thembiso Magajana is the founder of Social Coding, an organisation that aims to teach young black girls to code and bring digital education to rural communities. Social Coding brings technology and training programmes to these communities to promote inclusive education and increase youth employment.
It includes a four-year programme for high school learners, where each learner gets at least six hours of training per week, ensuring that rural youth have instruction in coding and computer literacy. Social Coding also provides training, resources and support to educators.
The idea was born when Thembiso, a qualified accountant, taught her niece coding on the weekends. This soon expanded to other girls, and Social Coding was born in 2016. She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, a TEDx Speaker, and was recognised as one of South Africa’s most influential youth in 2020.
Lindiwe Matlali
Lindiwe Matlali is a tech industry and business leader who has won numerous awards, including Excellence in STEM from the Charlotte Maxeke Institute, Social Innovator of the Year by the Schwab Foundation, and was one of the Mail & Guardian 50 Powerful Women in SA in 2021. But despite her many accolades, she remains committed to grassroots and government-level initiatives that inspire Africa’s young innovators and entrepreneurs.
Among her work has been the establishment of Africa Teen Geeks, an NGO that teaches kids how to code, for which she serves as CEO. Teen Geeks is the largest computer science non-profit organisation in Africa. The organisation seeks to educate, inspire and equip young people with skills, resources and experience to pursue STEM careers. Africa Teen Geeks created the first African block-based coding platform. They created tutorials for both learners and teachers to ensure that every African school can teach coding from the foundation phase in their mother tongue.
Lindiwe has also held a position with the Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution which aims to help the government seize opportunities presented by the digital industrial revolution.
Tao Boyle
Tao Boyle is the co-founder of South African ed-tech startup FoondaMate. The organisation works to make education more accessible, using the platforms of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. FoondaMate allows learners to access study materials and answers to questions via messaging platforms. Teachers can also use these resources to set homework and share learning materials with students.
FoondaMate makes use of a chatbot to provide study help by searching the web and sourcing data from trusted sources. The chatbot also suggests follow-up questions and related topics, provides definitions of words, and helps students work out math equations.
Since its launch in 2020, FoondaMate has reached over 400 000 from over 30 countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.
Tao studied economics and philosophy at the University of Cape Town, where she met FoondaMate co-founder Dacod Magagula. The two shared a passion for creating quality education for all.
After graduation, Tao joined Funda Wande, a not-for-profit organisation that equips educators to teach reading comprehension and mathematics and here she realised that a model proposed by Dacod would help with supply constraints that hampered the supply of textbooks to schools in rural areas.
