Emily Campbell: Women

Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts

Friday, 24 June 2016

CECS and the City Episode 2: SDG Number Five

This is me doing me best to smile through the cold NY weather.

When you get a group of really ambitious people together, it can be the perfect dose of motivation for a young person. On day 2 of the conference we heard from some women and men who had achieved a lot. There was Lord Dr Michael Hastings (Global Head of Citizenship at KPMG), Senator Imani Duncan-Price from Jamaica, Jacques Philippe Piverger (founder and CEO of the Soleil Group) and many more people who were frustratingly successful and really eloquent speakers too.

We spent the morning talking about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while it snowed outside (dogs were wearing snow boots to walk around the city!) The SDGs are the 17 global targets released by the UN in 2015, and are the successors to their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Each of the 17 is important on it’s own, but there’s a huge crossover and it would be hard to focus on just one at a time.

Number 1 is a biggie: no poverty. If you’re pessimistic about this one, you might be surprised to know that we’re halfway to eliminating poverty. Yep. That’s a huge deal! It’s something we need to celebrate for sure. BUT, you wouldn’t stop halfway, right? The following video from the UN is pretty awesome and makes this point. It features some interesting facts plus some celebs like Usain Bolt and Coldplay, I definitely recommend you take the 2 minutes to watch it.

Video: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/no-point-going-halfway-to-end-poverty/

Some of my favourites are number 4 (quality education), 6 (clean water and sanitation), and 17 (partnerships for the goals). Seventeen is important because it makes people focus on doing things together, and that’s a really nice (but also highly effective) way to go about it. The best part is that under each of these goals are really specific targets that can be measured, so they’re not just some vague areas of interest that the UN threw together, these are some serious goals with serious targets.

Number 5 is gender equity. In the room of highly ambitious women, this one led to a big discussion on equal pay, having more women CEOs and breaking that glass ceiling. It was really interesting and, of course, really important to hear. These women were very passionate about these issues and about creating opportunities for women. But there was a really powerful moment later in the morning that made us all take a huge step back from this. In the middle of the fired discussion, Lord Hastings said to us all “yes, these things are really important, but there is this preoccupation with acquisition of position. We need more than that. Girls need education, we need to eliminate poverty. Where is the social justice for those who can’t get to the first base point? Let’s start at the bottom and not the top”.

Damn. We had all been so preoccupied with number 5 and how it related to ourselves, but there are 16 other goals and billions of women on the planet that we were ignoring. I realised that empowering women is essential to meeting all the other goals, and women in developing countries need to be a huge part of number 5.

Jamaican Senator, Imani Duncan, described it really nicely and gave me my take-away message for the day in one line. She said “number five, gender equality, is the thread that runs through all of the goals”.

It was exactly the shift in perspective that I think we all needed.

Emily

Monday, 20 June 2016

Most people agree that we need more women to start and stay in STEM fields, especially engineering, computer science and maths. I definitely agree. I think women, men, businesses and the world in general have a lot to benefit from increased participation of women. One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is how many more? Is 50% realistic? Would a success story in Australia see numbers increase by 5%? 10%?

I don’t want to convince girls to do something they don’t want to do. But I do want them to know more about STEM careers and feel empowered enough to take those sorts of paths.

I’m going to use engineering as my example here, because I have the stats and it’s what I’ve experienced. But most of what I say applies to the physical sciences, maths and computer science. Perhaps even especially to computer science!

ANU engineering has just under 20% women in the undergraduate population, which is pretty good compared to other Australian universities. In 2015, 14.4% of Australian engineering undergraduate commencements were women [1]. So knowing that ANU is doing a bit better than average, should we stop there? Hell no! MIT has an undergraduate engineering population of 46% women [2], Brown has almost 40% [3], and there are many other great engineering colleges and universities in the USA with numbers in the range of 30-45% [4]. So it’s definitely realistic for us to bump those figures up so we can lead the Australian statistics in the same way MIT is leading the USA’s.

So, now that we’ve established that…what can we do?

As we sat in the New York Academy of Science (NYAS) on the 40th floor of the World Trade Centre overlooking the city scape, we heard about some really great things happening in this space.

The NYAS runs mentoring programs for high school students around the world, scholarship programs for undergraduates, networking opportunities between women of all ages and heaps of other things. All of their initiatives focus on the long term. The 1000 girls, 1000 futures program is a 3-year online mentoring program. They’re really showing what a big organisation can do with a little funding!

Kimberley Bryant, set up Black Girls Code in the USA. It started out as a bit of creativity for her daughter and her friends, and has now turned into a program that transforms thousands of girls into creators of technology, not just consumers of it. She showed us what one person can start, even when they’re not intending to do so!

The examples of awesome programs kept on going all day. It was pretty clear that they all had one common element. Mentoring! It seemed to be the number one driver at all stages. We need to provide mentors from kindergarten up until retirement day. These can be teachers, role models, supportive family members, older students, bosses, professionals, anyone.

Mentoring can manifest itself in a whole variety of ways, some of which are organic and not necessarily over the long term. Mentoring can be as small as telling your cousin how cool it is she did well on her maths test each time you see her, or helping a College student know what degree options are out there. At ANU, we’re working on the opposite kind of mentoring. The kind that involves a long-term structured program with input from a huge team of mentors.

Since leaving New York, we have expanded our first year women in engineering and computer science mentoring program which we are hoping to open up to all genders next semester. We have set up programs for later year students to be mentored by professionals from PwC and Cisco. We have more new programs in the pipeline too, from ANU students mentoring Canberra primary school students, to peer-to-peer mentoring between students in Cambodia and Australia. We’re creating a network and we want as many people to get tangled up in our web as possible!

I encourage you to join our network, or start your own. Go find a mentor. Or, better yet, find someone to be a mentor to.

Emily

[1] Australian education network http://www.universityrankings.com.au/gender-balance-ratio.html

[2] MIT http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/gender/ and http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/yrpts/

[3] Brown University https://www.brown.edu/academics/engineering/undergraduate-study/admissions

[4] ASEE https://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/11-47.pdf

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

Google is one of those companies everyone dreams about working for. We've all heard the rumours...slippery slides, climbing walls, free meals and, my personal favourite, their 20% projects. From the outside, the Google workplace seems like a tech-lover's playground, but probably just out of reach for most of us.

In 2015 I was lucky enough to visit their office in Sydney, but only for a few days. I went to Anita Borg ANZ Retreat. A group of women from Australia and New Zealand were able to take part in workshops on professional development, unconscious bias, Google itself, and ways to encourage younger students to explore technical fields.

I was, of course, impressed by the office (though I was disappointed not to come across a single slippery slide). Their catering facilities, onsite medical services, and spaces for learning and sharing ideas seemed phenomenal to me.

However, I think the most impressive thing I experienced was the energy which permeated in the workshops. Not the energy from the Google employees, but the energy from the other students. It was the first time I had been in a room full of (mostly) women who were truly passionate about technology and encouraging other people to be equally as passionate. I do have a few friends who feel the same way, but I'd never been in a room of 25 people who were so in step before.

One of Google's great skills is its ability to create and harness energy like that, and that's something I wanted to bring back to ANU.

This year our new gender equity group, Fifty50, is working to create a space that allows all of the staff and students in the College of Engineering and Computer Science to feel supported, enthusiastic and excited for their future. The group also hopes to appeal to high school students thinking of studying with us. We have big plans for networking events, mentoring programs, talks from industry, social media awareness and workshops in schools.

It's going to be a wonderful year for coming together, sharing ideas and supporting each other. I’m hoping to reproduce that Google energy (admittedly in a slightly less flamboyant way) right here at the ANU.

Emily

Friday, 7 August 2015

I spend every day with engineering students, so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what engineers look like (or at least what they will look like when they graduate after 4 or 5 years). In the past few days there’s been heaps of talk about a female engineer who appeared in an advertisement for her company, and around what female engineers look like.

To catch up on the story, read this article.

The response on media, especially twitter, has been huge, with lots of female engineers sending in photos of themselves. These photos proved something we should have all already known, that female engineers look like…well, females. At university, I can’t tell the engineering students apart from the business students, or the law kids, and that’s because what you study has nothing to do with what you look like.

It’s a really exciting time, as more and more girls are choosing to study engineering. My university is one of the best when it comes to the number of girls in engineering, though we're not yet at the 25% mark. So there’s still a long way to go, but I want to share some photos of my friends at ANU with you. They’re engineering students, and they have some big ideas about what they’re doing and where they want to go, but most of all, they’re just a bunch of fabulous, smart and interesting women!

Enjoy!