Women Programmers - Chicas en Tecnología

Hello! We are Chicas en Tecnología, a non-profit organization in Argentina. Since 2015 we are working to close the gender gap in tech.

Through our programs and initiatives we inspire, train and support the next generation of women leaders in technology.

We encourage girls from an early age to consider technology as an ally to fulfill different purposes that impact their realities and communities. We articulate concepts and methodologies from Science, Technology, Mathematics, Art and Engineering (STEAM) with social impact: Teenage girls identify a social issue in their communities and learn to program a mobile app to help solving it.

Our programs and initiatives are based on four pillars:

• Technology
• Education
• Leadership
• Entrepreneurship

All of them crossed by a gender approach.

So far 2.045 girls from 14 provinces in Argentina have participated in our programs and are members of our Community. We mentor them, link them with scholarships and programs and we support their career growth. You can read more about our impact in 2018 here —> http://proyectos.chicasentecnologia.org/reporte2018/ 

We are a data based organization. What is not measured cannot evolve.

In Argentina we didn't have any data about how many women vs men chose to study Computer Science and how this number changes through the years.

In 2018 we decided to launch a National campaign (which included requests to all Universities and to the national and state Ministries of Education) to create the first dataset of all Universities and Institutes in Argentina and the number of women and men who are enroll as students, who graduate, and the number of inscriptions in Tech related careers.

After month of hard work and in close collaboration with different companies and organizations we collected data of:

• 73 Career titles
• 81 Universities and Institutes
• More than 8 years of info!

We generated a public dataset and an initial analysis, but there is still a lot of room for improvement!

You can see our publication here: http://mujeres-programadoras.chicasentecnologia.org/ 

We presented the results in a big event with the presence of the Ministry of Science & Technology.

Our research had a lot of media coverage. La Nación, the biggest newspaper in Argentina launched an interactive data visualization to explore our dataset: https://www.lanacion.com.ar/2124338-poca-presencia-de-mujeres-en-carreras-tecnologicas 

You can explore our dataset here:

We are 18 people working in our team. We have backgrounds in Programming, UX, Education, Research, HR, Journalism, Administration and many more. We also have a network of +50 mentors (programmers) and +100 teachers.

For the mentioned investigation the team was:

• Romina Colman is a data journalist and researcher at Chicas en Tecnologia and also a university lecturer at Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina
• Cecilia Vazquez is an education scientist, researcher university coordinator at Chicas en Tecnología.
• Carolina Hadad is a programmer, computer scientist and social innovation specialist at Chicas en Tecnologí
• Mariana Varela is a designer at Chicas en Tecnología with a Master's Degree in Media and Governance.
• Melina Masnatta is a researcher at Chicas en Tecnología with a Master's Degree in Educational Technology. She is also a university lecturer.

For this particular scholarship we want to expand the team adding:

• A journalist specialized in data
• A data visualization expert
• A programmer specialized in data analytics

We know we can do more with this data.

We want people/researchers/journalists to be able to explore the data, to understand it better and to reach their own conclusions.

We want to combine this data with other sources of information such as SocioDemographic information, Public vs Private institution & Gender, Geographic Data, Public Policies applied by year, etc. In Argentina we have a public data portal with 816 datasets that could be combined with the one we have created.

We want to compare the info with other careers. For example, we want people to be able to choose 3 careers (Law, Medicin and CS for example) and show how the number of students change during the course of the years.

We want to show in a map how universities are distributed across the country, what Universities have higher rates of gender diversity and we want to inquire them about what strategies are they are using.

With the help of this scholarship we will be able to dedicate the necessary time to generate and cross our dataset with others, to discover correlations & outliers and, finally, to educate the population in Argentina about how gender diversity in tech is evolving in our country.

With the help of this scholarship we will be able to finish this project in 2 months.