Women are conquering the world of IT and Telecommunication thanks to the new Django Girls seminars that are coming to Greece.
As noted in a relevant article in the newspaper Kathimerini, two young academics, Penny Travlou, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh, and Natalia Avlona, a lawyer who deals with intellectual property issues and researches issues of technology and feminism, decided to bring to Athens the international initiative that began last year in Berlin.
The term Django Girls refers to the Django language, which, along with Python, are the most widely used programming languages used to build web pages and specialized applications.
These seminars are aimed at women without previous experience and upon completion, participants will have managed to create a website.
The representation of women in the telecommunications sector at an international level is estimated on average at 40% of the workforce, but from country to country it ranges from 10% to 50%.
In Greece, according to a survey by the National Documentation Center in the fields of Research and Development in Greece, 29,879 women are employed, i.e. 42.5% of the workforce. However, in the Telecommunications and Information Technology sectors, this figure is limited to 21.7%, and even at low levels of hierarchy. Correspondingly, in the research sector, men dominate with 63.3% compared to 36.7% of women.
Django Girls began in Berlin when two Polish software engineers, Ola Sitarska and Ola Szteczka, decided to take action against women's technological illiteracy. The two Poles wrote a 24-chapter manual that is used in local seminars.
The reason they decided to use Django and Python in the seminars is because they are open source platforms that are not subject to copyright.
As Penny Travlou explains, "The teaching method is peer-to-peer. The instructors are essentially assistants and the seminars are aimed at women with no prior knowledge."
"Traditionally, men produce technology and women consume. We are entering a male space with the aim of creating an active community of women," adds Natalia Avlona.
Source: iefimerida.gr
