Britain has announced measures to bring more women into technology, including 300 paid placements, a girls’ competition and a returnship pilot. The nation is finally opening the door to a workforce it has spent years inviting to knock, provided nobody asks who designed the lock.
The TechFirst Women’s Programme will support 300 women through paid placements with small and medium sized businesses. The placements will last at least six months, offering time to learn the systems, meet the people who built them and discover that the password is still written on a note beneath the keyboard. This is not a criticism of the technology sector. It is a criticism of its thrilling commitment to solving modern problems with stationery.
The package also includes a new UK wide competition for thousands of girls aged 12 and 13. They will use coding, artificial intelligence and creative problem solving in challenges designed to show what a future in technology could look like. It is an encouraging start, although the first challenge may be persuading an adult that a girl who has solved the problem does not need to be asked who helped her.
There is also a returnship pilot for skilled software developers who have been out of work for at least 18 months. It will be tested in the Home Office and Ministry of Justice, offering a route into senior government technology roles. The public sector may therefore gain people who understand software, career breaks and the mysterious moment when a project acquires its sixth review and loses its original purpose.
The Women in Tech Taskforce has opened a call for evidence on emerging technology, artificial intelligence and the biases built into it. That is sensible. Machines learn from data, institutions learn from mistakes and governments learn to give both activities a reassuring programme name.
The announcement also points to problems with recruitment tools and medical systems that can disadvantage women. Better systems are clearly needed. So is the revolutionary idea that people affected by a bad system should not have to provide the evidence while the system receives the promotion.
These measures reach from the classroom to career breaks and leadership. That is a serious attempt to widen participation. Britain now has the placements, the competition and the returnship. All that remains is for the first meeting to avoid explaining that inclusion is best discussed by a panel of identical men. Otherwise the programme will have achieved the rare technical feat of installing a new door without removing the old lock.
Source: GOV.UK.
