Techfest 2016-17, the annual tech fair of IIT Mumbai, is organising free coding workshops for college students in 20 cities across the country in an attempt to attract women into sectors like engineering, science, technology and Mathematics. As on date, just 15 per cent of IIT students are women.
“Coding is an important component in today’s world. We will empower women by teaching them basic coding skills using Python. We will also apprise them of coding competitions held at zonal and national levels,” said Karan Mehta, manager (media), Techfest.
Supported by UNICEF,
The next workshop is scheduled to be held at Fr Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering in Mumbai on September 3. Five workshops have already been conducted in Mumbai, Pune and Noida, with over 300 girls enlisted. Supported by the UNICEF, the organisers hope to reach out to over 2,000 women. Similar workshops are being planned in Chandigarh, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Jammu.
Two-day panel discussions have also been planned, wherein tech leaders will speak about women role models in the sector. It aims to provide a networking platform for women, and will culminate with a day-long hackathon.
While the aim to attract women may be noble, the ground reality is grim. A cursory Google search reveals that even the few women who graduate from the IITs, tend to drop out at a later stage, owing to family and maternal responsibilities. “Technology is a difficult field to sustain for a woman. By the time you complete your PhD you are almost 28 years of age. And then if you wish to go abroad to do post-doctoral studies, you are bound to cross 30 years of age, by which time there tends to be pressure from the family for marriage. When family responsibilities and maternity follow, the absence of good quality crèches and childcare support in India forces many highly-educated women to drop out of the industry,” says a researcher in nanotechnology. “If the government really wants to prevent brain drain, they should provide child care infrastructure for women,” she says.
Workshops to be organised in 20 cities for college students in an attempt to attract women into sectors like engineering, science, technology and Mathematics
