KlasCement present at the ADA Congress

The final ADA Congress took place on 19 November 2007. ADA arose because women in the ICT sector are still strongly underrepresented. The project is named after the first female programmer Ada Lovelace . ADA is trying to make the IT sector more attractive to women and is now putting a stop to its awareness campaigns. Although the Ada network has been attempting to close this gender gap for years, the result remains a drop on a hot plate. Sensitization remains necessary.

At this Congress ADA wants to bring together business, government and education and explain specific actions. KlasCement was also present !

The program includes a number of speakers, a panel discussion and networking.

Gisèle Roesems (DG Information Society & Media) is the first speakers. Using a lot of statistics from research, she wants to show that it is high time to raise awareness among young people and women about the IT professions. The European Commission wants to work on this. Why is it necessary to better represent women in the ICT sector? This has economic reasons. For example, more women in this sector could ensure that products that are more attractive to women reach the market, offering a larger market.

The European Commission has organized a number of shadowing days together with five IT companies to show young women that technology is not just for 'nerds'. Six students were each linked to a successful woman in an IT company. They followed their mentor for a whole day. This enabled them to get acquainted with the fascinating job in information technology. On http://ec.europa.eu/itgirls you can watch a video of a "shadowing day".

Eléonore Seron (Doctor of Psychological Sciences) explains why an IT career has little appeal to young people in general and girls in particular. The 2006 Dream 2006 survey shows that 85% of all young people know what profession they want to pursue. 70% choose a study in function of this profession and not in function of opportunities (jobs) on the labor market. Young people do not have an attractive image of an IT profession. They associate this with lonely, associate, for hacking nerds and freaks , a dark room, ... It is therefore necessary in the first place to adjust this image. Companies can promote ICT in a powerful positive way and campaign. Education can introduce pupils to ICT in daily practice.

A nice fact is that in Malaysia the image of ICT is very positive and it is about pronounced women's professions. The image these women have is expressed in words such as safe, light work, clean, healthy, ...

Members in the panel discussion are Kathleen Vanhoucke (IBM), Patrick Slaets (Agoria), Patricia Fenerberg (Haute Ecole de Bruxelles), Wivine Baert (St. Anne's College Antwerp). They testify and speak about the involvement of industry and education, new projects and their conditions.

Patrick Slaets states that companies should not do much more, but show what they really do. The stereotypes are maintained by the companies themselves. If you look at the advertising you see individual people behind a laptop and rarely for example. colleagues who work together.

Kathleen Vanhoucke supports the idea of ​​the "shadowing day". She recognizes the gap between the business world and the educational world. IBM would not only bring students but also teachers to the company. Wivine Baert highlights the difficult contacts with companies in this. This IT teacher guided the project Pimp IT up! Her school was the pilot school for this ADA pilot project. Final year secondary education students spend one day on the IT floor of female IT specialists. It became a success. These projects should grow even more. Patrick Slaets picks this up and emphasizes the need to show reality. Take students / students to eg. hospitals and show them that from the registration as a patient to the dismissal a lot of ICT is involved.

IBM is already committed to organizing EXIT Camps for young people aged between 11 and 15 years.

Finally, Jan Vermeiren , networking coach, spoke about the real power of your network. This is earlier in the second degree of your network. Not the people you know, but the people who know these people. We should be better at bringing people together. He does recognize here that most people get a little worried about the idea of ​​introducing someone to another and that this collaboration would not have been so successful. But, he says, you can also bring people together and emphasize that it may 'maybe' '' be able to help each other. More information can be found on www.networking-coach.com .

This means the ADA Congress and the entire Ada project are at its end. The commitment of the day was to save the Ada ideology. "We fear that our knowledge will be lost," confirms Kirsten Dewaelheyns of ADA. "Awareness is after all a long-term work."

www.ada-online.org/nlada/