This weekend, award-winning social enterprise Stemettes hosted its largest ever Manchester event – a two day hack attended by over 50 girls.
The gaming and animation hack, “Stemettes Hack Manchester”, was sponsored by Oracle, hosted by UTC@MediaCityUK and supported by LateRooms.com.
The event enabled the girls who attended to:
- Take part in two packed days of coding, food and fun – all for free
- Develop their coding abilities – irrespective of whether they were advanced coders or complete beginners
- Meet other girls interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM)
- Network with women who have built successful careers in STEM, such as LateRooms.com Software Engineer Clare Sudbery
This weekend’s hack was a fun event with a serious purpose – inspiring the next generation of women in STEM. The feedback from the girls has been resoundingly positive, with 100% saying they would take part in another Stemettes event, and 94% reporting that they were interested in coding in the future.
Stemettes recognises that, in the same way that gender barriers can inhibit girls’ participation in STEM, so too can economic factors. As a result, every Stemettes event is free for the girls who attend. The organisation’s commitment to maximising the accessibility of coding resonated with this weekend’s participants. One attendee commented, “I enjoyed learning how to use software I can actually afford to download at home, rather than being excited about really cool coding software - and then realising it is hundreds of pounds a month”.
Head Stemette Anne-Marie Imafdion, profiled in this weekend’s Sunday Times Magazine as one of the British women shaking up the tech industry, said of the event, “It was lovely to meet young women from all corners of Manchester who had great creativity, and see them express that using coding – their sense of achievement at the end of the event was palpable.”
Last year named EU Digital Impact Organisation of the Year, Stemettes runs hackathons, a mentoring scheme and Outbox Incubator, which creates young female STEM entrepreneurs (girls aged 11-22). In January, Stemettes will be launching its next initiative, OtotheB – a global online platform for girls interested in STEM and entrepreneurship.
Women remain disproportionately under-represented in STEM - according to a 2015 WISE report, only 14.4% of the UK's STEM workforce is female. In a recent speech, Clare Perry MP highlighted a Women in Rail report which revealed that only 13,492 of the 87,000 people working in rail are women - almost exactly the number at the start of the First World War.
Face-to-face interactions between girls and female STEM role models are critical to affecting patterns of educational choice and turning the tide of the underrepresentation of women in STEM, according to a 2012 Kings College London ASPIRES report. Central to Stemettes’ work is providing girls with regular, free events at which they can do just that.
A selection of images from the hack is available on our Flickr account.
