Tech She Can celebrates two years of inspiring children to consider a future in tech
"We're on a mission to make the world work for everybody."
Last week, Tech She Can, a charity founded by Sheridan Ash, MBE to inspire and educate girls and young women about the possibilities of a career in technology celebrated its second birthday. For a charity which has existed for such as short time, Tech She Can has already made an enormously positive impact, with more than 53,000 children having experienced a Tech We Can lesson, and in excess of 175,000 children having viewed its free of charge online resources, which include charming, highly engaging animations - more of which later.
In advance of the celebrations, Computing caught up with Sheridan Ash MBE, Founder and Co-CEO of Tech She Can and co-CEO Dr Claire Thorne to learn more about the work of Tech She Can and about why both CEOs are such strong believers in the importance of making the tech world a more diverse one. Their own respective routes into science and technology are the perfect illustration of just how important role models and mentors - or the absence of them - are in the career decisions taken by young adults.
Sheridan Ash MBE, who is dyslexic, left school at 16 with minimal qualifications, and with career advice amounting to "find a rich husband." Ash went back to education after an early career as a model, and then found a job in the pharmaceutical industry which led to a role at Accenture with technology and the NHS. Ash followed her boss to PWC in 2010, and noticed what appeared to be a distinct absence of women in the tech workforce.
"I did some research and only 14% of the tech workforce at PWC were women," she says.
"I went to the leadership team with some ideas and they went with it. I led that program, eventually across the whole company. An example was, if you came back part-time after maternity leave you had to do four days a week. We trialled doing three days a week and that's now policy across the company."
PWCs tech workforce of approximately 5000 is now 36% female, which is well above the industry average of a little less than 25%.
Dr Claire Thorne followed a very different trajectory. Her father was a telecoms engineer and encouraged his daughter to take an interest in all things STEM related. A "take your daughter to work" day proved transformative. It's a background which illustrates the importance of role models in the decisions young children make - particularly when that role model is part of the family. Teachers, and in particular a female science teacher encouraged Thorne to pursue STEM subjects at A-Level, but she drew a blank from the school careers advisor - who simply handed her the results of a computer questionnaire. Thorne pursued a physics degree and then a PHD at Imperial (where she met Ash) on dark matter.
In addition to her own experiences, the years that Thorne spent as a STEM ambassador in schools further convinced her of the importance of STEM role models in shaping how children view their futures.
Tech She Can
By 2017, Ash had progressed to the PWC leadership team and wrote and was involved in deploying a tech and innovation strategy for the firm. Core to that tech strategy was diversity, but PWC and their clients were all struggling to find women to fill tech vacancies. Ash commissioned some research and several findings stood out. The first was the lack of relatable role models. As Ash says:
"It's no good pointing teenagers to Sheryl Sandberg or Ada Lovelace who's been dead for 150 years. They know about those people but they're not relatable. What they need is role models at the beginning of their career in their 20s and 30s like the amazing ethical hackers at PWC."
Another finding was the way that girls assess the subjects and careers they plan to pursue, and that they make plans beyond themselves.
"They think about the positive impact on themselves, their family, community, the UK and the wider world. And they didn't get the connection between technology and all of those people. That was a big light bulb moment for me that they used technology but they didn't know about all the careers behind it. They clearly weren't being taught about it."
The third key finding from the research was that parents and teachers weren't putting forward tech careers to girls as much as they were to boys.
This research led to the launch of Tech She Can as an initiative from PWC in 2018 which grew rapidly, until being relaunched as a separate social enterprise in October 2021.
Inspiring young minds
Tech She Can provide educational resources for children aged from five, right up to GCSE age. It's been their animations for five- to ten-year-olds (which are free for parents and teachers to access) which have really driven engagement. Current and former teachers are involved in the creation of the animations and all of the characters (bar Tex the Dog) are based on real people. They're designed to spark curiosity in their young audience.
"It's easier for us to reach primary school children," explains Thorne. "Timetables are flexible and they don't move around or change teachers. But there is also a strategic driver because if you're trying to inspire children to be engaged and motivated by STEM subjects and careers then 13 is really too late to start. Girls in particular start to disengage from STEM subjects around the age of seven or eight if they aren't actively encouraged to pursue them."
The charity has also developed packaged lessons and assemblies for children up to 14 years of age to try and encourage them to keep science and computing uppermost when they make decisions about GCSEs. Career Insight days are also designed for young adults right up to the age of 18. These girls are selected with the help of their teachers and careers advisers and tend to be from less privileged backgrounds and unlikely to engage with STEM beyond entry level. Thorne explains:
"They often start the day really struggling to engage even with each other but by the end of the day they're really animated and can articulate the opportunities available - which go way beyond coding. They see that apprenticeships might be a route for them and feel really inspired."
Tech She Can wants to scale for more sustained interaction with the younger generation as the charity moves into its third year,. The vision is children having multiple interactions with them throughout their school lives, right from the animations in reception year, live assemblies in primary school, a visit from a Tech She Can champion to their school, career inspiration days and visits to festivals like London Tech Week when they're older.
Skills and diversity are closely linked
Both Ash and Thorne express some frustration that the lack of diversity in tech and the skills gap holding the sector back are typically expressed as two completely different challenges as opposed to two sides of the same coin. And, as Ash points out, the solution doesn't have to be complicated.
"If you took the three billion that's being wasted in the apprenticeship levy and repurposed it into a national program targeted at upskilling women, particularly returners, over a few years you could really make a difference to the skills gap." (Tech She Can run a scheme where businesses can donate their unused apprenticeship levy.)
Both are emphatic that the industry, in collaboration with organisations like theirs and with educators must act now. The recent developments in LLMs means that the pace of technological change is going to speed up. People other than wealthy men need to be involved in that process if technology is to work for everyone's benefit. We've heard a lot of late from the "godfathers of AI." Some godmothers would be a positive development.
As Thorne says:
"We're on a mission to make the world work for everybody. That means broad representation when you're building, designing, testing and deploying technology. And we don't have time to wait."
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