How to empower young women to work in tech, from a man who’s making it happen
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31st May 2019
The primary reason Vogue Codes was originally created was to encourage and empower women in tech – an industry traditionally (and currently) dominated by males. According to Forbes, in 2018, women only owned five per cent of the world’s tech start-ups.
There’s no argument that tech, and STEM industries in general, are undergoing a process of change when it comes to gender equality, but there’s still such a long way to go. According to Greg Attwells, intellectual property strategist at Finch, the key to evening out the disparity starts in schools.
A man who practices what he preaches, Attwells is also the co-founder of Creatable; a curriculum-based project under the Finch company that works with female high school students to build out their confidence and interest when it comes to problem solving, innovating, building, pitching, and commercialising – all of which are paramount when it comes to a career in the tech industry.
Attwells is speaking at this year’s Vogue Codes Melbourne Summit event, touching on his role as a curriculum architect, and all the ways he believes we can encourage young women to pursue, and feel excited about, a career in the tech industry. Prior to his appearance, Attwells shared with Vogue his thoughts on how we can get more young women inspired, and armed with the skills they need to thrive in what has always been a bit of a boys club. Keep scrolling for this insights.
Creatable co-founder Greg Attwells. Image credit: Supplied.
So what’s your professional background?
“I started out as a full-time graphic designer and part-time musician, but quickly found myself contributing most effectively in senior strategy roles – specifically, providing digital leadership to brands navigating marketplace disruption. I have a Communications Degree in Media Arts Production, and a Masters in Leadership.”
How did you come to work with Finch?
“Finch has a lot of really interesting intellectual property that sits latent within the business. Imagine what happens when you get mechatronic engineers working alongside game developers, interactive designers and film-makers? The cross-pollination of all these creatives working together under the one roof produces IP in the form of patents, inventions, entertainment properties and the like. Rob Galluzzo, Finch’s founder, brought me on as a freelancer to commercialise some of this latent IP. My role at Finch is IP Strategist. There is a family connection too – Rob is my mum’s cousin!”
Where did the idea for Creatable come from?
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“A couple of things happened at a similar time that created the impetus for us to do something in the education space. Firstly, we were recruiting for a new mechatronic engineer. We had 67 applications from graduates all over Sydney. Only two of the applicants were female. With only 16 per cent of STEM-qualified people being female, it’s an accurate representation, but it still shocked us. Around the same time, our founder’s daughter was hoping to enrol in a year nine design and technology class at a Sydney girls private school, but there weren’t enough girls interested to run a class (only eight).
It was at that point Rob called me into his office, just before Christmas in 2016, and said ‘we should see if the school will let us do something with these students that ignites a passion for creativity expressed through technology’.We basically asked the school if they could wrangle a class of 20 students together (they did) and let us teach the design and technology subject for the whole year (in partnership with the teachers for compliance). The school bravely agreed. So in January of 2017, I wrote a 12-month creative technology curriculum based on how we innovate at Finch. We decided to take girls on a ‘build your own idea’ journey from ideation through to pitching, on to rapid prototyping then finally, commercialisation. They would basically get a taste of the end-to-end journey of creative product development.
What we found was that the missing piece that these girls needed to really capture their interest was ‘context’. By making the subject about creativity and the power of an idea, technology was contextualised for them – way more interesting than just coding or robotics.
The other side of context was the industry link. They saw a direct connection from what they were learning to the kinds of jobs they could have in the future.”
And how did it all go in that pilot year?
“As I mentioned, only eight girls had wanted to study design and tech originally, but after that first year of running Creatable at the school, 50 girls signed up for it the following year. A huge increase! In 2018, our second year, we took 130 students through the program from different schools. Now, over 280 students have gone through our program in almost three years.”
So where is the business headed now?
“Without ending our face-to-face involvement with Sydney schools, we are adding a platform-based experience to our offering in 2020 so we can open up the experience to a more culturally, geographically and socio-economically diverse group of young women.
The basic gist of it is online classes, taught by the world’s coolest brands, on the innovation best practices that are shaping the future of work.”
How do you believe STEM-related companies and businesses can be more inclusive for women? Where does it start?
It starts in high school. It starts when young girls start telling themselves they’re not that creative, or they’re not smart enough to learn about how technology works. The problem is when they start comparing themselves to others; because what we really mean when we say ‘I’m not that creative’ is ‘I’m not as creative as her’. We can’t expect to simply hire more female engineering graduates because there’s just not that many of them. We need to give young women an experience in high school that helps them believe they have what it takes to leverage technology to solve interesting problems in the world.
I’d like to see more companies and brands partner with organisations like Creatable, because it really makes a difference to the trajectory of their career.
What’s been the hardest part about building Creatable, and why?
“The hardest part has been designing a program and business model that can scale. We want to scale for reach and impact, not profit. The challenge has been working out how we can keep it authentic. We’ve had some smart people help us understand what these industry partnerships look like in a scalable, platform-based experience. I’m so excited about where we’ve landed and the product we are building. I don’t think there is anything else like this out there in STEM education and we have an opportunity here to really innovate the way students learn in the 21st century.”