Cristina Ferrero Castaño
#EllasPrograman, the event to raise awareness of the role of women in the world of programming.
Yesterday afternoon, the Ironhack campus hosted a day of debate and reflection organised by Womenalia where Mática Partners had the opportunity to contribute its vision and experience to promote the role of women in STEM professions.
Mática Partners
October 14, 2021
The Ironhack campus hosted yesterday afternoon the event organised by Womenalia "#EllasPrograman: Women, programming and unconscious biases", a very interesting day to reflect and raise awareness about the future of programming, Artificial Intelligence and the role of women in all of this.
The main objective of this session was to raise awareness about the lack of women in the programming world, the consequences of gender bias in AI and to make female role models working in the programming sector visible, in order to promote STEM careers in general and the programming world in particular.
The event featured the participation of inspiring women such as Silvia Cobo Gómez, Site Reliability Engineer at Clarity IA, Amanda Gálvez, Professor at Ironhack, Nohemy Veiga, Lead Data Scientist at Everis and Idoia Salazar, President and Co-Founder of the Observatory of the Ethical and Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence (OdiseIA).
In addition, from Mática Partners, we contributed our vision with the participation of Juan Ramón Gonzalez, in the round table "Women in Programming: the present and future situation", together with Silvia Cobos and Amanda Gálvez, where they discussed the present and future problems of the role of women in STEM careers and where Mática explained how its recruitment model is based on the principles of equality and inclusion, but especially on the concept of talent.
Juan Ramón commented on what, according to his point of view, are the main causes of the lack of women in STEM positions, among which he highlighted cultural and educational biases and the role of companies in this problem. "Today's problem in attracting talent is not having done our homework yesterday," he said.
He also explained how the company deals with this situation, emphasising, on the one hand, the recruitment of talent without bias and, on the other hand, promoting and supporting a corporate culture that does not allow situations of sexism or inequality on a day-to-day basis. "The focus is on talent, and talent does not understand race, gender or condition," said Juan Ramón.
"Companies that are able to attract talent, regardless of gender, will have a competitive advantage over others because they will simply have better people to work with," he concluded.
After this round table, the event continued with presentations by Noemy Veiga and Idoia Salazar, where the importance of taking responsibility as a society to put an end to gender bias in the world of programming and AI was highlighted.
Finally, the event concluded with a tour of the campus facilities and a networking cocktail.
You can access the full video of the event via the following link: