Founder, Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre, Oreoluwa Lesi has called for more women’s involvement in science and technology-related field, saying technology is a gender balance profession as opposed to people stereotyping it to be men’s career.
Speaking on EntrepriseCEO weekly Instagram live session on the topic, Women on The Web: Leveraging Technology As A Means To Success.
Lesi expressed concern about the low involvement of women in the technology and science industries with the statistics revealed by the National Bureau of Statistics that 28% of female students are studying science-based courses and only 20% of technology workforce staff are women.
Relating how WTEC’s vision came alive, Lesi explained that she felt the need to bridge the gender-based technology gap and came up with an idea to starting a program with women on technology.
She said she later decided to focus more on girls who are the ones that need the knowledge to close the gap.
In her words, ‘’I really wanted to close the gender gap in technology but I didn’t have an idea of how to go about it because I was thinking of having it after school or on weekends and as a one-off program but before I knew it, I have set up WTEC, we ran our first program and got feedbacks. We started with women in the tech but later realized we actually need the younger ones to close the gap so we decided to start with the girls,
At WTECH, we are trying to know why this is happening, what we can do about it and how to close the gap, and what we can do to make sure that more girls are getting interested in technology, sustaining their interests, and grow up becoming women who work in technology place’’. she added.
According to Lesi, women need to be encouraged to see and consider technology as a career and erase the erroneous notion that it only a discipline designed for men because the industry needs more women to contribute largely to the technological input for advancement.
Responding when asked if women’s involvement in technology is a threat to men in the profession, Lesi clarified that coming into the profession has nothing of competition in whatever form but bringing different gender to work collectively to achieve the industry’s set goals as they both have their different perspectives to issues and strength for the team to benefit from.
‘’Revalidating the role of women in technology is not meant to compete with the men, it shouldn’t be like that because we all have our area of strengths and perspective. We are bringing different levels of exposure to the team or workplace. I see it as working together to achieve a particular goal not otherwise”, she insisted.