In commemoration of this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD), the CEO of Future Software Resources Ltd, Nkemdilim Bhego, has encouraged more women to embrace technology in order to remain relevant in the next 10 years.
She made this call at the “Girls in Technology: Breaking the Bias in Technology” Seminar organised for secondary school girls in Lagos.
“Girls in Technology is a laudable initiative and very important for organisations to support getting more women into technology and inspiring young women to actually want to pursue careers in technology because there are not enough women in technology,” she said.
This, Bhego continued, would in the long term have big implications for applications, technologies and products that are being built in terms of them being biased against women because women have not been part of creating those technologies.
While admitting that there are enabling policies that are written, the digital expert said the result is in the implementation.
She emphasised, “How do you make sure that you have women straight from leadership all the way down in technology companies, and in the engineering department?”
That most engineering departments struggle with their quota of women, Bhego believes that it can be made mandatory for departments to be staffed with a specific percentage of women, “and of course that would be hard in the interim because you need to fill the pipeline.
“I think there has to be drives to talk to young women and there are already initiatives”.
She, therefore, made a clarion call to women. “My take would be to support initiatives that have been working on this for the last 10 years with funding so that they can widen their reach.
“Support young women while they are in universities with programmes that support and mentor them.”
In her call, she implored other women at the top of the ladder to create internship opportunities specifically for young women to explore careers in technology.
“Get founders and established corporations to focus on hiring women into technology and support programmes that are building technology and skills with funds that are specific to women so that they can get more women into these programmes,” she added
With IWD being a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women, Begho insisted that celebrating IWD is relevant because the world is still not gender equal.
The global speaker bemoaned, “Until we have a gender equal world we’ll continue to have underrepresentation of over 40 per cent of the population. We’ll continue to have patriarchal structure, bias against women, and having women earning less for the same role.
“We’ll continue to have countries where women cannot vote, drive or participate in certain activities. That will mean we’ll exclude more than half the population of our world. And that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.”
Now, Begho is a Digital Transformation and Digital Marketing Expert. She also doubles as an expert speaker on information and communications technology in Africa, as well as a STEM advocate.
She prides herself as a serial entrepreneur who volunteers and mentors young and less privileged children in Nigeria.
