Today, at the United States Embassy in Rome, the Fondazione Mondo Digitale and the United States Embassy in Italy, in collaboration with Microsoft, presented the fifth edition of Coding Girls, the programme created to overcome the gender divide and accelerate the achievement of equal opportunities in scientific and technological fields. There are more than 100 Coding Girls in the high schools that will introduce and train 6000 peers to coding in Turin, Milan, Trieste, Rome, Naples, Salerno and Catania. Moreover, the programme includes regional hackathons at universities to promote the education and orientation of young women.
According to the European Commission’s “Women Digital Age” Report, the divide between male and female participation in the digital sector is present at all levels: education, careers and enterprise. Only 24.9% of women graduates with a degree in technological fields, while three many times as many men do.
In order to step up the achievement of gender equality in the ICT sector and promote female talents and leadership, the Fondazione Mondo Digitale and the Embassy of the United States in Italy, in collaboration with Microsoft, are promoting the fifth edition of Coding Girls. After having reached out to 4000 female students in 2017, the programme now challenges one hundred high school Coding Girls to train 6000 peers by the end of the year. From November 6 to 20, with the guidance of Emily Thomforde, Code Educator and Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics (STEAM) Specialist, the young programmers will participate in an itinerant training relay in 28 schools in 7 Italian cities: Turin, Milan, Trieste, Rome, Naples, Salerno and Catania. The coding practice sessions will be followed by regional programming and creativity marathons with universities.
This collaboration with major universities is one of the main results obtained by the Coding Girls Association after one year of activity. The association now has 25 hubs in schools throughout Italy. From the University of Trieste and the Rome “Campus Bio-Medico” University to the Developer Academy at the “Federico II” University of Naples, a new alliance has been formed to promote the strategic role of young women in scientific and technological fields. Now, the challenge has also been launched to the world of enterprise that, starting this year, will be able to “adopt” students and help them throughout their course of studies, thereby contributing to the emergence of new talents, competences and professional profiles.
PRESS KIT
