As part of the ownCloud team and a STEM Woman, I want to shine some light on the Women and Girls in Science day February 11th. For me, these initiatives are of high importance and I would like to share some of my experiences with you.
If something defines ownCloud as a project, it is our social responsibility. We want to make you able to maintain your privacy and provide you with a secure way to share your data on any device. You control who accesses your data!
At ownCloud, we care about a better society, open platforms, and open standards. We work together with people from around the globe.
An important aspect of our social responsibility is empowering women as an integral part of the Open Source community.
Empowering women to overcome the gender gap
On September 25th, 2015, the United Nations adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new sustainable development agenda. Each goal has a specific target to be achieved within the next 15 years.
One of these 17 goals, Goal 5, is to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
We are aware of the great difference in participation according to gender in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) sectors worldwide. Women still represent a very low percentage, so we at ownCloud and from our offices in Spain at Solid GEAR also collaborate with initiatives such as STEM Talent Girl. The STEM Talent girl project aims to inspire and empower the new generation of women in science through a mentoring project for the development of STEM talent.
Last February 11 we celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Around this date especially, we carried out several activities to value women in the field of STEM worldwide. We want to make their work visible and showcase these feminine roles in the fields of science and engineering. Our goal is to promote practices that foster gender equality in the scientific field.
Shadowing Sessions
As a mentor of Stem talent girl, I was fortunate to have two talent girls, Alba and Ana, visiting me. Alba and Ana are part of the STEM Talent Girl program.
Raquel, Ana, Alba, and me during the Shadowing Session.
With them, we did a shadowing session. During one afternoon, the girls experienced first-hand the day-to-day life of a STEM profession right next to their mentors. They paired with their mentors and stayed just as close as a shadow. It has been a pleasure to show them a little bit more of my world: the development of Software!
During the session, we tried to show them the wide vision of some of the infinite possibilities offered by computer engineering.
They learned more about what a project involves and discovered all the hard work behind an application. For Ana and Alba, it was great to see that an application is not just what the end user sees, but also that a lot of work is done in the backend.
Live demo and the days’ conclusion
In addition, we were fortunate enough to attend a live demo. In the Demo we showed our latest advances in the project to our project lead Michael Stingl and more teammates in Germany. Ana and Alba joined and saw the importance of teamwork and english skills. We would like to thank ownCloud for sharing the session.
Later on I summarized my career and how I had managed to follow my path until today. I now have been a part of this great ownCloud team for more than 3 years and I am looking forward to a lot more.
Thanks to Raquel Pérez and Siro Ramírez for participating in this shadow session and offering Alba and Ana valuable insights. Also, thank you to ownCloud for having all of us in the live demo. It was great to share the experience together with parts of our team in Germany.
Workshop with AppInventor
We are already preparing a new activity for next month to introduce programming with AppInventor within the Stem Talent Girl program.
In the meantime, here is a video with the summary of “Introduction to Programming with AppInventor” workshop that I did on February 14-15 at CRA Tábara College in Zamora, Spain as part of the activities around February 11.
Invest in the future you want!
I was delighted to have brought the IT world to children between 11-14 years old. It was great to share my passion with them and I was truly amazed by their willingness to learn. The future belongs to them and we have the task of achieving a more equitable, non-judgmental society in which we can all benefit from their future innovations.
I am very proud and grateful for all those who do their bit for corporate social responsibility and our future.
To reach these goals, everyone needs to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society and people like you.
Corporate social responsibility counts! Encourage your company to work with civil society and find ways to help local communities achieve the goals.
What do you think about this intiative? Let us know by leaving a comment below or talk about it on social media!
