NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Watching Lateline earlier this year and hearing a representative from software company Atlassian talking about gender equality and the issues surrounding women entering jobs in technology – including the poor quotas – I felt this was an area where Vogue could make a difference. Then, at a recent event, I met Marita Cheng, a robotics entrepreneur and 2012 Young Australian of Year, who told me how she wore a uniform of jeans and a T-shirt to work with her developer colleagues and then changed into pretty dresses to visit schools to teach and inspire young female students to enter the technology industry.
At Vogue, we don’t have a single female developer on our team, and that’s not through lack of trying. This has made us realise technology is an area where we could incite change. There are fundamental and systematic failures in our school curriculum, our universities and workplaces that are discouraging women from entering this field, yet we are told there will be 100,000 jobs created in Australia over the next five years in this sector. At the rate we are going, very few women will be able to fill them.
In the US “girls who code” is a cool movement – and even a hashtag – led by model Karlie Kloss, dubbed by US President Barack Obama a “supermodel and supercoder”.
This fashionable movement is helping combat the idea that technology is a masculine industry only of interest to boys who like gaming. It’s also helping to break down the stereotype that STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are preferred by men, while women favour humanities and the arts.
It’s not just coding that we are addressing but also the fact that every future career will be touched by technology. If women lack an understanding of the language of technology, or fail to have a basic knowledge of coding and what it takes to build a digital product, or grasp the importance of digital marketing and social media, they will be disadvantaged in all careers in years to come.
This is why we bring you Vogue Codes: with the help of Kathryn Parsons, the inspiring founder of Decoded (read about her on page 74); Westpac, which has an admirable commitment to gender equality both in the bank’s own business and the community in general; and HP, a company committed to building more attractive and female-friendly products; and with the support of Harvey Norman CEO and friend of Vogue Katie Page, who writes about this issue on page 80.
Vogue will host Vogue Codes this October – a seminar to help make careers in technology more fashionable and to encourage women to embrace technology.
In the meantime, so you might gain a better understanding of this issue, we have produced this special section to follow outlining and addressing some of the challenges as we see them.
It’s time to help make women become empowered by technology.