TWO TECH ON
ARE FILIPINO WOMEN COMFORTABLE WITH TECHNOLOGY? GAIL TAN, GOOGLE PHILIPPINES HEAD OF Communications and Public Affairs, says that globally there are many issues that still need to be addressed about women, including choosing a career in cience, echnol
The Philippines, like most nations, is done addressing the basics – the right to education, the right to vote, the right to embrace a career, even the right to be online and participate in internet discourse. “But something that we noticed at Google is that when it comes to science and technology, women are not that comfortable yet,” she says at the opening of the Celebrate Women Forum held to mark International Women’s Day earlier this month.
The forum, held in partnership with Cosmo Philippines, came on the heels of a Connected Consumer Survey carried out by Google that revealed that there are slightly more women than men online in the Philippines. However, 41 percent of the respondents said they still lack the time to go online while 30 percent do not know how to do the things they want on the internet. Seventy percent of the women believe though that the internet could help them improve their opportunities.
in the panel discussion and two were from the science and technology industry – Stephanie Sy, CEO and founder of global data science consultancy Thinking Machines; and Valenice Balace, CEO and managing partner of Honesty Apps, which created the Philippine-based social dating app, Peekawoo.
“We invited these women to tell us how they sights and experiences, other women will know how they can do it, too,” says Tan.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN TECH
Ever since big data and analytics exploded in the technology space, the world’s biggest tech companies have been scrambling for talents in the data reer choice for technology professionals.
Sy, who graduated from Stanford University, has carved a place in this industry as a woman a social media technology startup in Silicon Val built data analysis tools at Google before coming back to Manila in 2013 to start her own company.
Now a recognized data scientist globally, a startup founder and CEO – and she’s not yet 30 – Sy acknowledges the gender divide in STEM “I’ve worked with startups in the US and here and I honestly think that the Philippines is more percent women – and guys are actually very excited about it – but we do have very strong women leaders in client companies we work for. We know that our opinions will be taken well,” she says. Sy’s company, Thinking Machines, is a data science consultancy that helps clients from winning media organizations make data-driven decisions at all levels by leveraging data and machine learning to solve business problems.
“If you have opened a newspaper recently and how it is experiencing a new renaissance. It’s really exciting to be running a company that is trying to get ahead of AI in Southeast Asia.”
Balace, on the other hand, graduated from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde in 2009 with a degree in Computer Applications. She previously worked at Smart Communications and Voyager Innovations as a developer, analyst and product manager. She has extensive background in location-based systems, network, architecture and systems, mobile manufacturing and app and website development. Currently the CEO and managing partner of Honesty Apps, a dating, conference and community apps platform, Balace made it to the list of Forbes Asia’s “30 category for her contribution to the developer ecosystem. “When I started in college, there were 40 students in class and only three were girls. By the next term, I was the only girl. I’m so used to being the only girl. When I started working, I the only girl. So, when I started my own company, there was a time when all of us are girls. We started getting resumés (from women programmers) who wanted to work with us,” she says.
When an all-girl company like Honesty Apps
starts making a dating app, what changes? “The dating tech scene are all guys. Think Match.com or Plenty of Fish. But we were the only dating company that reached 70 percent of the population. For girls, we have our own dating goals and we were talking to girls,” she says.
STARTING YOUNG
and to push girls to go into STEM, the Department of Education (DepEd) allotted a big budget ICT packages, P4.5 billion for 9,000 science and 17,000 laboratories nationwide. But according to Rosario Oreta Lapus, president of Miriam College, which has a strong STEM program, more needs to be done. “Only about 20 to 30 percent of women are going into STEM (from the UNESCO ed in medicine or research rather than computer science. We have to open more opportunities for everyone,” she says. Part of the strategy is exposing girls to more role models. “You cannot be what you cannot see,” she says. “Change expectations, make sure that they have a place in that and they see themselves there.”
Both Sy and Balace admit to growing up in a business family. “My grandparents on both sides established business after World War II, my parents also started their own business. Our dinner conversations were mostly about what would you do as a manager and they are fantastic role models. They built a big company from nothing in the course of the last 25 years. So when the time came for me to strike out on my own, it wasn’t as intimidating for me as for most other people,” says Sy.
Balace, on the other hand, shares about waking up every morning to a factory and going home every day from school to a living room full of socks because the family is into manufacturing textiles and men’s apparel. In high school, she did cashier and payroll work.
“When I started my company, it was just a hobby. It’s something I do other than my day job. Three months into it, we didn’t even have a concept of a venture capitalist coming in to invest in years later, we expanded our operations to Vietnam and we now have a total of 40 employees.
“Lapus underscores the importance of starting STEM, we need good teachers who can teach math even to the mathematically challenged,” she says.
THE PATH TO STEM
Not all careers come with linear paths. Both Sy and Balace say that their pathway to STEM was actually accidental.
“I went to a school that is very memorization heavy and math is the only class that didn’t re not good with memorization so I really enjoyed math. If you understand the fundamental rules, you can work on any kind of problem. That’s one of the joys of STEM. It’s very objective. You can discover new things, you can build on your fundamental knowledge – you can build apps, chat bots, self-driving cars. That all came from an understanding of the basics. It’s fun,” Sy says.
Balace, too, found her way into computer programming because she missed the enrolment in a Marketing course. “I was surprised that I liked programming. I didn’t expect to like it so much. I started as a backend developer. Then I started to look for a hobby that I can do on the side using the skills that I had. So I started with the dating app. I didn’t really think of it as a business at the start. I enjoyed it so much,” she says.
Is there anything that still gets them excited about technology? For Sy, it’s the new renais inventions like self-driving cars or innovations in human perception and computer vision.“We started doing apps in a year, months, weeks.
“Five years ago it can cost a million, today it can cost less and can be up in minutes. Now you can also make a lot of things. There’s a lot of talk about AI. We already started AI for chat, it is so fast, exciting, so there’s no ceiling with what you can learn,” adds Balace.