Mark Lyn­der­say

Last Tues­day, an im­pres­sive gath­er­ing of school­girls showed up for the first Caribbean edi­tion of Mi­crosoft's Digi­Girlz se­ries of youth-fo­cused sem­i­nars.Ac­cord­ing to Pradeep Ra­man, gen­er­al man­ag­er, Mi­crosoft Trinidad and To­ba­go, the com­pa­ny be­gan the Digi­Girlz project as part of its di­ver­si­ty pro­gramme and has specif­i­cal­ly em­pha­sised it in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca to, in Ra­man's words, "reach out to young women at the in­flec­tion point in their lives when they are mak­ing de­ci­sions about their fu­ture."The young women were in for a mixed bag of some­times opin­ion­at­ed ad­vice, Mi­crosoft soft-sell and at least one hour's worth of riv­et­ing life sto­ries from fe­male pro­fes­sion­als de­liv­ered at fire­hose pres­sure.The Digi­Girlz ex­pe­ri­ence is dif­fer­ent de­pend­ing on where it's host­ed and what kind of re­sources are avail­able. There's an on­line com­po­nent with cur­ricu­lum ma­te­r­i­al here: http://bit.ly/ivbIW8.Out of the half-day of the event that I wit­nessed, it's fair to say that the young women got their day's worth out of just the pan­el dis­cus­sion, which brought a rich re­source of fe­male pro­fes­sion­als to bear on the mis­sion en­cour­ag­ing young women to set the bar high for their am­bi­tion.

Sen­a­tor Nan Go­sine-Ram­goolam, Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion, sit­ting in for an un­avoid­ably ab­sent but ap­par­ent­ly keen­ly in­ter­est­ed Prime Min­is­ter for the fea­ture re­marks, gave a talk that seemed to be as much about cau­tion­ing the young at­ten­dees about the dan­gers of tech­nol­o­gy as it was about flog­ging the Min­istry's ICT ini­tia­tives. It was hard to tease from the for­mer teacher's speech a clear and un­equiv­o­cal call to en­gage­ment in hard­core ICT.That wasn't the case with the pan­elists who were of­ten bor­der­line mil­i­tant in their call to arms for the cause of young women in the dig­i­tal work­place."I'm go­ing to put in a plug here for math­e­mat­ics," said UWI se­nior lec­tur­er in Com­put­er Sci­ence, Mar­garet Bernard.

"It's a base that will take you any­where and if you have a feel for it, pur­sue it. I'd like to dif­fer a bit on the kind of sta­tis­tics I'm hear­ing about girls. In our bach­e­lor's class­es, half of them are young women. There are al­so many fe­males pur­su­ing oth­er stud­ies. There is no glass ceil­ing in ca­reers. Every­thing is open to you."Frances Cor­reia, ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent for Gov­ern­ment busi­ness, Fu­jit­su Caribbean, proved to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly en­gag­ing and straight­for­ward speak­er with a grit­ty Tri­ni-flavoured speak­ing voice.

"I have a big ti­tle, but ba­si­cal­ly, I'm in sales for an IT com­pa­ny," she be­gan, en­cour­ag­ing a tit­ter from her au­di­ence."I don't have a pas­sion for IT for it­self, I like what it can do, how it can en­able so­lu­tions and de­liv­er a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life.""The big gap be­tween where you are to­day as a stu­dent and where you will end up is in de­vel­op­ing cre­ative think­ing, prepar­ing your­self for the prob­lem solv­ing is­sues of work life. The bun­dle of ex­pe­ri­ences you have be­come a re­source that you car­ry with you for the rest of your life."

"I came from a chal­leng­ing back­ground," lo­cal an­i­ma­tion cham­pi­on Camille Selvon-Abra­hams said, "But I nev­er used that as an ex­cuse not to suc­ceed or to lim­it me in any way."It would fall to Jacque­line François, COO of Os­car François Ltd, who set aside a po­ten­tial ca­reer in IT to re­turn to her fam­i­ly's busi­ness to wave a flag for pro­gram­ming."De­spite the con­cerns of oth­er pre­sen­ters," François said, "this world needs peo­ple who can sit by them­selves and work out prob­lems that need to be dealt with."Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn with notes from the pan­el dis­cus­sion here: http://ow.ly/5dyzu.