Women in ICT workshop

As a first step in our "Women in ICT" project, we organized a "Women in ICT: In Search of Identity" workshop on 19-20 December 2006 at SAP Falcha. Due to the bandh called on 19th Dec, we almost had to postpone the workshop. Nevertheless, we decided to go ahead with our schedule and indeed it was a good decision for significant number of participants turned up despite the disruption. The second day was also a fruitful one due to the presence of some key personalities.

The main question that our workshop focused on was "Why are women left behind in the ICT movement?". Discussions focused around the issue andwe were able to come up with quite a few strategies to address this issue, thanx to the valuable inputs and suggestions of the participants.

Another key feature of the workshop was the knowledge sharing mechanism that we used. Open Space methodology that we used to facilitate the discussions was appreciated and liked by all the participants. Also,setting up wiki stations was a key example of appropriation of technology.

All in all, the workshop was a satifying experience for us all.

A small initiative

IT field in Nepal is a booming industry. Today, no one industry can remain isolated from the developments in the field of IT. Be it banking sector, or hotel industry, or tourism, or software houses, IT is playing a vital role everywhere. With many IT firms opening up and many projects being outsourced to Nepal, IT promises to have a good future.

Nevertheless, I have found that not many girls/women are interested to pursue a career in IT. What maybe the reasons? If its the pressure of the job, then what job doesn't have pressure? If you are to survive in this competitive world, you have got to have a will and the capability to handle pressures. If it is the odd hours that the IT jobs demand, then there are always other options within the IT industry. In fact, IT jobs are more flexible, in terms that you can even work from the comforts of your home.

I feel that we have narrowed our horizon in terms of IT. Whenever we talk of IT jobs, we restrain ourselves to programming or designing or networking jobs. But IT is much beyond that.

In order to analyze the reasons for lower participation of females in IT sector, we have initiated a project titled "Women in IT". With this initiative, we hope be better able to know why girls do not view IT jobs as a promising and rewarding career.