While the share of women in tech stagnates, La Poste has just launched a data and AI school. It trains 51 learners with exact parity. How Decode with Natalie Collin, CEO of the Group’s Consumer and Digital Branch.
It’s a kind of sea serpent A recurring theme in public debate, but a stubbornly intractable equation. Women made up 17% of the tech workforce in 2020, according to the Gender Scan 2022 survey, as the number of female graduates in the field increases and companies struggle to find the recruits they need. Worse, girls are dropping out of science courses in high school, according to a fall 2022 report by the Math and Science Collective. Its authors warned of a 61% drop in the number of students receiving more than six hours of maths lessons a week following the 2019 undergraduate reforms.
Clearly, equality in Tech is not for today, or even tomorrow. Except, perhaps, within the new school of data and artificial intelligence of the La Poste group. Launched on March 9, this vocational training school trains 51 students and has achieved gender balance since its first promotion. A clear result of desire, even, according to Natalie Collin, general manager of the group’s Consumer and Digital division, a form of necessary intransigence.
Madam Figaro: – Women and girls are increasingly rare in science and technology. How do you view this situation?
Natalie Collins. – It is very sad because those who work in Technology think about the world of tomorrow which cannot be unstoppable. Algorithms are not neutral, they are a tool of intellectual and cultural domination. The more we realize this, the better it will be for society as a whole. Ensuring that everyone contributes to their formation actually seems to me to be a safeguard for our democratic model. Especially since we are talking about new professions, not old, traditionally male professions. Therefore, there should be no barrier to entry, on the contrary. Information systems, data and IT in general offer great opportunities for diversity. Things are moving, but very little.
You yourself, how did you achieve parity between your first class?
I just demanded. Otherwise, I refused for us to start school. I remember that when we presented our project at the VivaTech fair, many young people came and told me that they wanted to register. I answered. “Okay, but it’s like going to a night club. Go to your school, find a woman interested in our training and come back.” We ended up having far more applications than expected and in our first promotion we reached 55% women. We adopted the same approach for the winning startups of our French IoT competition. When I noticed that only 10 to 15% of their management are women, I decided to make equality one of the conditions of our support. within three years we reached 50%. I don’t want to hear “there are no women”. Finding 50% of the population is not that difficult. But we must also free them. Women are accused of everything from being too absent or too present, too maternal, too controlling… Putting women in the minority and in trouble is part of the system of male dominance. Coming out benefits both women and men.
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Does this mean you are advocating positive discrimination in recruitment?
It has existed for the benefit of men for 3000 years. I don’t think it’s a problem to let women benefit from it for a few years, given the lag we have to catch up. Take the Cope-Zimmerman Act on equality of boards of directors. Without this positive discrimination, women would never have been able to achieve this. You can also search, discover women’s profiles and encourage careers in Tech. Our teams shut down LinkedIn, asked influential female developers to open their networks to us, and asked others to find their old friends from engineering school… These approaches are paying off.
Why is it so important for women to invest in these professions?
Because they offer an extraordinary opportunity, a career for the future, with strong progress. data is everywhere today, and more and more so. We hope to grow from 51 to 250 students within three years and cover all majors; data analyst, data product owner, data scientist…Here, too, the problem is to identify women in the fields of mathematics, chemistry or even management in the master’s program and to create a rank among them. You have to be a little belligerent. Definitely me. But without it, everything will not change. And it’s so easy to leave things the same…
Source: Le Figaro
