Everyone Wants the Same Thing

9:41 AM

We All Want the Same Thing – Girls or Boys, Women or Men

Tech is a fast growing sector – and an engine of growth for many economies. What this means is that tech presents a great place to work and grow for everyone – men or women – in FinTech, research or tech consulting.

That’s good news, right? But the better news is that many tech skills – including the ones that turbocharge our careers – are really gender neutral. And at the heart of it all, regardless of gender, we all aspire towards better lives and careers.

Even though tech does better than some engineering fields, early childhood education or nursing, the gender participation gap still exists. And this gap is apparent when it comes to leadership roles. However, this isn’t always the case. We only need to peek into the history of tech to find amazing contributions from women in tech.

What has triggered the imbalance? And more urgently – how can we get more girls and women to join tech? After all, we have a labour crunch in tech, and females making up half our population represents a sizeable tech workforce. From the sharing and experiences of tech women leaders – Ms Tan Lee Chew and Ms Stephanie Davis, we learnt that no single actor can change the current narrative alone. It takes the collective efforts of schools, families, companies, governments, the women themselves and, most importantly, the other half of the population – men – to do this together.

What’s heartening is that SCS has gotten the ball rolling – honouring 100 Singapore Women in Tech and 18 Singapore Girls in Tech after the inaugural list last year. This is a good start, but we are in the early days.

As the next step, how about we – men – who make up the majority in the tech industry show more encouragement by telling our daughters, our wives and our female coworkers and even bosses, “You are doing great!”. Because when they are great, we all become greater together.

Enjoy the read!

TAN TENG CHEONG

Editor Fellow, SCS tan.teng.cheong@scs.org.sg

EDITOR

Tan Teng Cheong

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Irene Lim Ng Wee Wei Pavitra Krishnaswamy Vladyslav Koshelyev

EDITORIAL SUPPORT

Claudia Lim

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