Hi, everyone. My name is Dora and I'm the co-founder and youll be imagine us. And today I'm going to talk about um why fixing uh the gender divide in, in tech has to start early.Uh But before I address this question, like to address um the question of why we even need uh gender diversity in tech. Uh And I'm wondering if uh the audience could be a bit interactive. So um if you studied uh some kind of like computer science or technology, um I would love to hear sort of like in the comments if it wasn't a formal setting or an informal setting. And um if you did study technology, what was sort of the gender split in your classes? Um Awesome. And that's a mathematician and software developer. Um Curious if you had studied with uh a 5050 gender split in your classes or mainly uh male classmates or, or female classmate.

Um I personally studied both neuroscience and computer science in college. And while in my biology classes, there were uh slightly more women in computer science, it was extremely low uh sort of participation from, from female students. And why I believe that this is essentially a significant problem is because I think that technology is our future and I, I just think that there is a lot of proof or why it's true. Uh digital economy uh is growing extremely quickly. And um in the eu specifically, uh the essentially the rate of employment in the IC T uh industry is, is growing way quicker than any other industry. Um Thank you. Ok, so I'm seeing more around 10% 20% ratio of, of uh women. And then of course, even worse for, for, for people of color and black uh which is even lower representation. Thank you for the comments. Uh So this is actually the second part of, of my argument. So technology is the future. Uh but we know that women today do not equally uh participate in tech. And we know that because we see the numbers. So in the eu we make up about 17% of the tech workforce and this is actually a decrease from 10 years ago. So while the number of women is slightly increasing, the proportion of women is decreasing just because the industry is growing so, so quickly.

Um And so, so just to like finalize this logical equation, um then it logically follows that today, we don't have an equal chance to shape the future and that is what I believe we should be changing. So simply put for technology to benefit everyone, we need diversity among its creators. Um So just to take a step back also, why is it important that technology has that risk creators? Um I, I'm a start up founder. So of course, I look a lot to sort of start up knowledge and Y Combinator, which is sort of like the whole grain of start up knowledge. Uh has this this sort of uh mantra that the to get start up ideas is not to try to think of a start up ideas, just look for problems and preferably problems that you yourself have. Now. The problem with this approach is that what is going to happen to the problems of people who are not in tech, who is going to build start ups and new products for them. Um So just to quickly like take an additional turn to why I, I believe that or each day you can see the problems that surface from the lack of gender diversity in t this is an article written about my company, imagine labs in Hungarian Forbes magazine.

I'm originally from Hungary and you probably don't notice. But in Hungarian language, we don't differentiate between uh men and women, the gender pronouns. So when Google translate, had to uh translate the text to English from Hungarian. When my friends started to, to read this article, they kept asking me, why did they refer to you in the article as he? Um And so simply what happens is that uh machine translation is not perfect. It works with data in fact to it and it works with um data that um is put in based on currently available sources. And it made the assumption that a start up planner, an engineer would most likely be male as opposed to female. And so there's a lot of examples of this in machine translation and actually truth to be told, Google has been working to fix this issue. Um So, uh uh I'm not sure if this would work in other languages like uh like Slo Slovenian. Um But in Hungarian, this is an issue in Turkish. It is an issue in, in Spanish. If you translate from English to, to Spanish, for example, doctors often assumed to be male and the nurse is female and whatnot. And so this is sort of just like one example where uh the lack of gender representation goes wrong in tech today. A more significant uh example was uh two years, almost two years ago.

I think the launch of the Apple squad where actually it so happened that women were limited in their financial capabilities because the algorithms as as it was referred to uh by, by Goldman Sachs and Apple essentially just discriminated against women and gave them a lower um credit limit.

Um And beyond that, there's actually even more significant examples where uh it isn't just an inconvenience that technology is, is not built to be inclusive. Um such as when, you know, voice recognition doesn't recognize your voices or facial recognition doesn't recognize you.

Um But there is literally life sort of threatening situations. Um But on sort of the upside of it, there are already examples in the industry where women uh have taken a step forward and actually brought in solutions uh that uh others might have not thought of. So while um Apple has first missed out on the opportunity to introduce anything related to female health and the health app, um an app called clue was launched uh pretty soon which actually uh supported women in tracking their menstrual cycles. Um So the point that I'm trying to get across here is that uh eventually by having more diversity, be that gender diversity or really all patterns of diversity within intact, uh All we need is more diversity among the creators in particularly the the area of expertise that I have is is around involving the tech.

And that's what I've been personally working with a lot. Um And so the specific sort of like part of the pipeline that I've been focusing on is essentially starting early. Um The reason for that is is because there is a lot of studies showing and also sort of my primary research has found the same thing is that girls and boys express sort of similar interest in technology in stamina, just interest but also confidence until around the age of 11.

But by the age of 16, uh a huge proportion of girls drop their interest. So what can happen in these times, potentially uh societal aspects kick in uh girls start to do more of what their friends are doing and and dropping a lot of their extracurricular activities. So our idea, I imagine that has been if we could create a product and a community that would capture girls interest, just like right before this, this change happens. So around uh up until around the of 1112 and then maintain uh girls sense of belonging and confidence in, in, in technology and coding, then we could really make a change. And so we've worked together with hundreds of girls to, to core essentially product ideas of things that they could use in their everyday life to learn coding. And so one of the, some of the things that we observed was that this target age group uh really enjoy to do things with their friends being creative and that phones are sort of the number one device that teenagers or preteens phones and an ipad or tablet use. Um Yes. And so we also saw that there was an opportunity to linking girls hobbies uh to King in order to make it even more fun and appealing. And so what is that?

And being uh is, is an app where we teach Python programming in a gaming T and visual way. And we do that also through a physical extension, which is our hardware, the Magic Chat and I have that here, um which I can wake up. It's sort of like a Tama go that you can customize, do coding. So in our app, uh and I can show that quickly on the slides and then also demo it, users create in Python. So we're actually teaching a real coding language. Uh Then this coding project can be worn on the Man charm and then finally, also shared within the community because we uh realize how important the community aspect of it is. So if I'm opening up our app or you see here, these are all coding projects created by our users and shared with each other. And if I just tap on a project, I can quickly open up the code, you can see this is all written in, in, in Python, run the code and then um upload it over to the Machar via Bluetooth. And so now it is loading up and, and the coding project has actually um appeared. So it is a really, really tangible and fun way of, of learning to, to code.

Um So after today, we've had around more than 15,000 just created just in this eight by eight matrix which has sort of proven to us that it can be um a good sort of first step having this sandbox environment sort of creates a more safe environment to get started. The possibilities are limitless but still somehow more constrained. So they really spark creativity. Um And, and we try to be at this like right edge of fun and challenge so that our, our coders remain motivated uh both by challenge but also by a sense of achievement. Um And uh yeah, so I think like the biggest sort of uh motivator for, for us at image labs is just seeing our, our app and our product in action. Uh just to give you a bit of sort of the entrepreneurial twist to it. I've been working on image labs now will be in three years and, and um sort of one year into the company is when we launched a Kickstarter campaign. Um And, and that's when we got uh sort of like a funding to be able to create meats. And then last summer, we actually launched it on the market. And then since then, we've been selling it across Europe and U and we also worked with organizations like Black girls code, uh girl scouts and other summer camps. Um So there's still a long way to go for us to so like fix the gender gender pipeline.

Um But it's just been a really fun journey for us and just to finish off, I wanted to get back bit into sort of like the, the technical aspect of it because the title of, of the talk was also um essentially how to design together with the users and why we think our solution is a fun way to learn to code.

And so a analogy that I like to use is that uh I look at coding as a tool um that is just there for you to solve problems and, and get things done. And so learning to code is a bit similar to, to learning new languages where there is some of us who like to be extremely creative. So in the language realm that would be singing songs and reading poems, and some of us like to be logical and look at grammar rules. And so the same way with the Mai app and the Machar, we, we try to deliver this uh idea. So some of our, our users and coders enjoy exploring R DB colors and being very artistic, but some of them enjoy more the logical aspect. And so, for example, this one project here, this, this dye uh was created using the Python Random Library. So you can actually every time you run your code and upload it to the manager or just preview it on your phone, it throws a different number. So it functions like an actual dye. Um So this is really sort of a toy as it is today. Uh But what we believe that it can be an extremely powerful sort of uh uh disruptor by giving that confidence and sense of belonging into to young girls. And so currently, uh we mostly focus on nine to sort of 13 year olds.

Um But we also have younger and older uh users of our our app and, and um our devices. Um and so sort of like one other final thing that I think is really exciting about both sort of like learning to code and, and learning to code with our solution for, for uh for Children and younger girls. Is that really nobody is saying that coding is going to be easy or, or becoming an engineer is going to be easy. So I think learning at a young age that progress is done through practice and also that errors and mistakes are your friends uh is an extremely powerful message. So our sort of error messages uh uh in within our our ID. So our development environment try to be really friendly and really instructive so that um young women don't become afraid of making mistakes, but know that that's sort of just natural part of learning and making, making progress. So that is just a screenshot of our website and where we are today, we are focusing on, on growing our community, but also adding more and more uh lessons and and quests as we call them into our gamify learning journey to, to deliver even more Python coding knowledge to our our users.

And on this final image, what you see, uh these girls are some of our imani girls. So they have been our ambassadors and every year we have a different group of ambassadors, but they've also been essentially part of shaping the product. So since the beginning, and that's because also of my background, I, I studied user centered design and US design as well. Uh We've been just wanting to bring in uh sort of the end user perspective, we really believe that can be powerful in shaping and, and forming the product. Um So I was a little faster uh than the allocated time, but I would love to, to see if there's any questions perhaps in the chat that you would like to, to share that I can answer. And I'm also going to leave my personal linked in here and um just our website in case you would like to check that out. Um.