Thu | Mar 28, 2024

Hundreds come together for ‘powerful’ Girls in ICT conference

Published:Friday | April 28, 2023 | 1:11 AMAsha Wilks/Gleaner Writer
Kimona Bowen, student of Central High School, plays a virtual reality game during the Girls in ICT Conference and Expo at the AC Hotel Kingston, located in St Andrew, yesterday.
Kimona Bowen, student of Central High School, plays a virtual reality game during the Girls in ICT Conference and Expo at the AC Hotel Kingston, located in St Andrew, yesterday.

It was Kimona Bowen’s first encounter being immersed in virtual reality (VR), an experience she initially found to be very frightening. But soon after, the engagement with the technology piqued her interest, serving as further motivation to pursue her passion to work in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The Central High School student was one of more than 200 girls from across the island who were in attendance at the inaugural Girls in ICT Conference and Exposition organised by FLOW at the AC Hotel Kingston on Thursday. There, they were inspired to make their mark in the digital world.

International Girls in ICT Day is celebrated annually on the fourth Thursday of April. This year’s theme is ‘Digital Skills for Life’.

Bowen told The Gleaner that starting in primary school, she developed a passion for coding and would often go searching on Google for coding websites to sharpen her knowledge in the area.

After taking a break for a short while from coding, when an ICT club was formed recently at Central High, the 16-year-old stated that “it was a good way to get back into learning how to code and doing different things in ICT”.

She boasted that the school club, which a little more than 20 members, consisted mostly of girls, some of whom were in leadership positions, including vice-president.

“When you look at the technological industry, there are not a lot of females in there, so [to] bring out so many females, to understand that they can join a male-dominated area, I think this [event] is a very powerful thing,” Bowen said

Jamaica-born Natalie Bennett, who is a senior product manager at Google, in her keynote address, encouraged the young ladies to follow their passion.

Reflecting on her own personal journey, Bennett highlighted that despite at first studying business management and working in that area, her fiery passion for tech could not be suppressed.

Bennett, who grew up in the downtown Kingston inner city, was first introduced to a computer during her tenure at Convent of Mercy (Alpha) Academy, but the older she got, her dream of working in the tech industry seemed next to impossible, given her financial challenges.

She said that in the past, computers did not represent a viable career path for building out technology, but were merely machines that replaced typewriters.

“It was just a skill you got so you could work in the office and do administrative work,” she said.

The primary professions that were seen as more feasible, she stated, were those of lawyer, doctor, teacher, and banker.

When she started to work as a customer service representative at a cable company, she returned to her destined path towards tech as the software that ran the system would frequently crash, causing her to often be in dialogue with the developer, who would visit the company to fix the issues.

“I would ask questions, and I would watch, and I would just be, like, ‘What are you doing?’. And then after a while, he didn’t have to come to the office any more because I would call him, tell him what’s wrong, [and] he would walk me through it, and I would fix the problem. Then [a time came] where I wouldn’t have to call him at all,” she said.

As the years went by, Bennett stated that she began to feel unsatisfied in her profession and encountered numerous disappointments that discouraged her from following her intended path in life.

But through the encouragement she received from close friends, she went overseas on a scholarship to attend graduate school, where she faced discrimination.

“I was a black, female immigrant in tech. Being just one of those things brings its own sets of challenges, but the intersectionality of it can be very overwhelming,” she said, highlighting that she was one of two black females and one of five black students of a cohort of more than 200.

“Things in life may not always go the way you plan. There is always something to learn. Nothing you experience will ever be a wasted effort if you learn and grow from it,” she said in encouraging the girls.

She reassured the students that many opportunities exist for them to achieve their dreams and to hone their digital skills.

For his part, Stephen Price, chairman of the FLOW Foundation, said the exposition was born out of the company’s mission to encourage equality and inclusion in the ICT space and was about equipping young women with digital skills.

“The world of technology is exciting, dynamic, rewarding, and fast-paced,” he declared, adding that Flow was excited about the increased capabilities of technology and the new opportunities they brought through emerging tech applications.

“Traditional roles such as pilots and doctors will continue to be in demand. However, there is going to be a need for new roles to be filled – cloud architects, data scientists, blockchain analysts, senior product managers for Google Maps, and the list goes on,” Price said, noting that ICT continues to power exponential growth, which makes it important that women are equipped to participate.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com