Technology, a man’s world ripe for female conquest

Cynthia de Benito

Lisbon, Aug 27 (EFE).- Career or family: if you choose the former, you may not be sexy. So go the stereotypes women who venture into technology continue to face, a field in which they are beginning to say “enough is enough” and it’s time to design a future that includes the other half of humanity.

The feeling is that the debate about the lack of female presence in the top ranks of this sector has been modulating, and it is no longer a question of asking for space, but of assuming that it is also their place.

Ambition to build a future that the current generation of young people imagines in the short term and even emphatically: “I think that in ten years probably women will dominate technology,” Aminata Dembele, a 21-year-old French woman who wants to widen that path, tells Efe .

Dembele is one of the 27 young women – one for each State of the European Union (EU) – who this week discovered in Lisbon, in a meeting organized by Huawei, what are the obstacles that women face to develop a career in technology, where stereotypes reign.

“There are ideas with which we have grown up and which are things that we have very internalized, and to be recognized for the same work as a man you have to work twice as hard,” says her Spanish colleague Marta Campos Fornés, also 21 years old.

It is not the only difference that this student of Mathematics and Physics sees: “You are going to end up getting promoted because of your merits and not because of your potential, as happens with some men,” she says without bitterness, but with a feeling of confidence that things are going to change.

FAMILY OR CAREER

“I would like to know if I am going to have to prove more than a man…”

“I have been told that you have to choose between having a career or a family, because technology is more demanding…”