Women Leaders in Technology(WLiT) believes that women can and should hold key leadership and decision making positions in technology. Our work is far from realised however; the Kathmandu Post recently reported that according to the 2017/18 Nepal Labor Force Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Statistics, the male to female working age population ratio in Nepal is 100:125 while the ratio of employment is a mere 100:59. Women are still absent from managerial positions since less than 1 out of 7 managers in the country are female according to the same survey.
In order to address this, WLiT and NWiC organised an event called “Women Tech it Up!” to build a network of women in tech groups.The alliance would collect and organise through a 2 day facilitated summit where they form a collective vision for the future of tech and their roles in it, ending with a 5 month goal for each institution to reach a 2 year collective vision.Each team will use funding to integrate these agendas to their programs and report back to WLiT and NWiC within the next 5 months of the outcomes.
The event was held in september 10 and 11 which was facilitated by Mrs. Sumeera Shrestha, where representatives from all organisations came together to identify the actual problem in the community in terms of Women in Tech and did a mindmap of how to work together to address these problems on a greater scale. The event was attended by 26 partners , 5 organisations and 21 small clubs and communities. After the event the participating organisations and clubs organised many small programs aligning with mission and vision made on summit over September, October , nov, and december. The closing summary program will be held on Feb 11 on occasion of International day of girls in science and tech.
Till date 22 programs have been already organized and it is estimated that we will reach 3000+ people , majority of them who are women and including non-binary, Queer and boys (school students).
Shreya Basnet