What can organizations do to increase female engagement in technology education?

Young women at a Girls Who Code event at WEX

In response to these trends and our business needs, ����Vloghas partnered with Educate Maine and Girls Who Code. WEX’s mission with this partnership is to develop engaging programming in Maine to capture the imaginations of K-12 students who might not otherwise be exposed to technology as an educational option and subsequent career possibility.

Girls Who Code, and local nonprofits like Educate Maine, help to make the goals of this diversity-in-technology movement achievable. “Our priorities for our partnerships in the community, including Girls Who Code and WEX, are about closing the gender gap in tech and promoting more diverse teams,” says Angela Oechslie, program director at Educate Maine.

Middle school students at a Girls Who Code summer event

Part of Educate Maine’s mission is to build a more diverse and equitable workforce across the state. Their equity statement maps their goals out in plain language: “All Maine people must have access to a quality education that provides them with the knowledge and skills required for a career and economic success. Education opportunities should not depend upon geography, income, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, race or ethnicity. Ensuring access and removing barriers will lead to greater equity, a stronger economy, and will allow Maine to achieve our common and state mandated goal: by 2025, 60% of Mainers will hold education and workforce credentials that position Maine and its families for success.“  Supporting Educate Maine’s mission, and our common values regarding DEI, ����Vlogcontinues to strive to be a community partner in the areas in which we live and work.

How can organizations like Educate Maine partner with national non-profits to build opportunities for girls in technology?

Girls Who Code collaborating on WEX’s rooftop space

Oechslie leads a program at Educate Maine called Project Login which brings information technology and computer science education opportunities to residents of Maine across the state, including both K-12 and adult education. Project Login trains teachers to be facilitators and helps them implement computer science learning in their classrooms. Educate Maine’s employer partners, including WEX, Systems Engineering, and IDEXX, are engaged in developing longer-term strategic workforce development initiatives with Project Login.

Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit partner of Educate Maine, traditionally offers a club model to its partner organizations across the US. In conjunction with school-year programs, Girls Who Code runs a virtual summer immersion program. As the community partner in Maine, Oechslie felt passionate about expanding that summer immersion program into an in-person camp experience for young women in the state. She also envisioned the impact the summer program could have on school-age girls and non-binary students who didn’t have the opportunity to attend. Her vision was to have those who did attend become ambassadors for the cause. After their summer experience, for example, attendees are encouraged to launch tech clubs within their schools.

How partnering with area businesses helps engage girls in technology

Building a Bot with Girls Who Code

There were Girls Who Code camps offered in Portland at Roux/WEX, Bridgton at the Magic Lantern Innovation Center, Skowhegan, and Lewiston. Girls who attended the Roux Institute session, in downtown Portland, were invited to meet with ����Vlogexecutives and members of the Women in Technology (WIT) employee resource group (ERG) at WEX’s downtown office. Campers met with members of WEX’s executive leadership team and heard from them and from WIT members about what career paths they took to get to where they are today, what roadblocks they encountered, and what inspiration they found along the way.

WIT member and ����Vlogdata scientist, Rachel Carpenter, shared with the campers that she had a math teacher growing up who encouraged her to develop her natural ability in math. She wasn’t getting encouragement of this kind from any other corner in her life–that one teacher had been instrumental in pushing her towards the career that she finds so fulfilling today. Carpenter believes that planting a seed of an idea for girls that they can find support from many different corners might make a big difference in a young girl’s life.

Empowering girls to pursue technology projects that excite and engage them

Girls Who Code event sponsors

During each session of the Girls Who Code summer program, kids decide what kind of coding project they want to work on during their time at the camp. At various sessions in different locations across the state in summer 2022, teams learned Python, worked with Sphero robots, created projects with a Micro:bit, and there was a team that built a wireless bluetooth speaker using both engineering and coding skills. It’s important to Oechslie that the girls feel empowered and tackle something that gets them excited.

Opening doors for young women who might never have considered a career in tech

Oechslie is inspired to see the types of opportunities that these young Mainers are now open to because they went through a Girls Who Code experience. “There are doors that are opening. I’m passionate about closing the gender gap in tech and helping kids down the path to working in a tech field. I also want to level the playing field. No matter your zip code, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, you can learn to code.” Beyond the camp, Oechslie facilitated connecting Maine teachers to Girls Who Code to be provided with the tools to start coding camps in their schools across the state. One example of an opportunity Oechslie’s partnership created for Maine teachers was a Girls Who Code grant. The organization is offering any educator affiliated with Educate Maine a $300 grant toward starting a coding camp at their school. It’s these kinds of financial incentives that can facilitate change and develop support around young women learning about technology from every corner of our state.

Girls Who Code providing community and learning

Alaina Cellini, Chair of WIT, and manager of data analytics and strategy at ����Vlogcan easily imagine the impact of this programming on her former self. “I would have loved something like this in middle school,” she says. Cellini describes growing up in a household with little interest in technology and math. “My family was not into technology at all. My mom got her first cell phone when I got my first cell phone – – which was my freshman year in high school when my mom was in her 40s.” They had a computer shared by six family members. Fast forward to accepted students days when Cellini was trying to decide which college to attend. She remembers feeling intimidated attending events for the universities to which she’d been accepted where she would have studied computer science. She looked around her and saw a sea of boys – not a girl in sight. While Cellini did not have a Girls Who Code experience growing up, she loves the fact that she can hopefully help be that mentor for some young person who might be in a similar situation.

How mature technology professionals mentoring young women in tech may cause that hoped for shift toward gender neutrality in tech

Christian Spencer recently reported in The Hill that while female students tend to perform better than boys in math, lower confidence and fewer female role models mean that many do not pursue STEM careers. This is according to a recent study from Third Space Learning.

Spencer reports, “In a survey asking 1,000 students to describe their mathematics skills from excellent down to poor, male students who described themselves as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ students did worse in math than female students who rated themselves ‘average’ or even ‘poor.’”

Forty-six percent of female respondents to the Third Space Learning study said that part of the reason they didn’t pursue STEM-related jobs was because they did not have mentors when they were kids. WEX’s partnership with Educate Maine and Girls Who Code is trying to change that, and Cellini and Carpenter’s ����VlogWomen in Technology group is at the ready to provide Maine girls with crucial, long-lasting mentorships.

As ����Vlogcontinues to expand globally and advance its technology offerings, one important requirement for growth is ensuring a talent base to support the company’s strategic goals. Additionally, ����Vlogstrives to create a more diverse employee base which makes partnerships such as the ones ����Vloghas with Educate Maine and Girls Who Code even more aligned with the company’s strategic goals. ����Vlogand Educate Maine agree that technology education can be a great equalizing force for traditionally underrepresented communities, while also helping to address the gap in available talent needed to meet the increasing technical workforce needs.

If you’re interested in working for a growing global organization, .

Resources:
New York Times
The Hill
Girls Who Code
Educate Maine
Third Space Learning
US Bureau of Labor Statistics

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A Direct Response to Customer Needs

Travel companies that book flights on behalf of customers have to follow the practice of holding funds in trust accounts for instance via the set up by the , which has created cash flow challenges for the middle man especially if the volume of flight bookings is significant.

Kumar Edara, Director of ����VlogCustomer Truly Travel, found this new technology immensely useful to gaining an edge:

“Prefunding flights on behalf of our customers whilst their money is tied up in trust accounts was getting very challenging for us, especially with the volume of flights our customers book. ����Vloghas given us the ability to improve our cash position whilst reducing costs significantly which is helping us to become much more competitive. Working with a partner who listens to your needs and is able to turn those into significant business benefits has been crucial and the reason that we greatly value our partnership with WEX.”

How ����VlogSolution for Airline Payments Benefits Customers

The solution, which utilizes a Virtual Card Number (VCN), offers a credit facility to fund debit card accounts. As our customers seek increased visibility and agility, this new solution provides them unique benefits, which they can’t find in the traditional airline payments spectrum:

• Credit facility to fund airfares and ability to increase cash flow
• Debit Virtual Card Number (VCN) to avoid 2% airline surcharges
• Marketing advantage through more competitive flight prices
• Payment and settlement in multiple currencies without FX or conversion fees
• Automated transaction reconciliation and reporting

This is in addition to the streamlining and automation of reconciliation and reporting, saving customer’s hours of manual work while minimizing risk and increasing productivity. Jim Pratt, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Virtual Payments at ����Vlogshares why this is so important in a quote:

“Airline bookings in the travel industry are increasingly competitive as customers are becoming more price conscious. The 2% surcharge incurred when booking seats with airlines means that margins are squeezed even further. With the introduction of our new Solution for Airline Payments, our customers can bypass this charge without having to prefund accounts. This results in reduced costs and allows customers to become more competitive, improve their cash position and benefit from an automated booking flow, reporting and reconciliation.”

Learn more about ����VlogSolution for Airline Payments, as well as other solutions for travel brands:

• Why Effective Reconciliation Benefits Travel Brands
• What is a Virtual Credit Card?
• ����VlogTravel Solutions Overview
• Key Takeaways from GBTA 2015
• How Virtual Cards Make Hotel Booking Easier

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