 community leaders here. So we got tech lady and women who call girls in tech and the young women. I know sometimes this name confuses people with coding girls as well. So yeah let's go with what you do, who are you, what organization, what the program is. So hello my name is Eli Shen. I'm the founder of Tech Ladies. So Tech Ladies is a community for women to connect, grow and learn as programmers in the tech industry. So we do run a bunch of programs like study groups, workshops. I guess like one of the most famous program that we do is this Tech Ladies Bootcamp. It's a 12-week part-time bootcamp where we take women or with a near zero technical background and put them through a bootcamp to eventually become programmers. So since launch last year we have trained about 23 women and seven of them actually got internship or junior software engineers now, really really proud of these ladies. So for Tech Ladies that's my passion project. During the day I work at Facebook as the developer programs regionally for Asia-Pacific. Hi, okay people can you hear me? I'm Purnima Kamit. I'm a director for Women Who Code in Singapore. Women Who Code is a global nonprofit and we launched in Singapore in January this year. Our aim is to inspire more women in tech careers and in order to do that we also host events, tech related events for a women only audience, speaker sessions, coding sessions, workshops and such. So I mean our main belief is to actually build a strong network which helps learn and develop new skill sets in order to realize opportunities, you know tech career related opportunities in Singapore. And my motivation, we always talk about a lack of women in senior management on boards as founders. So I think we could start by learning new things, creating new things and that's how we fix the pipeline. Hi everyone, I'm Wan Ting. I lead the Singapore chapter for Girls in Tech. So Girls in Tech is actually a global organization. We are 10 years old now. We have over 60 chapters around the world and the mission of Girls in Tech is to empower, engage and educate girls and women who are passionate in technology to have a voice in the industry. And here in Singapore our mandate is we have three main chapters, three main pillars that we are focusing on. The first part is definitely on pipeline. We see that there is a pipeline issue that needs to be addressed. How do we encourage more girls to step into STEM industries and not be afraid because now it's more male dominated but it should change in the near future. And the second part is on building out confidence and leadership skills and goals and letting them take up leadership positions like what you mentioned. So that's the second part and the third part is really on skills and technical skill sets like teaching them on coding skills and having design thinking book camps and things like that. I'm Mini and I work for UN Women which is the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and we work on a lot of issues around ending rounds against women, economic empowerment, women in leadership but one of the cool things that we launched four years ago is initiative called Girls to Pioneers which works on exactly that, the pipeline, creating the next generation pipeline of female workforce in STEM. So we work with young students on getting them to understand STEM, giving them access to STEM opportunities, just giving them an overview of what it looks like to work in and all the amazing women on the panels before this are role models for them. We also work with parents and teachers on integrating STEM into early learning especially for young girls and with employers on hiring and retention of female STEM talent. Cool, so I have a full-off question for Mini. You are coming from UN Women so you have been working since 2010 so it's been like seven years. So during all your career what is the biggest achievement through your career? That's a difficult question for me. I'm a bit of a glasses half-empty person so I'm going to say because we haven't achieved gender equality, we haven't achieved anything. For me I think Girls to Pioneers has been that success because when we first started it I wasn't sure how it would go or whether we would have any progress in inspiring young girls but in a very short time 17,000 girls have now just indicated that they're entrusted in understanding more about STEM. They've been a part of our programs, they're going forward in doing this and the first lot of them have just gone or are just going to university this year so we're going to see how many of them are actually pursuing STEM careers. So I'll get back to you after I check that. So we are all with female folks group and through all the the program we are trying to running, trying to promoting women to present me to tech fields. So what do you think is the most effective way to to increase the gender ratio in tech fields? Yeah like well what's your ideas? Probably I can go. So to me I think it's a lot on community building and also about celebrating female role models so to encourage in any situation it's really difficult to be a minority and feel like you're alone. That's why Girls in Tech and I'm sure like the other community leaders would feel the same that to have a strong community of support and say that everyone is here for you and don't be afraid. There are people who have been there and done that and you can just go ahead and just do it. I also think that network plays a big role I mean right now I feel we also have we don't have many women role models like you said it's our responsibility to build that as well for future generations and you know also doing more creating more and then learning keep keep challenging yourself. I think that's raising your hand whenever there's an opportunity available that helps. So like how I see it is really to see everything in in on a big picture right like what are the I see us working together not necessarily collaborating but rather let's not duplicate each other's work. So if you're targeting girls I don't need to do girls I can focus on women if you're running workshops I don't need to do more workshops I can focus on bootcamp. So in so in the grand scheme of things you can see that we are very clearly serving girls and women females in general in a very nice a very neat sort of like collaborative cohesive kind of a structure. So that's how I see how we can help in in getting more women girls interested participating in the industry. I want to take a step back actually and start with mindset change at a younger age but also for the community that influences these young girls because we interact with a lot of teachers who tell us but girls just don't get it like why do you even bother girls don't get it or why do you want to inspire girls to go into tech and engineering because engineers are so androgynous and we want our girls to be ladies and these are female teachers who had signs for some of the most prestigious schools and so for us we want to take step back and change that mindset because that is already going to limit girls at a very young age from accessing these careers. Even for myself I started in 7th year but during my study I didn't go so I just assume okay coding is not my thing but after I self know okay it's not so difficult as I imagine so I think the perception need to change definitely it's it's very very big problem yeah so I have another question so as organizer do you have any time that you are frustrated while we are doing because like the problem while trying to solve is so huge and how do you have any time think oh this is cannot work and what was the first for stretching it is just share with the audience and see how we can help. So I can go first confession I didn't think that the bootcamp will work the model of a technical bootcamp will work so so the the model is we take senior engineers to train women how to code and this woman learn how to code by creating products for nonprofits so there's three different distinct groups of people which yeah like how can it work right sounds like a very difficult task so my my train of thoughts was that you know just just try that like what was the worst thing that can happen right if you fail then let's pretend it never happened I was just going to move on with my life so so it really isn't it doesn't have to be that difficult to start so so if you have an idea you have a passion just just start and the worst thing can do is that it fails then you can pretend never happen move on with your life okay so in terms of like continuing doing stuff like this of course it's definitely challenging just just look at the scale of today's event I think you've done an amazing job you should give them a let's give her a round of applause thank you so so as an organizer it's definitely a lot of things to do a lot of things that you need little things I need to take care of and it's even more difficult when you have a full-time job because I think that's a question for that so I'll talk more about it later so again a voice back to why are you doing this what's your passion and that passion that passion led me to start something and the results of my work motivates me to continue doing it so so that's how it's it works for me thank you so I think I mean we've been just six months old in Singapore so I won't label it as a frustration yet so I mean when we host events I mean there's a lot of planning that goes in I mean you as you would have done for this one and it's it's a really really about participation I mean we expect around like 70 people and it's 25 turn up and then so I think we really need more participation from audience because we are willing to go a step ahead and do more and it's just would be great to see more people come so I think these two problems are really very real problems so one it's on participation and one is on getting volunteers and like help to do things right so participation it's for example we just had a mother daughter coding workshop I think it's an excellent initiative you know to try and change mindsets on like mom they should learn how to code and bring their daughter alone to learn that but initially the reaction was really really slow so the frustration is more like disappointment and also why is it that people are not getting this like how do we reach out to more people so that they can feel this that they need to do something about this and yeah with passion and actually really turned out really well we had a full house event on that day and and really is just pushing through and doing whatever you can to spread the word and getting everyone who is passionate about it to do the same and that's how I think for me my frustration goes back to the mindset change things when we meet people who say no girls can't do this or they just not it's not possible it's not in their makeup it's it's just not in their genes and like who decides that that's really very frustrating but at the same time I mean is the same the first year we ran it there was this teacher told me well you know my principal wants you to do this I'm gonna let you do it with our students but I can tell you there's going to be no impact and now four years down the line she's still calling us back every year saying you know your program does so much for our girls and we're so excited and the first year we had a hundred students participating this year we have thousand students from the school participating in the program so yeah I guess it's just how you can turn that experience to something positive for myself so most of the time already went up free so when you post the free events people just created to sign up but they and then they never show up which as organizer have to say it's kind of disappointing because our speakers my guest and I have this full crowd in the house and our speaker can sharing their knowledge and have more impact to the bigger group so what keep myself motivated is when the event and maybe one or two audience come to you and say wow and I love this event so that's how I keep myself motivated and I think maybe still because of the problem we're trying to save is already there like 20 years 13 years so we have to be pension about heads so what we want although there's some disappointment frustration but it's better than not doing it if we don't do it who else will be so eventually I think we still can change the world and there's a lot of organization notes that we can share like for forgetting people to show up what I do is usually a week and all day before the event I beg people to cancel their tickets so I'll be I'll send an email saying please please please cancel if you're not coming so I can have a better gauge of who's coming what I've also have an email list so that that work because response from that is higher than people randomly seeing the Facebook also whatnot and I also use Facebook ads that's very good for outreach so yeah so yeah for Elijah and the partner you both have your full-time job and how you balance your full-time job and then your community activities it used to be overwhelming to begin with to be very honest with you because the network related stuff is always so exciting then you're boring day job right so but then you learn to prioritize then you also have a good support system at home and you try to convince your manager that you don't you cannot attend the late night meetings but yeah you do make it work because it is a purpose and a movement that you truly believe in and you really want to work towards so yeah I guess you make it happen so how I balance my full-time job and my passion project on the answer is badly so it sounds very sad but it's not very depressing but it's pretty rewarding so I'll stay about one or two hours after work every day just to work on tech ladies and I eat almost three meals at my desk so this I'm just trying to find at pockets of time where I can work on tech ladies and I I know that this is not sustainable so right now my focus is to create like an onboarding dog so that so that volunteers can can take over it I know sounds very depressing but at the same time right when you look at the results that that come out from your work it's very rewarding and I do think that there's also it helps it I didn't do it for my career but what I realized is that doing tech ladies actually helped with my career because so my in my current role my the manager who hired me wanted to hire me because like whatever I'm doing for tech ladies is the skill set that I'm doing now for Facebook so that's something that's it works right so so so I guess like what I'm trying to tell you is that the journey is going to suck but the rewards are going to be awesome I must say tech ladies is doing a really good job I joined I'm in their group and the effort that you take to welcome all your members and to share their stories every time and to you know share success stories I think it's it's very good job maybe we should have other workshop for the organizer how to marketing your organization and the Elisha can be the coach for this yeah so another question is like as Elisha just said okay actually we are we have a same focus but actually the program we run it's kind of like differentiate from each other so how we can work together what how we can you know mix the huge impact by working together actually before before the working together but this is one particular bit that we do within women who court it's it's this program call us applaud her so what what applaud her basically does is so we have networks in 67 cities across the world and each network has its own like the directors and the network leads and so we have an opportunity to applaud about our network members so let's say if somebody is has got a new job has completed a new project has contributed to open source so we can submit applaud her submissions and basically the whole network raves about them we go on to Facebook we go on to Twitter we go on LinkedIn and just talking about start talking about that individual so we essentially make that person famous for like a month so I think one of the ways that we can all work together is actually encourage and applaud more women within Singapore I think that will actually also serve as a good yeah it does encourage when some people could talk good about you right so I think I would like to work to get that across the board how we can work together yeah so I'm thinking I had been in talks with another female founders network with about they are trying to run a hackathon in school and we were thinking of how we can work together with that and I think some of the things that came out is like sharing context like I have some contacts with schools and they are having troubles reaching out to schools and getting buy-in from principals and I think that's where we can help they have a very strong bootcamp that they want to put in place just lacking the context and I think that's where we can always come together and say we can share resources and can share things like that to work together I think ultimately we're all working towards the same goal right so it's just about pooling our resources coming together figuring out our individual strengths and then leveraging it to make sure that everybody's impact is sort of amplified that's all I just want to add on to that like my my audacious goal is to I think what would be nice if we can sit down and plan like our yearly schedule together so that for the community there's always something every every month rather than like all of our events happening in one month we get a strong momentum and it's not sustained I think that's not good for the community that we're trying to serve here but having said that I say it's audacious because like at least for me you know when I plan my event out for a year I plan it around my work schedule so that you know I can be there so I'm wondering like how how well we can actually put together at our different schedules but I think that would be great. Ghosts of Panias is my work schedule so I can pull it in the gaps. Good good, due to the time constriction one last question so if there's one thing you help the audience can do for your initiatives why it will be? She almost said Ghosts of Panias needs volunteers so if you want to come and volunteer we run camps through the year and like I mentioned we have one coming up for thousand kids and there's grand total of two staff who work on this so we can't run that many camps we desperately need volunteers please come. There's so many amazing women here and you know mentors and role models play such an important part in changing mindsets and in helping the youth understand what is out there for them so please do if you have the time if you have the interest please to contact us and I guess that's that's a major start for us. I think for us I would really appreciate if you could reach out and share with us your voice we need help we need to know how we can help you as well so if you have something you can let us can help us with and something that we can help you back in return I think it will it will keep the momentum going and that's how it strengthens the community. Yeah definitely I mean spread the word yeah I mean spread the word create more and applaud more. So yeah I think it's pretty similar I guess like for me is to participate participate as in contribute your skills participate as in join the events and whatnot because we're here to we're here to help you or like if you realize that everyone has been helped then we can I can retire a little bit. Yeah cool so yeah I think what we're doing is really leads the community is working together so I hope the audience here can nature come to us and offer your help and we we also can help you back. Okay thanks. Thank you so much Pernima, Wanting and Marlene and Alicia for also inspiring us some of you it's your full-time job some of you do it on the side out of passion to make a difference and now it's great to know we have so many different support groups that we can go to and get different kinds of resources and different kinds of support if we are ever interested in venturing into the entrepreneurship or technical field.