Django Girls make the male-dominated world of IT more accessible to women

By Matthaios Tsimitakis

An announcement regarding a Django Girls meeting at Hackerspace in the Athens neighborhood of Aghios Eleftherios on Saturday sounded more like a pop group fan club's get-together than an event addressing a socially and economically challenging issue: the employment of women in today's dynamic industries of information technology and telecommunications.

Two young Greek scholars, Penny Travlou, a lecturer in cultural geography and theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Natalia Avlona, an independent researcher with a law background focusing on intellectual property as well as issues relating to technology and feminism, joined forces in order to bring to Athens an international initiative which began in Berlin last year. The project, Django Girls, aims to make the male-dominated world of information technology more accessible to women.

"Django and Python are two broadly used programming languages with which websites and specialized applications are developed on the Internet, while Django Girls is a series of intensive seminars for women of all ages without any prior experience," noted Travlou.

The Django Girls story began in Berlin, where two Polish software specialists, Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka, decided to take action against women's digital illiteracy. The percentage of women employed in telecommunications globally, for instance, is estimated on average to be at about 40 percent of the work force. Nevertheless, this figure varies from about 10 to 52 percent from one country to the next.

While there are no official figures regarding the number of women employed in the fields of telecommunications and information technology in Greece, research points to a certain kind of framework....