Andrea Arvidsson

"We need to strengthen women's influence in the tech industry"

- Today, not even 10 percent of Sweden's programmers are women. But it has nothing to do with a lack of interest. Our coding meetups and events are fully booked time after time, and over the years we have coded with over 6,000 women. Today, we are Sweden's largest non-profit network for women developers, with headquarters in Malmö, project groups in Stockholm and Gothenburg and participants throughout Sweden.

- Pink Programming has been around for five years and is a non-profit organization that works towards equality in the IT industry and to strengthen women's influence in the tech industry. The aim is to get more women to discover programming, strengthen and lift those who are already in the industry, and support companies to become more inclusive. It is about breaking norms and changing the narrative for who gets, wants, can and should be a developer.

- Programming is a profession with a future shortage of educated labour, so it is obvious that we need to bring in more women. But it’s also about bringing more perspectives into the tech industry. Technology is playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives and it is unreasonable for its development to be driven by such a narrow group of people. One should not forget that, after all, it is people behind the technology who decide how it should look like and work. We want to give more people access to that power. In this way, this is also an important issue of democracy.

- With more perspectives in the industry, technology itself becomes more inclusive. Look at face recognition technology: when it was launched, it was discovered that it worked very well for white men. For people with a different appearance, it worked much worse or not at all. It is quite easy to figure out which groups have been underrepresented when that technology was developed. The one who builds technology does so based on their values ​​and prejudices, which are often also unconscious.

- We arrange camps, events, and training, but the community itself is just as important. As a minority, it’s extremely rewarding to share experiences and feel that you are part of something bigger. In addition, we work with companies within the industry and we’ve received support from them from day one. I think that many IT companies understand the benefits of diversity and inclusion, and realize that it contributes to productivity and creativity. So the will is there, but there is still a lot to do.