What is Shaking up Tech?
What is Shaking up Tech about?
Shaking up Tech is a yearly event by universities for women and gender minorities who are beginning their path towards university studies.
With Shaking up Tech, the participanting universities want to offer a versatile understanding of technology as a field and a career choice. The goal is also to show that young women and gender minorities have more than enough knowledge and skills to study the field. The event has multiple company partners standing behind this same goal. Technology is a field of the future that needs a diverse group of people to face the challenges of our future and to think in new ways. Different ideas and versatile teams lead to better results and are the key to sustainable achievements and operating environments.
The goal of the Shaking up Tech event is to shake up prejudices and to offer practical examples from the technical field and its opportunities on how to influence our world.
The one-day event in 2018 served as a pilot for Aalto University's wider project, the goal of which is to encourage young women and gender minorities to apply to study in the field of technology. Now the event is organized annually in cooperation with other universities. Our long-term goal is to strive for a better balance in the the gender distribution of both applicants and graduates in the field of sciences.
The field of technology in Finland is exceptionally gendered
The division between men's and women's fields is exceptionally sharp in Finland compared to other EU countries. Only one in five of the university's master's degree engineering students and professors at the colleges of technology are women.
Correspondingly, about a fifth of those working in technology companies are women, in 2019 the exact number was 22% [1]. The share of women in decision-making positions is even lower: for example, only 7.5% of CEOs of listed companies are women [2].
Health technology, space science...
...sustainable development, mobile application design, leading positions in the corporate world! University students are graduating from more than 100 different specialization options. Experts in the field of technology create the products and services of the future. Increasing the share of women and gender minorities in this group is in the interest of all of us: groups consisting of different people know how to look at problems from different perspectives and develop better solutions [3,4]. Skilled people are needed for decision-making positions - studies in the flied of science provide the best possible skills for this!
Finnish girls on top of the world
Did you know that worldwide, according to the PISA study, Finnish girls are the second best in mathematics and natural sciences[5]? This proves the skills to succeed in the field of technology are there for young women in Finland! However, according to the same study, Finnish girls are the least interested in technology and natural sciences as a career choice [5]. According to a survey conducted by Microsoft, the lack of interest is mainly due to a lack of practical experience, uncertainty about the relevance of technology and natural sciences, and the assumption that boys are better in these fields [6].
[1] Teknologiateollisuus 24.8.2020, [2] Tilastokeskus 2018, www.stat.fi
[3] Nature 2014, 513, 305, [4] PNAS 2017, 114 (8), 1740
[5] PISA 2015, [6] Microsoft 2017, Why don’t European girls like science or technology?