IIT Mumbai calls women for free coding workshops in 20 cities

IIT Mumbai has come up with a constructive idea to encourage women to take up coding. At its annual tech fair called Techfest 2016, it launched free coding workshops for students in women’s colleges across 20 cities in the country.

“We will empower women by teaching them basic coding skills using Python, and informing them about zonal- and national-level coding competitions,” said Techfest’s media manager Karan Mehta who thinks that coding is an important component in today’s world to The Hindu.

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The workshops have begun and IIT has already organised six of them in Mumbai, Pune and Noida and the last one concluded at Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering on September third. Cumulatively, the first five workshops saw a crowd of 300 girl students who came to learn the basics of coding. The next batch of workshops is going to be held in Chandigarh, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Jammu.

The UNICEF supported workshop will also have a hackathon which will happen at the end of two-day panel discussions. The panel discussions will have leaders from the technology industry talking about the significance of women role models in this sector. It will also help women build their network at the event.

Though IIT is doing its bit to attract women towards coding, research suggests that women who graduated from IIT itself tend to quit their careers midway because of various personal reasons like building a family, marriage etc. Also IIT only has about 15% women students.

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“By the time you complete your PhD, you are almost 28 years. Then, if you wish to go abroad for post-doctoral studies, you are bound to cross 30. By then, pressure to get married builds from the family. When family responsibilities and maternity follow, the absence of good crèches and childcare support forces many highly-educated women to leave the industry. If the government really wants to prevent this, they should provide childcare infrastructure for women,” says a researcher in nanotechnology.

Point to be noted, right?

Feature Image Credit:  wikipedia