They represent less than a third of the workforce in engineering schools. In an attempt to change this disparity, the Efrei digital engineering school in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne) is organizing an internship for high school girls.
Cybersecurity workshops and meeting with digital entrepreneurs: 45 high school girls take part for three days until Wednesday February 22 in an internship organized by Efrei, a digital engineering school whose campus is located in Villejuif (Val-de- Marl). The objective is to deconstruct clichés and encourage vocations in computer programming.
Women represent between 20% to 30% of the workforce, according to the network of engineering schools. Attracting more girls is good for the image, but the Efrei also wants to avoid missing out on very good students. “These are girls who are strong in math but who will stop because they are afraid to go further, or they will not necessarily tell themselves that it is for them, explains Léa Philibert, representative of the Efrei. Me, for example, I was strong in math, but I was afraid to go into something a little too technical.
Devices to facilitate their education
The proportion of female students has tended to decrease in recent years. According to Léa Philibert, the functioning of the specialties, which must be chosen from the first in high school, reduces vocations. In this engineering school, you sometimes only see one girl in a lecture hall of 70 students.
But this situation does not discourage the participants in the course. In first technology class, Elia is already very motivated to join the establishment. “At the start, I was in the same perspective as the girls who didn’t want to go to the technology sector because there were too many boys (…). In the end, I still went into technology because it’s interesting.”
The school puts forward various actions, so that women experience their schooling to the best of their ability: for example, distributors of sanitary protection have just been installed and specific associations exist. “There is a real unity, confirms Chloé, in her fifth and final year at Efrei. We stick together, we really are ‘girl power’, We may not be many, but the little we are, we support each other. Sometimes there are sexist remarks or issues, but I’m really not afraid to speak up when something bothers me.”
The school’s objective, assumed to be a little idealistic, is to reach 50% of female students by 2030.