Young women spend their autumn holidays programming

Dealing with prejudices

At the moment, women only make up one third of DTU students. Initiatives such as IT-camp for girls are supposed to change that.

DTU students Rikke Jessen and Johanne Vistisen, who are studying Mathematical Modeling and Computation, are tutoring the camp for the second year in a row, and experience that outside DTU's walls there can be prejudices about who works with IT and programming.

"We would like to help dispel the myth that you have to be a young man who sits and programs and drinks energy drinks all night to work with programming," Johanne Vistisen says with a little smile.
She herself has experienced that trying programming can be a challenge if you don't know exactly where to start.

"The camp is something I would have liked to have attended myself. I had tried a bit of programming before I started at DTU, but there weren't that many ways in. Sometimes you don't see an opportunity because you haven't seen anyone who resembles you doing it," says Johanne Vistisen.

For Rikke Jessen, it's about passing on her own enthusiasm for the profession, and hopefully inspiring someone to follow the same path.

"After all, it's a question of showing them that programming is something you are able to do and something that's fun. We think it's mega-exciting, and if they find it exciting, they might start studying something within IT themselves," she says.

Helping discovering IT

"The purpose of the camp is to open the eyes of high school girls to the fact that IT can also be for them. There is a need for more IT graduates, so there is no point in potential talents not being realized because they don't think that that world is for them," says professor at DTU Compute, Inge Li Gørtz, who is responsible for the camp and has organized it since 2018.

This is done, among other things, by showing some of the many sides of the subject, she says.

"What we are trying to do during this camp is to show that there is very nice and fun mathematics in it, and that it is fun and creative to program," says Inge Li Gørtz.

Although the camp is a success, she does not hope that it will live forever:

"My goal is that the camp becomes obsolete, and that in 10 years there will be no need for such an offer, and that perhaps we can just have an IT-camp for everyone. But right now some participants come because it's only for girls," she says.