“I didn’t feel silly about asking questions”
Recap of the MATLAB workshop for female researchers
We recently ran our first workshop that was advertised as being primarily for female researchers. We did this to encourage more women to unlock their programming potential!
There is a worrying
gender gap in IT. And the idea that this may translate to researchers’ programming ability is not too far off. This may influence the potential of research, the possibility of getting published and even help launch a successful academic career.
So we decided to run a workshop that was primarily for female researchers, run entirely by female trainers and helpers. Luckily all the best MATLAB users I know are the women around me, so finding helpers wasn’t a problem. But we also had fantastic volunteers from other areas. Aliza Wajih (@awajih08), Anita Ponsaing, Amy Parker Watson, Philippa Karoly, you were all amazing!
The workshop was quickly booked out - with a waiting list that was as long as the number of spots we had offered!
18 of the 27 researchers who signed up attended (we will need to work on that ratio). 17 women and one man, who we were able to offer a last-minute spot due to the drop-out.
Kerry (@kerry_halupka) and I (@isa_kiko) had a great time teaching this course. We seemed to get everyone engaged and received some lovely feedback over the four days.
Naturally we wanted a more formal way to find out if female-only workshops are necessary in order to engage women, so we designed a survey.
Our first question was:
This workshop was advertised as a “MATLAB for female researchers”. I would have felt equally comfortable signing up for a course described as…
Responses were given on a scale from 1 (No way) to 5 (Totally) and 12 women filled out this part of the survey.
In a perfect world, we would have hoped that there’d be no difference between signing up for a course advertised for “female researchers” and a course advertised for “researchers”. Even though the gap wasn’t too big, it was still there. However, a quick fix to encourage more women to come might be to simply run workshops “for beginners” instead.
We then wanted to dig a little deeper, asking participants to tell us about the atmosphere, which everyone who had been to another workshop before (8/13) agreed, was excellent. So we asked:
If there was a difference, what caused it?
The overwhelming majority attributed the good atmosphere to the small groups and our excellent helpers and instructors <3, with two attendees mentioning that they thought having a workshop for women and specifically run by women made all the difference.
However, when we asked:
What did you like about having a workshop that was primarily for women?
we got some interesting feedback:
“I didn’t feel silly about asking questions”
“I can communicate with many talented women researchers”
“The ‘feeling’ of the course is different”
“It was great, no attention seeking men”
“Female teachers”
“Everything. Having women as demonstrators was also very empowering. Having women who seem just like me, and are examples and role models, and are demonstrating that the material is easy to use, was fantastic.”
So while our survey shows that we might be ok advertising for beginners, we also found that our attendees genuinely enjoyed a space that lacked the usual gender dynamics.
And last but not least, I myself really enjoyed this course. I met brilliant women who weren’t afraid to ask questions and who seem to have become good friends over the course of the workshop.
I think we’ll keep running these in the future. But I’m also interested in finding more ways to encourage other minority groups to attend our workshops and feel like they have a safe space to learn and improve their programming skills. Please share your ideas about how to do this with me!
