Pionerasdev — Supporting #WomenInTech

Marian Villa

4 min readFeb 15, 2019

Leaders 2019:

Core Team Members:

Ana Sosa @anamariasosam
Laura Ciro @ltciro

Medellín

Manuela Castrillón @ManuCastrillonM
Maria Camila Gómez @Camigomez318

Cali:

Isabel Cristina Ruiz Buritica @iris9112
Maria Alejandra Pabón @malejita_p
Yully Guzman * Sara Catalina Muñoz * Helen Bonilla

Barranquilla:

Kelly Villa @02_KellyV
Stella Miranda @fashionate

Overview:

Increase the level of abilities in WomenInTech and create a platform to build connections between technical communities.

Region of Impact: Colombia
Focus: Education for the Workforce — Gender diversity in the workplace.
Funding began as a non-profit in 2017, but since 2015 we are active in the tech ecosystem.
Impact: We have reached +800 Women in three main cities in Colombia: Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla.

The Problem:

Latin America and the Caribbean have a challenging starting point . From 2010 to 2015, the region registered an increase from 34% to 42% in the proportion of employers who reported that a workforce inadequately educated represented a barrier to hiring. The sector of Information Technology (IT) was among the top 10 sectors with the most difficult positions to cover in 42 countries. It is estimated that by 2019, Latin America will have a shortage of almost half a million professionals in technology (Cisco, 2014). And by 2025, Latin America will need 1.25
millions of software developers (IDB, 2014).

Of 47.6 million inhabitants in Colombia, only 9% have access to higher education. The dropout rate is 3.8%. and high levels of labor informality hinder efforts to reduce poverty. Colombia’s overall employment rate is 76%, but 70% of the labor force is employed in the informal economy (OECD, 2015). However, children far outnumber girls in the mathematics and science assessments of the PISA 2012 tests, with one of the most marked differences among the OECD countries: 25 points of difference in mathematics and 18 in science. And they face an unemployment rate of 13% higher than that of men, and 31% more likely to be excluded from the educational, labor and training offer than their peers in other countries.

What we do:

Pionerasdev is a no-profit that empowers women in Colombia through code. Each month we have meetup sessions to teach and learn HTML, CSS, Javascript and frameworks, Python, Ruby and more.

Our focus is to create a safe ecosystem for women. Our goal is to promote they actively using tech skills to imagine, empower, vision, create and build a better world through computer programming languages.