The UC3M and Telefónica launch a Chair for Women and Technology
2/10/20
The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the company Telefónica Móviles España have created a chair to encourage research in topics related to the incorporation of women in the field of technology and the encouragement of female vocations in this field.
The UC3M-Telefónica Chair for Women and Technology will allow the promotion of various activities related to the encouragement of female vocations in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), a relevant topic on both a national and international level due to the scarce presence of women on courses of this branch. The support of an internationally recognised technology company such as Telefónica will allow a substantial increase in the impact of the initiatives carried out to encourage female vocations in ICT.
“The Chair intends to address the image of the female technologist in a familiar way, not only stressing the important references in research but also those technologists that develop their academic and professional careers in this field. We wish to communicate that technological development has a fundamental human and humanist perspective in digital transformation”, comments the head of the Chair, Paloma Díaz, a professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the UC3M.
In addition, the framework of the Chair is intended to raise awareness of the importance of incorporating women into ICT studies to overcome the current gender gap in this field. “When an important, higher skilled, more stable and higher paid part of the labour market requires programming and computing skills, a portion of the population (women) being automatically excluded for subjective reasons represents a problem. As well as the fact that we do not have more diverse teams with which to provide different perspectives on the use of technology that avoid bias”, points out Paloma Díaz.
The collaboration of the UC3M with a key company in the ICT sector such as Telefónica will allow a wide variety of extra activities to be offered to students at the University, such as training courses, innovation encouragement and talent spotting events and the possibility of carrying out tutelary Undergraduate and Master’s Dissertations. A fundamental characteristic of the activities to be promoted will be emphasising the transdisciplinary nature of technology and its contribution to addressing the digital transformation of society in a sustainable and inclusive way.
This chair will reinforce the efforts and initiatives that have already been carried out by the UC3M with the aim of contributing to increasing the ratio of women undertaking Engineering studies and to draw attention to the presence of women in areas of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
