A hackathon for gender equality on career choices

La Rochelle urban community is an attractive and growing territory, but with recruitment difficulties in important economic sectors, such as the building, nautical and digital sectors. While there is a higher proportion of women with higher education qualifications, and an overrepresentation of women among job seekers with higher level training, there is an absence of women in technical and scientific professions. The proportion of women is only 9,4% and 4% when it comes to scientific and/or technical courses.

Therefore, La Rochelle aims to increase the number of girls and women in scientific and technical fields, increase women’s employment in the technical, scientific, digital and industrial sectors, and create a permanent background noise over gender equality issues.

As a small-scale action, La Rochelle arranged a full-day Hackathon for gender equality on career choices for pupils to think about their training and career choices and the obstacles/influences they face and promote actions to promote professional diversity. The event included two 13-14 years old classes from 2 junior high schools, with almost 60 pupils in total.

The day contained presentation of statistics, testimonials, including the local celebrity Isabelle Autissier, first woman to have completed a round-the-world sailing competition. The workshops that followed were centered around discussions about What are the criteria that make you choose a career path? What are the jobs that are attractive to you? From your point of view, are these jobs equally accessible to girls and boys? Why do you think it so (state the different reasons of this lack of accessibility)? How to fight against these identified causes? What would encourage your orientation towards a job of an economic sector ? How to promote a job?