Sri Lanka’s tech sector is facing a shortage of skilled workers, a gap that is forecast to grow as the island reaches for an ambitious additional $3 billion in export revenue by 2025 on top of the almost $2 billion it’s already generating. Engaging and training women to enter and grow in tech related sectors will be crucial for bridging the worker short – age and improving diversity. The challenges to achieving increased female participation and digital literacy are nuanced and complex. Here, Jayomi Lokuliyana, Co-founder and Chief Executive of data driven digital marketing company zMessenger and Chairperson of the Women’s Chamber for Digital – Sri Lanka, discusses her views.
How do you view the current situation for women in tech in Sri Lanka?
I think it’s one of the sectors where women are underrepresented in Sri Lanka, in terms of workforce participation as well as exposure to digital skills. Digital literacy is an issue in both the education sector and the workforce. Overall, women are underrepresented in the tech workforce. Compared to sectors like banking, leisure or education, where women hold over 40% of the positions, in digital we are hovering around 29%
Is it simply a ‘pipeline problem’ – the view that girls and women are not interested in tech, and would changing that at school-level up the supply for the workforce?
I have a divided opinion on this. Statistics show girls’ education enrolment is as good as boys in Sri Lanka but when it comes to making a choice, girls don’t pursue ICT, they tend to aspire to careers like medicine or teaching. Something is influencing that decision, perhaps a lack awareness of tech careers, of role models, of support, or all three. There is a level of conditioning at both school and home. IT is still mostly seen as a man’s specialisation. Research shows parents are likely to give a computer to their son than their daughter, meaning girls don’t get the same exposure to tech as boys. Teachers with IT literacy are not available in all schools, and in some cases schools would rather lock down the computer lab and keep it pristine than let the children access it. It’s also a challenge to get career counselors to understand the IT field and promote it. It’s important to note, there is also a retention challenge. Right now 35% of IT students at university are female, but of them only 29% join the workforce. Many women who study IT also don’t return to the workforce after marriage or maternity and companies need to tackle these workplace issues to facilitate participation.
With strong global career prospects and high salaries, tech should be viewed as a top career choice but still isn’t. What’s holding this view back and how can that perception be changed?
There is a massive awareness issue that we need to solve – people don’t know what the benefits of an ICT career are. For example, not many people know that the starting salary in an IT job is higher than it is for a medical practitioner. The awareness that exists is largely confined to certain pockets or very urban areas. IT careers have not been taken to the masses and are perhaps seen as ‘geeky’ rather than glamorous, on talk shows you see doctors and lawyers, but hardly ever someone representing tech. We need to address the lack of role models and align the school system so that IT education starts at kindergarten level for girls and boys. Kids need to see that IT is an area where they can be creative. I think there should be multi-level interventions from schools to communities, including parents, who are one of the primary influences when it comes to kid’s education decisions.
Our education system drives us to be in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, and some go on to qualify in medicine or engineering, but what happens to the rest? Why wouldn’t they consider technology as a third option – it’s part of the STEM definition after all. There’s a gap in the education field. We should be directing kids towards technology too.
How can systematic changes be implemented?
Multiple stakeholders should be actively involved in initiatives: policymakers, like the government as well as the private sector because they need people for the workforce. Many students study subjects not required by the job market.
WE NEED TO ADDRESS THE LACK OF ROLE MODELS AND ALIGN THE SCHOOL SYSTEM SO THAT IT EDUCATION STARTS AT KINDERGARTEN LEVEL FOR GIRLS AND BOYS
We have so many unemployed graduates. If we could repurpose 10,000 of them and train them in a coding camp for three months, they could enter the workforce in the tech sector.
Two or three decades ago Sri Lanka successfully created a demand and a massive mass movement of women to work in the apparel sector because we had an export target. Everyone contributed towards that goal. Now we have a goal of $5 billion IT exports by 2025 and for IT to become a top five contributor to the country’s GDP. My worry is, we aren’t making a similar effort for that goal. If women are given the access they will seize the opportunity. I worry whether policymakers understand that there is an awareness issue, because many believe the gender balance right. But it is not. Perhaps a few elite companies have female representation around 40%, but most do not. Even in my company – run by a female entrepreneur – I can’t find experienced women to recruit so only 12% of my engineers are female. I believe one way to address the awareness gap at government level is to establish a digital index run by a neutral body. Other countries have done this to understand the digital literacy of their workforce, and Sri Lanka should do the same. Goals can then be established and measured based on data, not speculation.
Since co-founding zMessenger in 2003, what’s been your personal experience as women in tech?
I never tried to be a man in heels, I’ve always embraced the positives of being a woman, which, I believe, helped me tremendously. Sri Lanka is a matriarchal society, quite different to the West, so perhaps because of that there was a level of acceptance for a female entrepreneur taking a challenge. But at the same time there were instances where people didn’t believe a woman could be running an IT company. They would ask ‘where’s the chairman’, anticipating a male figure to be behind it. Many have also asked me if I was a software engineer – that’s a myth I’d like to debunk – that you need to be educated in engineering to run a tech company.
You don’t, rather you need to understand how technology can deliver the value, then you can hire the engineers. There are a lot of great examples of women who have used technology to successfully launch businesses without an education in engineering.
Do you think the $5bn export goal by 2025 is a stretch?
At the current pace it is. Sri Lanka doesn’t have the workforce numbers and right now there is already a supply shortage. In order to go for an ambitious target there should be purposeful interventions to solve this issue, such as repurposing young graduates to the IT sector and ensuring all who study IT end up in the workforce. The formation of the Women’s Chamber for Digital Sri Lanka in June 2019 was a step in the right direction. 90% of the board are private sector female leaders and we felt in our own capacity, we could actually make a change. We are reaching out to the public, policy makers, the corporate sector and international organisations to collaborate and launch programs. Starting from getting an index for the country, then launching a mass media campaign to increase awareness, then lobbying and encouraging employers to adopt policies that would enable balance in their workforce. Diversity always brings positive results. Companies with diversity are more innovative and it is a need of the hour.