Girls of tomorrow: iWish conference inspires young women to pursue STEM careers

Now in its fourth year, the annual iWish conference inspires young women to pursue careers in STEM, writes Ciara McDonnell

At the launch of the 2019 iWish events were students Weronika Niemierzycka, Melody McGuirk, and Anthea Ring from Rockford Manor, Blackrock, Co Dublin. Picture: Jason Clarke

Tara MacCarthy is in her second year studying Quantitative Business in UCD. When she is finished her course, the 20-year-old from Rochestown, Cork, will be highly trained in business analytics and will be able to work in companies as diverse as Google, investment banking, and consulting. A career in STEM is something that Ms MacCarthy was always interested in, compounded by her visit to the first-ever iWish conference in Cork in 2014.

“I always wanted to go into this field,” she tells me on a break from the UCD library. “I loved maths and science and wanted to be able to find a way to combine to two.” iWish, a conference dedicated to opening young girls’ minds to the kind of career choices that STEM subjects can bring about, hosted an event for 1,000 transition year girls in 2014, and Tara was one of them.

“I loved how interactive it was. To see all these speakers who were relatable and in careers that I hadn’t even considered was really inspiring. I loved how informal the conference was, and how I could approach any company who was exhibiting and ask them questions I had about their business.”

iWish has grown exponentially over the last four years, with events in Dublin and Cork and almost 6,000 girls pre-registered for the 2019 event, taking place in February. It may have grown in size, says co-founder Caroline O’Driscoll, but the core ethos of the event has not changed.

“When we started out on the iWish journey we were looking at all of the companies in the region who were operating through STEM and a lot of those companies saying that we needed to find more talent,” she explains. “For us the obvious question was ‘why are we leaving half that talent pool behind?’ We could see from colleges that less than 20% of girls in college were studying technology courses. Not a lot has changed in that respect in the last four years except that technology is now driving the agenda forward.”

Right now, we need to be concerned with the growth of technology, and what that means for traditional careers.

“If you look at the World Economic Forum’s projections to 2020, five million jobs will be lost in the top 15 economies and we believe those job losses will fall disproportionately on women, because women aren’t taking up the courses in college that will enable them to take part in the careers of tomorrow,” says Ms O’Driscoll. “There was a report recently from McKinsey which said that because of the rate of technological growth in robotics and AI, 800 million jobs in the world will be lost by 2030 — that’s a fifth of the entire global workforce.”

This is not a time to be afraid, cautions Ms O’Driscoll, rather to upskill and ensure that we are continually taking note of global change. “A statistic I love is that 65% of primary students today will work in jobs that don’t yet exist. That tells us that there will be new jobs, there will be new economies, but we will leave girls further behind if we can’t get them to participate.”

Ms MacCarthy says that the perception of careers in STEM is still something that girls rail against, and it needn’t be the case.

“Right now, all technology is on a trajectory upwards and it’s the area that people should focus on. Girls need to realise that it doesn’t mean being in a lab coat all day; you are actually out there in the world effecting change. The best bit about a career in STEM is being able to do the science bit but also be able to help and explain it to people who don’t have an idea what you’re talking about.”

This notion of helping is a key issue for young women pursuing STEM as a career, says Ms O’Driscoll. “Every year we survey the girls in attendance and the one piece of feedback that comes out every year is that over 80% of girls want a career where they can help other people, but they don’t see how STEM facilitates that.”

We need to widen our parameters of what appears to be a ‘helping’ profession, she believes. “Girls can see ‘helping’ in nursing or teaching but actually we would say there’s another side to that. If you look at the STEM careers, everything from climate change to medical technology you can bring about major change. At CUMH they’ve developed algorithms that detect seizures in premature babies, so they can intervene earlier; this is all from data, this is STEM.”

Last year iWish introduced a Teacher Zone to the conference, thanks to feedback from their attendees that teachers are one of the greatest influences on a girl’s career choice.

Ms MacCarthy agrees. “Mr Sheehy taught me physics at St Angela’s College and he brought in past students who were doing physics in different applications, and this was fascinating to me because there were lots of different careers that I hadn’t really heard of. To meet young women who were early enough on in their career that we as students could relate to them was amazing.”

Ms O’Driscoll wants to drive home one message to every girl who attends the iWish conference in 2019. “Each year we hear that not all paths are straightforward; some may not have done honours maths, or others may have come at it a different way and I think that’s important for all children. The pace of change has been so extraordinary and will be even more extraordinary again that things like problem solving, analytical skills, critical thinking — we need to focus less about the job and more about the skills that children need to take them to the jobs of tomorrow, because we can’t predict them yet.”

iWish takes place at City Hall, Cork, February 7 and 8, 2019, and RDS, Dublin, February 11 and 12. To register attendance, log onto http://www.iwish.ie/