IWD 2021 — the trailblazing women at EDUCATE Ventures

One of the missions of International Women’s Day 2021 is to celebrate the advancement of women forging innovation through technology. At EDUCATE Ventures, we have a team of women who have done exactly that.

They come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, from different countries and traditions. But they all share an interest and passion for STEM subjects and technology making them trailblazers in the field. And they all subscribe to this year’s theme #ChoosetoChallenge — whether it was the attitudes towards them at school and in the workplace, or generally towards women in the sector.

EDUCATE’s Director, Professor Rose Luckin, went to university as a mature student and initially planned to study economics. But she stumbled upon the section on artificial intelligence (AI) in the prospectus, and thought it sounded interesting.

Professor Luckin ended up being one of only two women on the course and is now among the world’s leading experts on AI. She encouraged girls and young women considering a career in technology and AI to “go for it”.

“Follow your instincts and your interests,” she said. “Every workforce can benefit from diversity and the AI and technology workforce is particularly unrepresentative of the population, which can lead to problems both within those companies and the technology applications they develop.”

Dr Anissa Moeini, EDUCATE Ventures’ Strategic Research Lead, has a lifelong commitment to diversity and equality in education, after her family was forced to escape persecution in Iran in the 1980s, including exclusion from education. Settling in Canada, her parents instilled in her the value of education as a human right and privilege, which led her to study how technology can be used as a tool to improve performance.

Dr Carmel Kent, EDUCATE’s Director of Data Science and AI, succeeded in the technology world despite being told by her high school maths teacher that she “simply didn’t have it” and should focus on “other” areas.

“When I think about how discouraged I felt at that time, and how common it was unintentionally to exclude girls from STEM subjects in school, it still makes me furious,” she said.

“Undoubtedly, this has a direct effect on the low representation of women in the high-tech industry. Even when women are hired, the work culture can make it challenging for them to maintain and develop their careers. The imposter syndrome is almost universal in young women, but it seems to be especially prevalent in STEM fields.

“We need to pave a smoother way for young women today, and to realise their talents and aptitudes early on, so they can reach their potential.”

As an undergraduate in Turkey, Dr Canan Blake, EDUCATE’s Principal Researcher, found that access to technology was not readily available to everyone. It was not until she took a British Council Scholarship at King’s College London and a research proposal combining environmental education and use of technology that she become more familiar with the potential of technology to help teaching and learning.

Orli Weiser, meanwhile, who specialises in AI and Data Science at EDUCATE, excelled in maths and the STEM subjects during her school days in Israel. But when her mother was told by a teacher that her test results were similar to the boys’ scores, she took it as evidence of how girls and women were viewed by the system. Nowadays, attitudes have changed and there are programmes to encourage girls into STEM.

She believes that “soft skills” such as being able to effectively communicate, work in a group, be flexible and willing to collaborate, are as important as technical skills. “Everybody can learn how to install a database and maintain it, but it is much more complicated to learn how to be a good teammate,” she said.

“Even now, after 25 years of working as a Database Administrator, I learn new things every day. If you are curious, if you love learning new things, if you enjoy analysing and solving problems, you should consider entering the technology world.”

Dr Becky Sage, EDUCATE’s Director of Acceleration, was a scientist before venturing into the world of technology, which led to her becoming CEO of EdTech company, Interactive Scientific. She discovered that while maths and science offered the means to solve problems, technology allowed scale, collaboration and the potential for greater impact.

“My interest in technology is never for the sake of technology alone and I think that technologists must be clear about both the positive and negative impacts of their work,” Becky said. “As CEO of Interactive Scientific, I was very excited about the ability of cloud-based and immersive technology to helping more people to be involved in scientific problem solving and to help scientists to more easily communicate and collaborate.”

She believes determination, resilience, being open to learning and curiosity are among the most important personal traits needed by women in tech.

“In terms of increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM we have to employ both a top down and bottom-up approach. We need to transform the culture to ensure that women and under-represented groups can work in a STEM environment, without having to put up with micro-aggressions that keep them held down.”

Find out more about our team — both men and women — and the work we do, here.