On March 8th, 2018 at the Marriott Hotel in Swansea, ITWales hosted their Eighteenth Annual International Women’s Day Celebration Dinner which was sponsored by Technocamps and the BCS. Over 190 people from across South Wales attended the event to celebrate Women in Welsh IT, which this year focused on ‘Inspiring the Next Generation’.

ITWales first organised this event in 2000 to highlight the very low numbers of girls who elect to study Computer Science and the enormous gender gap in the ICT and computing industries. Unfortunately, the situation has changed little, and we continue to strive to address this problem. And make no mistake, it is a problem: Computing enjoys the worst gender imbalance amongst students studying STEM subjects in Higher Education – which in general is badly imbalanced – despite various studies suggesting that women write better computer code than men.

The event was emceed by Kev Johns from Swansea Sound with a range of thought-provoking and inspiring speakers from across the UK. The speakers were:

Clare Riley, HE Engagement Manager from Microsoft Education

Janner Herd, E-learning Consultant

Emily Bristow, Head of Intelligent Automation, GCI

We would like to thank all of those who attended the event, the speakers and Kev Johns for supporting the event and are already planning next year’s event!