Emeka: Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic week. Your one and only Mummy G.O send her greetings and special shout out to all the great women out there doing great things. My name is Emeka Aaron, I’m excited to be here again on another episode of the Good Citizen radio show which is brought to you by CSR-in-Action and proudly sponsored by Act Foundation. As one good citizen, let’s endeavour to continue to play our part in building a great Nigeria. We will go on a short break, we will come back shortly
So, it’s the International Women’s Day Week, a global day set aside to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women all around the world? Today also marks the call. The day also marks a call the action to accelerating women’s equity. And the theme for this week, for this year is Embrace Equity, #DigitAll, Innovation and Technology for Gender Equity. Today we have with us the founder, the cofounder and chief operating officer of Data Girl Technology. Ms. Frida with us in the studio. Good afternoon ma, and welcome to the show.
Frida: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me.
Emeka: How are you doing today?
Frida: I’m excited.
Emeka: I like that. I can hear that from your expressions right now. Okay, good stuff. So, can you tell us a little bit about Data Girl Technology?
Frida: Data Girl is a startup based in Cameroon and we train women and girls to code, to design and we help them, we link them up with opportunities in the tech sector. So we do this through our booth camps and our training program. And it’s been an interesting ride for me. So far we’ve been able to train over 20,000 girls.
Emeka: 20,000 girls. Wow.
Frida: That’s right. We are looking forward to training more in the nearest future.
Emeka: Wow, that’s great stuff you’re doing there. Okay, so this week we celebrated the International Women’s Day all around the world. So, what does this International Women’s Day mean to you?
Frida: Personally, the International Women’s Day symbolizes two things. First, it’s an opportunity to reflect as women, to reflect on the progress towards gender equality, how far we have come journey and to celebrate and rejoice. It started, it was a whole struggle. But now becoming the theme of the world, people I can say that everyone surely was understanding and joining the bandwagon of sounding or seeing visually, clearly inequality. And secondly, for me, it’s also an opportunity for us to reminding women of the struggles, reminding women, speak up when they’re caught up in struggles, reminding women and even men, reminding our society that this is a global reality that we are faced, regardless of where you are, Africa or in the Western world, women are been faced with inequities. So it’s an opportunity for us to reflect on those two things for me.
Emeka: Wow, that’s good. So the year’s theme focuses on how technology and education in the digital age can help to empower the women and also the girls across the world. So, do you agree that a gender responsive approach to innovation, technology and digital education can increase the awareness of women and girls in the digital space regarding their rights and civic responsibilities?
Frida: Yes most definitely I agree. Gender responsive technology means that technology with the understanding of gender dynamics and needs are experienced by women and girls or every gender basically. And this simply means that having a woman in mind when you’re creating any technology whether you are designing a platform or you are putting out a woman’s need in mind. Technology has a very heavy potential to break the barriers that stop opportunities for women and girls to access not just information, education and resources that will empower them and help them and to state in our communities we are going to break the gender divide, we are going to break these inequalities then we must create technologies that include and accommodate women. So yeah, I strongly think that gender responsive approach innovation is the way to go.
Emeka: So can you explain to us the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls in the digital space.
Frida: The digital space when it comes down to digital space is wide.
Emeka: Let’s close that gap.
Frida: Yes. Well there’s a gap but the space itself is big and daily we realise that the world is slowly moving and with the right technologies, more activities daily are moving towards online and this means that we need more if there has to be opportunities for that inequality. It’s an opportunity for women to jump in and be part of this opportunity that the world is shifting to online but unfortunately the internet is also in that space that it has heightened the risk of women getting harassed, abused. So we must always protect our women in the in the digital space because we cannot just reform them, then we must also educate them that this is what is happening, this is how you should be cautious because if they are not knowledgeable enough then we cannot shield them from this risk. So protecting women’s right in the digital space will mean that we need to ensure that the digital technology is designed and is used to promote equality and inclusion and equally educate the girl child or the women on what to do and what not to do. Equally encourage them to speak up, if you see something going wrong we have platforms who are supportive, who do not accommodate these harassment stuff. A platform like Facebook, Facebook has a working group that monitors. If you are going against a certain rule or regulations you are being banned. If someone reports or a group of people reports you for certain activities, they monitor you and you are being banned. So we must encourage more of these platforms and we must equally educate women to be aware of this because if you don’t know where to go to, you might not even know that there’s an opportunity for you to speak up or report someone who is perpetrating or harassing women online. The way to preserve, prevent and protect our women is by educating them as well.
Emeka: That’s good stuff, because I’m just getting something new from what you just said right now. Okay, so just hold that thought. I’m still going to follow through with that when we come back. But right now we’re going for a short break. And if you have any opinions or questions or suggestions about the topic being discussed today, we’d like to hear from you and you can reach us on our phone line on 0700923923923 or you can send us a WhatsApp Message to 08173136193. We’ll go on a short break right now, and when we come back, the conversation continues with Ms. Frida.
Okay. Welcome back to everyone listening, and we’re still in the studio, and we still have Ms. Frieda here with us, the co-founder of Data Girl Technology. Thank you very much. And we’re still enjoying the conversations. So, it’s not surprising that women worldwide are underpaid and underrepresented in the society, right? How can we manage this imbalance from your own perspective?
Frida: I like that you put a certain amount of pressure on our work, we work as half.
Emeka: I’m balancing it right now.
Frida: Yes, there’s that imbalance and sadly it’s a global imbalance. Everyone is affected and generally men averagely earn more than women and for me we have to tackle it at the root. It’s not something that we just speak about it. We have to tackle it from the root of policies, to address this we have to have policies that will bring about transparency in payments, equity in the nation. And we also need to encourage women to take up high paying jobs and opportunities and how do we do that if we don’t have women at the top. We then have women speak for women, we then have these policies being designed for public women or to change this narrative of men being paid more than women despite the same work that they do and I think that the best way we can approach or solve this is by encouraging women to learn the right skill, get the right working group and get to the top and I always say this, I stand for gender equality but I do not want women to be empowered, hired or given lots of responsibilities because of their gender. That’s not what gender equality is about. We want women who have the right skill to be given the role because they are talented, skilled. They have the ability and capability to handle the role, a leadership role, a role of responsibility and get or could yield the same result or even better results than or like a man would. And when we have women in these quests of responsibility in this top management position it becomes easier because they’ll be the one to influence. We equally need to talk to men, let men be there for women, we need men who speak up for women. We do not need women only but we equally need men. We need to encourage more men to see the need to get into the room and speak to their fellow men to say: “Hey this women breaks their back as much as this man does so we need to pay her equally as this man and we have a typical thing in Africa that everyone receives their paycheck and hide it, salary is a top secret because we discuss in secret. If we can have that transparency in pay I think that at some point we will get to I’m at this issue of imbalance when it comes to men and women in the work sector.
Emeka: Okay, just to ask a little bit of question in there. There’s this survey I saw somewhere on the internet talking about women right now being more educated and also having to gain more job opportunities more than the men lately. So I don’t know how true that is.
Frida: How true? No I don’t think it’s kind of women have more education than men. I just like to remind you that the issue of inequality is a big thing now because of the steps we took in the past. Back in the days especially in Africa , I’m talking about Africa because I know more about Africa, I have lived in Africa most of my life and back in the days, when it has to do with engineering and difficult school courses and things like that, we will find our parents encouraging the guys to go. They make children to go and do difficult engineering, manufacturing and maybe lifting. Jobs like teaching, nursing that are not very hard, they’ll have our ladies go to that so we have our imbalance, this is the result of the actions of our people and for us to break that we have to encourage more women and push them into those roles that we used to prevent them from getting into. There are times that even in an engineering class of maybe 6 boys, we find maybe 1 or 2 girls and maybe when those 1 or 2 girls are struggling the teachers will even say this is not even the class you are supposed to be in. They’ll say go and meet your fellow women in maybe food and nutrition class, a nursing class or something that is not very tasking. Saying that women are now being educated more, for me is looking at what has happened in the past, we are trying to strike a balance, we are trying to put women in the spotlight because for a very long time women have being at the back, women have being deprived, shunned, rejected, doing what they do not like or even told they cannot do it. Thank you very much.
Emeka: Thank you very much. But on the flip side, don’t you think some of the professions you mentioned, engineering and stuff like that, were, like, too hard or kind of physically demanding for women? And that’s why you have to encourage the women to do more of teaching, nursing and stuff that are much less stressful for them to do? Don’t you think that’s a little bit in place there?
Frida: No, I don’t think so. I’ll like to say that the first web decipher ever was a n and that goes as far to prove a point that women can do whatever they want to do, whoever they want to be. Making a decision for a woman based on her gender, for me it limits that person. We have men who cannot do as much as women. Now this is not me saying let’s get into the field and drag or say that the man is stronger, the woman is much stronger. We have men who are equally good teachers but when it comes down to the big ones, technology for instance, getting into the tech space, tech is not the easiest of things. It’s as tough and complex for men as it is for women but saying that a woman should see and struggle and push first her a skill because she is a woman or her gender then it’s misguiding. If you can say that a woman shouldn’t learn because it is tough then a man shouldn’t learn because it is tough. If tough is the reason why something shouldn’t be learnt then it should be equal for men and women. It shouldn’t be because you’re a woman. Now if you are a woman and you get to the field and you find it that it’s something you can’t contain or comprehend then hold on. It’s okay for you to move to another field that you know that it is easier for you to understand. But if you are being told that it is because you are a woman we don’t want you to come and get confused here, you cannot do it because you are a woman then that’s where the problem is. The problem is being restricted because of your gender so that’s where my concern lies.
Emeka: Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine. I have my colleague here, Thelma, and she’s been itching to say something about this, so Thelma welcome to the show.
Thelma: Thank you Emeka, how are you doing?
Emeka: I‘m fine. So you want to say something, so let’s hear you out.
Thelma: Yeah, I actually do support. That, I guess that has been saying. Then I remember that there was a time where I’m part of a community and we did this drive, Tech Drive, where we go to schools like primary schools and secondary schools, and the awareness from those girls are amazing. So, I think that most girls nowadays actually are aware, and it’s due to the fact that there are more of coming up. Like, if you look at his Women’s Day this year, you could see that almost everyone partook. It was not just gender equity plug hats everywhere. There were things happening, boot camps, people were going for conferences and all of that. So the awareness is more the fact that Stem courses might be hard is actually what gets us. That’s why that survey where we’re talking about women being more educated or something, I just think that there is more awareness. This spotlight is now on women and they could actually do something. So it’s in our future that women could actually be leaders. It’s coming closer. I believe it is coming closer. So girls and Stem girls start trying to do a whole lot. Well, thank you for representing women.
Emeka: Thank you, Thelma. That’s a very strong one. And I know definitely Ms. Frida is in line with you too. Now, it’s not equal because it’s two to one right now, so it’s not equal. I’m also fighting for my rights here because there’s a much here in my house.
Okay. So Ms. Frida, what steps do you think can be taken to promote gender equity in the workplace? Just like you’re talking about, like practical steps that can be taken.
Frida: When it comes down to gender equality, gender equity and gender equality are two sides of the same coin. One is promoting the rights of women; the other one is promoting equal rights. The first step that we need to take is tackling from the root, policies; we need policies that practice that supports inclusions and diversions. We need policies that accommodate women as much as it accommodates men. We need to address this unconscious bias and hiring, promoting, putting in place of decision because this person is a certain gender you’ll want to not give her a post of responsibility, why because maybe she’s a woman and she will fall pregnant or she’ll probably be sick and not come to work and things like that. We need to address those kinds of situations. We equally need to ensure that there’s equal pay for work. We need to make sure that the women who work as hard as men should be paid as men. We equally need to provide equal opportunities. I mentioned that we need to have women at the top to be able to make the policies to fall back on us, if we do not have women at the top in the room when these decisions are being made then we will keep on these struggles for a while. We need to encourage diversity and inclusion not just in the workspace but in our culture especially in Africa. There are places or days back in the days that they’ll say women are not supposed to go to the market at this time or places that women shouldn’t go at a certain time or there are some days that women shouldn’t go to the farm and things like that. Cultures that deprive women of their rights can just even be bad, we need to make sure that we discourage it and come with cultures that encourages the women just for being a woman and encourage her to do things based on her capabilities.
Emeka: Good stuff. Thank you very much. So right now we are almost close to time, but what message would you like to share with other women around the board today who aspire to leadership position on this International Women’s Day? Just a very short one for every woman listening to you right now.
Frida: All right. For every woman listening to me right now, I just want to remind that your voice, your experiences, your contribution its matters, and that your powerful, you have the capacity to do everything you sent to your mind. You’re going to choose your dreams, make a difference, and most importantly, you need to continue pushing your progress. There’s light at the end of the tunnel but we must work together and holding each other’s hand every day until we attain the height that we want to attain individually and collectively.
Emeka: Thank you very much Ma. It’s been a blast with you today on the show, and I really hope I just hope that you also had fun, too, talking about women today. Thank you very much for being on the show. So for everyone who listened, thank you very much. And we do hope that you’ve learned from this discussion today about International Women’s Day. Thank you, Ms. Frieda, for being on the show today. Thank you everyone. And we do hope that you have a lovely weekend, Ms. Frida and everyone listening to us right now. We celebrate everyone, every woman out there; every man takes care and celebrates all the women around you. Until next time, let’s continue to be alight to one another. The show is brought to you by CSR-in-Action and proudly sponsored by Act Foundation. I remain your one and only celebrity show host, Emeka Aaron. Stay safe, stay blessed. Bye.
Thelma & Frida: Bye.
