E-mma Association
Education Finalist
E-mma is an association aiming to promote diversity in the digital field, which is not present. We want to encourage women to embark on the fields from which they have been distanced by their education and culture. We believe that no area can be productive if it is not composed of men and women. We do coding workshops for person between 7 to 77 years old in order to help them learn programming (artificial intelligence, python, html css, javascript, algorithms) with a big focus on girls education and encouraging young girls to pursue these fields. We are today at E-mma located in the 12 French cities. The association is composed of 500 volunteers in France (women and men) and half of the volunteers are men, these volunteers are all developers with a computer science back ground and they deliver the coding workshops for our association by going in schools or high schools or on other events such as Paris Games Week, VivaTech… To inspire young girls to programming, we do a lot of conferences to inspire the girls through role models they meet during our events.
What impact has the initiative had or is expected to have?
During the last year, we’ve done around 400 workshops and targeted 20 000 people to programming with half of them were girls and women. We are expecting to double the number of coding workshops for the coming year and we’ve already started doing it because we done from the beginning of the year 95 coding workshops in 3 moths everywhere in France.
What is unique about this initiative? Can it be scaled-up and replicated in other places?
E-mma is located in the 12 French cities and we are deploying the cause of promoting gender equality in IT fields now abroad on the following location in the coming months : Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Balkans, La Réunion, Senegal, Casablanca, US. We are expecting to be more than 800 volunteers in the coming months.
To ensure this scalability we will be moving E-mma into a Foundation to be able to support our growth. We are looking for funding’s for our different localizations to be able to succeed correctly in this project. To keep this initiative unique, it was important for us to give access to technology at any age in order to break stereotypes and not only on the earlier age and also E-mma is the only association where you can find more male developers then female supporting this issue because we really want men to understand the importance of diversity in technology and finally our coding workshops are done with young boys and young girls to avoid any kind of discrimination and to show that men and women can work together in programming from the youngest age. Our coding workshops are very technical because we want to give all the technical skills that young girls need to feel confident to purse this field because if today they are not in it it’s also because of that fact that they are not being trained at the youngest level. With E-mma we believe that the training and the education is one of the solution to break this lack of diversity in technology.