Microsoft expands Hong Kong camp to encourage more young women to work in IT

Young women are being given a leg up into the information technology sector with the help of Microsoft as the technology giant expands a three-year-old programme to secondary schools.

The Microsoft GirlSpark Camp held in collaboration with the Women’s Foundation and the Ivey Business School is designed to encourage young women to pick a career in ICT after a study by the foundation found women made up just 10 per cent of IT departments in more than half the companies surveyed.

This year, 72 per cent of the 60 participants studied subjects outside science, technology, engineering and maths as the camp is designed to attract female university students who might not consider careers in the ICT industry.

“Today, we’re all influenced by the digital world, so you can develop technology or you can apply the technology,” said Horace Chow, general manager of Microsoft Hong Kong, “We want to tell all the students based on some real life cases that in fact if you’re interested you can pick your career along that line, it doesn’t have to be programming, to be in the technology field.”

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For the first time, the GirlSpark Camp included secondary school pupils from three schools with a Minecraft coding workshop designed to inspire interest in ICT among younger students.