Why Latina Women Aren’t In Technology: Because They’re Latina

When you think about jobs you think about opportunities and equal chance no matter what race or gender that you are. You have an identity disregard circumstance. If you are a Latina or a white woman you should be granted the same opportunities that the other has, because you are both human. If you are a male or female you should both be treated equally because you are both human. But in reality it is not always like that.

This past 2016 summer I spent seven weeks in a program called Girls Who Code. Where I was stationed at a tech company and learned the basics of coding- computer programming. In my whole seven weeks at this company, I only saw two Latina coders at the company. I did see a handful of black and Latino men once in awhile, but there was no one who I could identify with. Take in mind that in my building there was over 1,000 people working at the time. The only other workers that were Latina was the custodian or the receptionist, not the actual computer programmers.

Within this logic more and more tech companies are starting to realize the lack of representation of Latina women in tech companies and industries. 

Ironically, when I was at this company we once had a diversity panel where the event coordinators gathered the most diverse workers but there was only two African American females, two Latina females, a group of Indian women and the rest were apart of the LGBTQ community- I felt like they just gathered all of the women in my floor and called it a diversity panel. Across the board we all talked about the lack of diversity and representation in tech companies and what we should do to solve this problem. I then realized the answer, the majority of the fifteen girls out of twenty that participated in girls who code – who had the privilege in doing this program which opens their eyes to a whole new world- were the daughters of engineers or people who worked in technology. And you ask yourself how could one aspire to be a computer programmer if you don’t see anybody who looks like you working in this career.

As of 2015, the computing workforce for Latina women in technology is only one percent. Yes you heard that right, one percent out of twenty five percent. You see from experience, when you are a young Latina girl you do not aspire to be a computer programmer because what is that right? But if we had more aunties, older sisters, and one day moms, killing it in the technology field we will then want to become that. But for now it is not like that for almost all of us.

People think that identity, the power to look up at someone that looks like you and is successful, is not important. As a matter of fact, that is the reason why we are seeing one percent in those data charts. Instead of wanting to achieve more and break those barriers that are keeping you from going higher, men in these positions are wanting you to achieve less than what you can actually accomplish.The conventional coder is the white male that never leaves his room and is super awkward and almost no one can depict themselves like that. They are scared of you taking away their job, which in their heads they actually think they can do better. If there was an uprise in Latina coders, it would be a domino effect. There would be an increase in inspiration in wanting to be a woman in technology. There would be new innovations and applications that were created and thought out by powerful and unstoppable Latina women. The possibilities would be endless, but society gives ending lists before they can even achieve.

I know many of my friends that would love to learn how to code or are interested in being in technology, but the fact that there are very little ways to learn how to get involved is deceptive. Even having a computer or a laptop at home can be difficult to have in some families homes.

My division one high school which is home of low income and very diverse yet very intelligent as some would try to argue, has finally proposed to implement new improvements into our school. The very late school board is building a new football field, a performing arts center, and a STEM facility. Guess which one they are building first? No, not the unimportant STEM facility, but the football field. Do not get me wrong having a football field would be a nice and wonderful thing to have, but to decide to construct a place for a sport that rarely sends any of their athletes to a university especially in my high school, over a facility where many of our students need and can benefit from this place of learning and creativity, is the root of this problem.

The amount of Latina women that sometimes do not even know what makes up the technology field can explain why there aren’t many Latinas- let alone woman- that are applying for computer science majors. Having a head of people that are in charge of your education that have such low expectations for your community, what they think you cannot achieve, and your future speaks volumes into why we are underrepresented in a so called boys club job and world. If women are the ones who are using and consuming the most technology then why shouldn’t we perfect these websites and applications and make it our own ? That is why these programs like Girls Who Code,  that push girls to challenge themselves and view themselves as capably able to do these things that are shown that men can only do is so vital to the growth of a new and prepared generation of empowered girls that will create things that we haven’t even thought of creating yet.

We need to advocate the importance of technology to everybody not just the children of engineers, but to the young Latina girls bursting with creativity in the low income communities. These young Latina women from these communities that are not even looked at, most likely won’t have the same resources as a girl that comes from a charter school. Latinas most likely will not have the privilege or even the chance when they aren’t given the opportunities that I had by a single chance. Creativity and technology is the future and has always been.  These young girls do not have many women of color or someone that looks like them in these type of jobs, so we need to create a path to these opportunities and not push them away at a young age. By doing so we must take away this stigma of Latina women not being able to be in technology and become successful by it. Then hopefully one day little girls that speak Spanish and with a little more tint in their skin will say they want to innovate the future. It will become a reachable and pursuable dream that nobody can stop them from achieving.