Posted by Christie Parkin on 05/06/2017
Alexia is 18 years-old, just finished high-school, yet her love of Women’s empowerment, Entrepreneurship and STEM (Science, Technology Engineering, and Math) has led her to a level of influence well beyond her years. Bypassing the slow, traditional path to leadership she acted on her passions and established GirlBoss NZ, an organisation which encourages young women to embrace STEM, Entrepreneurship and higher leadership. In just 18 months GirlBoss has nearly 3000 members.
What are your plans for the rest of 2017?
In 2017, thanks to the support of the Bellingham Wallace Emerging Talent Award, I am working full-time at GirlBoss New Zealand. With the mission to have a GirlBoss Ambassador in every New Zealand high school. I am speaking to approximately 15,000 young people, teachers and business professionals about Gender Equity, STEM, and the future of work. My speaking engagements will include The New Zealand Association of Math Teachers Conference, The March for Science, AMP Conference, and the Westpac Women in Tech Conference. I have also been selected by the Eisenhower Network, to be New Zealand’s representative at the Future of Work Summit held in Malaga, Spain. This will be an exciting opportunity to bring leading, global learnings back into my community.
Through the New Zealand’s Career Expo, GirlBoss hopes to reach 60,000 New Zealand High School students and spread the GirlBoss message. The Career Expo will be held in Auckland, Wellington, and Hamilton. We want to create an interactive and engaging stall promoting female participation in Leadership, Science, Technology, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, and Maths. We are currently looking for sponsors to make this possible. Sponsorship packages start at $750 to be a sponsor in one location and $1500 to be a sponsor at all the locations we visit. Supporting the GirlBoss Stall is a positive, practical and cost-effective solution for engaging with the youth market. We know this model works, last week we had a stall at a Christchurch Careers Expo with much smaller attendee numbers and we had 1600 girls sign up to become members and 70 bright young women signed up to start GirlBoss clubs at their respective schools.
Why is it important that we are aware of changes in the workplace?
We are at risk of mass unemployment and gender inequality because many New Zealanders are uninformed about the looming changes in our workplaces. 47% of jobs are expected to be loss within the next 20 years. These losses will impact women and low-decile communities hardest due to their predominance in fields highly likely to be automated (retail, hospitality, and administration) and absence from fields set to grow. If current gender gap ratios persist from now until 2020, the World Economic Forum says, there will be "nearly one new STEM job per four jobs lost for men, but only one new STEM job per 20 jobs lost for women.” In 2012, Momentum Machines built a robot that can make, wrap and bag 360 individually customised hamburgers in an hour. The founder of this device was quoted as saying “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them. Many of the low-income employees paid to create these burgers aren't going to make an easy jump to robotics engineering. Those statistics add to the urgency to which we must address the chronic problem of getting more women & low decile communities into STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—professions. Through events and presentations; GirlBoss is changing the conversations around digital literacy in New Zealand. GirlBoss NZ equips young women with leadership skills, and an entrepreneurial mindset, and a passion for STEM, and self-belief allowing them to be impactful future citizens.
What are some of your career highlights so far?
A highlight of my career so far was the GirlBoss Third Wave Conference, a two-day event that inspired 380 young women from across Auckland. Thanks to our sponsors, these young women got to hear from the likes of Michelle Dickinson (NanoGirl), Jacinda Adern, Anna Curzon and Theresa Gattung and more.
I watched young women transform, their opinions of computer science and feminism were changed in the space of hours and everyone (including myself) left feeling empowered.
Why do you believe diversity in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is important to New Zealand?
A diverse STEM workforce will ensure that technological innovations better represent our society and solve pressing global problems. We need to recruit the most talented people to STEM fields, and not including half the population (women) in the pool of possible scientists and engineers is short-sighted and self-limiting.
By supporting women STEM students we can out-innovate, out-educate and out-build our previous generations, resulting in greater prosperity for us all.
The pursuit of science knowledge is one of the greatest, most noble human pursuits with the power to solve our global problems - yet for most of history half our species have been barred from this adventure.
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