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Zimbabwe needs more female role models to encourage young girls to take up stem subjects to address the problem of the low number of women taking up science-inclined jobs, says a leading information technology professional and gender advocate.

Girls in Stem Trust founder and executive director Victoria Nxumalo (VN) told alpha media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube (TN) on the platform in Conversation with Trevor that girls cannot be what they cannot see.

Nxumalo is also founder and training director of Digital Learning Centre and technical innovation director for The bulawayo Tech Hub.

below are excerpts from the interview.

TN: Victoria Vicky Nxumalo, welcome to In Conversation With Trevor.

VN: Thank you so much for having me Trevor, it is such an honour to be here.

TN: It is an honour to us because you have had to fly from Bulawayo to come and spend time with us, so we do not take that for granted Vicky, thank you.

VN: you.

Siyabonga

Trevor, thank

TN: Fantastic. So, Vicky, you are the founder and executive director of Girls In Stem Trust.

You are founder and training director of Digital Learning Centre.

You are the technical innovation director for The Bulawayo Tech Hub.

That is huge, I mean there are lots of responsibilities there, how do you divide your time between these responsibilities that you have?

VN: Work-life balance Trevor, really important, and the journey of how all this happened really was not intentional, so there is always a story behind the story.

TN: Let us have the story. VN: Girls in Stem Trust has probably existed for about 15 years, for as long as I have been an information technology professional, but on paper it has existed for five years.

So, I found myself gravitating towards always wanting to put myself in spaces where technology is being discussed, and as time goes you begin to realise there are very few that look like you, and I mean women right?

So, I began to wonder, to say but we are churning out all these graduates, where do they go to?

Where do the female graduates in the stem subjects go to? Is it that they get swallowed up in the backoffice somewhere or other...

TN: For the stem subjects Vicky, for those who do not know out there, what are they? What are the stem subjects?

VN: They are science, technology, engineering and Mathematics.

So, you could pretty much be anything, from a science teacher, to a robotician, to an astronaut really, and all of that falls within stem, right.

My focal area is technology, and I believe that technology underpins all the facets of stem, so there is a technology for science, a technology for engineering, a technology for maths.

So pretty much like I said I was gravitating towards always being in those spaces where technology is being discussed but not very many women are there.

Technology affects everybody, you know the digitisation of the spaces that we are in currently, and also when you look at the