Colombian pop singer Lao Ra fashions herself a rebel. Check out her Tumblr and you’ll find pics of iconic female singers who were known for never sticking to the script: Gwen Stefani, M.I.A., Madonna. So, on her debut single, Lao Ra decided to go big. She playfully sticks out her tongue at the conservative culture of Catholicism with a song titled “Jesus Made Me Bad.” Here are some of the lyrics:
I’ll flirt with your dad
And I’ll sleep with your mum
And then, I´ll break your heart
I´ll make out with your friends
Oh I will misbehave
One day I’ll run away
Lao Ra knows she’s bound to ruffle a few feathers. She told The Fader even her family members aren’t fans of the song: “Even though my family isn’t religious, [they] think I’m disrespecting tradition.” Lao Ra says that’s the whole point.
The gender disparity in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) jobs remains wide in Colombia. As of 2019, Colombian women hold 32.9 percent of all STEM jobs in the country.
Nicole Chapaval, the VP of education at Platzi, wants to get more women into STEM. As someone who found herself in tech, Chapaval understands what it takes for women to break into the industry.
Chapaval’s own passion for computer science started in her youth. Despite wanting her parents’ reservations about her career choice, she went to school to study software engineering.
“I learned how to code with Platzi. I was a student back in 2012 before I worked here,” she told mitú.
Platzi is a professional learning app targeting people ages 22 and older.
Photo courtesy of Apple
Instructors for the app are teaching livestream courses on programming, marketing, design, and business. The classes are available in English and Spanish.
Chapaval took an interest in content optimization practicing her coding on a personal blog while taking online courses. Starting out as a student advocate, the two founders of Platzi noticed her dedication and started to involve her more in the team.
As Platzi expanded, so did Chapaval’s job description.
Chapaval has been successful in her career. Yet, despite the success, she has seen the gender disparity firsthand. It has only further inspired Chavapal to work to get more women in their tech careers.
“One of my first jobs was in a company that was doing mobile applications and in this company there were 15 male developers and myself,” she says.
Wanting to engage with her male colleagues, Chapaval admitted to feeling weird when her enthusiasm was not reciprocated.
“I was always very extroverted and wanted to meet everyone [but] they didn’t want to talk with me,” she says.
Chapaval teaches 60 percent of computer sciences courses hoping to attract more women to the field.
Photo courtesy of Apple
“I think that representation is very important. So I try to be very vocal and very present with everything that we do in social media and in content creation,” she says.
Whether it be attending company livestreams or podcasts, it is imperative for Chapaval to have women witness others in the field to show the possibilities they can achieve.
Prideful, she also amplifies the achievements of other Latinas in STEM, like that of Diana Trujillo. Yet, she still expresses a need for more women to get managerial roles.
“I am very proud of Trujillo,” she says. “She’s from my hometown and she was in the NASA project that launched the Perseverance Rover. These kinds of things are great!”
Thirty-six percent of Platzi‘s more than 1 millionstudents are women and it is growing.
Photo courtesy of Apple
“That’s very low,” she says, “but we doubled that percentage from 2018 so we still have a long way to go.”
A key step needed to attract more students is accessibility, both financially and in content. Platzi, Chapaval mentions, offers free programming courses that aim to be accessible to those with low internet connection in all parts of Colombia and Latin America.
“It’s not just about what you are learning as an individual, but also as a team or a group,” she says. “That also adds to the working ecosystem of Latin America.”
Regardless of gender, age, or background, Chapaval believes “education is very important if we want to break these blockers.”
In fact, two crucial skills she believes everyone should know is programming and English. “I like to say that both skills have to do with communications; communication with machines and with other people in the world,” she says.
In a time when remote jobs are pertinent due to the pandemic, having communication skills is a valuable asset for STEM careers in any country.
“Programming should be a basic skill that schools teach as well because it’s not only [beneficial] to be a developer,” Chapaval says. “It helps you understand how to solve problems in a logical way.”
Chapaval is grateful for her personal growth in STEM and hopes that Platzi can help others grow.
Photo courtesy of Apple
“I hope [students] can create what they dream of with the coding skills that they can get with us and can show it to the world,” she says.
“Latin America is a lovely region and a lot is happening here,” she says. “I hope that if this community can get to know each other and create the next big companies and big solutions for problems that we have right now, I would [be] fulfilled.”
As the gender disparity in STEM slowly expands, Chapaval continues to vouch for women to speak up and push through in the field.
Proudly Chapaval says, “Latinas are very extroverted, and the tech and software engineering world needs more extroverted people [like us] to add to their ecosystem.”
The App Store featured Platzi for Women’s History Month.
Medellín, Colombia was once home to one of the world’s most powerful cartels – Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel. During the ’90s, drug gangs and guerrilla fighters controlled the city’s streets and few people ventured out the relative safety of their immediate neighborhoods.
That Medellín is a distant memory for many Paisas thanks to the fall of the cartels, but also to a distinct set of ideals and values that have shaped the city’s development over the last decade.
Medellín was named the world’s third city of the future and it’s leading in so many categories.
Medellín is nestled in a valley high in the Andes, and many of the city’s poorest residents live in comunas they built on the steep slopes. And although the city still struggles with high rates of poverty, city planners are working to bridge the divide between these poor communities with little access to public amenities and the core of Medellín.
The technology that helped save Medellín is not what you’d see in San Francisco, Boston or Singapore—fleets of driverless cars, big tech companies and artificial intelligence. It is about gathering data to make informed decisions on how to deploy technology where it has the most impact.
Where most smart-city initiatives are of, by and, to a large extent, for the already tech-savvy and well-resourced segment of the population, Medellín’s transformation has for the most part been focused on people who have the least.
The city’s cable car system is one out of sci-fi novels.
Think of a gondola suspended under a cable, floating high off the ground as it hauls a cabin full of passengers up a long, steep mountain slope. To most people, the image would suggest ski resorts and pricey vacations. To the people who live in the poor mountainside communities once known as favelas at the edges of Medellín, the gondola system is a lifeline, and a powerful symbol of an extraordinary urban transformation led by technology and data.
“The genius of the Metrocable is that it actually serves the poor and integrates them into the city, gives them access to jobs and other opportunities,” says Julio Dávila, a Colombian urban planner at University College London. “Nobody had ever done that before.” As people of all classes started using the cars to visit “bad” neighborhoods, they became invested in their city’s fate, heralding a decade of some of the world’s most innovative urban planning
Designers have created safe spaces for all with parks and libraries.
The Metrocable succeeded in connecting Medellín’s poorest neighborhoods to the rest of the city – but where would they hang out? This lead to the construction of five libraries sprinkled throughout Medellín, all surrounded by beautiful greenery. These “library-parks” were among the first safe public spaces many neighborhoods had ever seen.
The key ingredient of Medellín’s transformation, experts agree, is perspective: The city looked beyond technology as an end in itself. Instead, it found ways to integrate technological and social change into an overall improvement in daily life that was felt in all corners of the city—and especially where improvement was most needed. “Medellín’s vision of itself as a smart city broke from the usual paradigms of hyper-modernization and automation,” says Robert Ng Henao, an economist who heads a smart-city department at the University of Medellín.
