TEQtogether draws upon existing research and good practice to provide clear and straightforward guidance on areas in which we believe it is important for men to act differently if women are to participate fully and freely within the technology sector. Some are written at quite a broad scale, whereas others are focused on much more specific issues. Although primarily intended for men, they are equally relevant to others.
All such guidance notes have a brief introduction, provide references to relevant material on the topic, and then the guidance notes themselves, sometimes in the format of key things both to do, and also not to do. The guidance notes are also available in various languages (currently English, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish) and formats to download and share.
We recognise that translations, nevertheless, present very real challenges, both because of the different cultural resonances of gender across the world, and also because it is not always possible to convey exactly the same meaning in different languages. In those that use masculine, feminine and neutral pronouns, for example, much scientific and technical language is masculine (see, Unwin, 2018); in languages without neutrals, such as Spanish, plurals are usually masculine. One way around this is always to use both femine and masculine plurals, as with las científicas y los científicos – especially putting the feminine first (see Real Academia Española)! Where relevant, we also provide colloquial versions of some of the translations.
Guidance note topics
Our guidance notes are grouped under four main themes:
Personal and family
- Empowering girls in STEM: ten things that fathers should do
- Encouraging boys to respect and appreciate girls and women in STEM
Human Resources and Employment
- Writing job descriptions in the tech sector
- Writing performance appraisals in the technology sector
- On an interview panel for an ICT position
- Assigning roles in an ICT team
Events and workshops
- What to do if you are convening an ICT conference or event
- Convening a computer programming workshop
University research and teaching
- What male students should do to support women studying STEM subjects at university
- Designing gender-sensitive ICT research
Country specific guidance notes
We are also doing research and working with partners in different countries to develop country specific guidance notes:
Pakistan (with COMSATS University, Islamabad, and the Inter-Islamic Network on IT)
- Ten tips for CEOs of SMEs and startups who wish to benefit from employing more women (in Urdu; audio Urdu; in English)
- Eight tips for brothers who wish to support their sisters in STEM subjects and the tech sector (in Urdu; audio Urdu; in English). [Please note that audio files are not working on Firefox 78.0.2 for Mac as of 25 July 2020 – our apologies, but this is beyond our control. For Mac users, the files do work on Safari 13.1.2]
All of our guidance notes are prepared by one member of TEQtogether in consultation with other members of the core team.
Please suggest further topics, or consider joining our initiative and helping us craft these notes. Do get in touch through our Contact Form. We very much hope that these are a useful addition to the material currently available in the field.
These guidance notes are all freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License ; we would be grateful if you could indicate their source (https://teqtogether.org/) whenever you use them.
Updated 25th July 2020
TEQtogether 