Women In Tech

GH: You mentioned the main topic I want to talk about today, which is the topic of women in tech. Let’s talk about that.

We don’t produce a lot of computer scientists, and among those we also don’t see a lot of women. The percentage of women students in ICT for Belgium is around 7.2%, which is also the lowest percentage in the OECD. How do you explain the low participation of women in ICT?

De Croo: I think that what you explain about Belgium is a general phenomenon. Some countries do it better — for instance some Eastern European countries do it a lot better than we do — but it is a general issue. If you look at History, at the beginning of computer sciences the problem was not there. There were a lot of women active in computer science in the 60s and in the 70s. That changed at some point due to the personal computer. The PC brought it to the homes and gave this sort of geeky side to it, because you would have 12 year olds fiddling with PCs.

GH: Oh, so it is your fault.

De Croo: It is maybe. Well, I was a part of it! You would have 12 year olds fiddling with PCs, and at that point, for girls, that was not an attractive thing to do. It’s also because of a gender bias.

GH: The so called “Hollywood” depiction of hackers and geeks.

De Croo: Exactly. That image is not an attractive one to girls and girls get conditioned through bias in a very different way. This means that when you would have girls going to university at the age of 18, they have a backlog compared to boys who have been playing with these things, which leads to a strong rejection.

Now there have been techniques used to attract other profiles into IT studies, for example at MIT today — which is quite a hard one to get into — in the beginning the first steps of programming is using Scratch, which is something made for kids. Using Scratch makes it a bit less geeky at the start and easier to grasp the general concepts that are being used. I would think that in Belgium this is what we need to do. We need to make it more practical, more fun, less of a geeky thing.

When I visit the CoderDojos, we see gigantic progress. There are a lot of girls there, which is a good thing. Today they are between 6 and 12, but that will flow through in the years to come.

GH: The entry way to this computing world is indeed a boy’s gateway. Some have argued, like you do, that adding programming classes to the education sector would add a new gateway that would be universal.

De Croo: I think so. I remember when I was in high school in the beginning of the 90s, I learned how to code. I think it was Turbo Pascal. That gave us good basis of what coding is. I remember that the exam was on paper [laughs] so you basically wrote programming code on paper and then handed it out, which is a bit of a strange thing. I loved it! And I think I was quite good at it. If I look at the same school today, and I asked it to the director recently… They don’t teach coding anymore! They don’t teach coding. So in the 90s we did it, and today we don’t.

GH: How do you explain this regression?

De Croo: It’s impossible for me to explain that! Now one of the things which I’ve often said is that, if you look at our school system in Belgium, the way we basically test kids on what they call “capability of abstract thinking”, very often today that is done through Latin and through maths. I did that too, I did four years of Latin and I thought it was horrendous. Obviously, yes, it helps you because it gives a basis of the language which determines our culture but in the end, why do so many people force their kids into Latin? It’s because they know that this is how you get them to be stimulated in a certain way. Latin also rejects a lot of kids who consider it useless, and very often you will see parents who have not been exposed to Latin who will say “It’s a dead language, why would you even bother?”. I would think that you can achieve exactly the same testing of abstraction capabilities with programming languages. It’s exactly the same. In the end it’s an abstract structure that you use for certain things, and it’s also much more useful.

Now, I’ve said that on some occasions and then got some angry reaction from some Latin teachers. I’m not saying that Latin should disappear. I’m just saying that coding could be another way of testing that and could be a way that appeals to much more kids, including girls.

GH: On the French speaking side, they are working on this massive reform, the so called “Pacte d’excellence”. One of the first things they announced was that Latin will become mandatory until the age of 15. In terms of Digital, they want to include a digital aspect and to teach digital culture… But as soon as you start to ask about algorithmic and programming, there’s still a debate on that front. A lot of lobbying is being done, a lot of pro and anti-programming classes are debating it. How do you explain that not everyone is on board?

Photo by Nadia Aimé

De Croo: I think there are a few elements. In Flanders we have a reform like that as well, and it takes a gigantic amount of time because there’s lobbying in all directions. It’s a hard thing to do and I think it’s actually the wrong approach. We are trying to define what we think that kids should learn and it should be a stable environment for the next 15 years. I’m not sure we can actually define that, because we live in such a rapidly changing world. I’m much more in favor of giving the schools much more autonomy in that ; letting the schools fill it in themselves and giving the teachers much more autonomy.

Today, teachers are basically being transformed into some teaching robots who are good when they fulfill the administration. That’s not why they became teachers. They became teachers because they have a passion to teach something to kids. Giving them more freedom, I think, is actually something that will lead to quality education.

On coding and so on… There is a lot of conservatism in this. I think there’s also a total lack of knowledge in what the possibilities are. A lot of thinking like “Well you know, coding is only going to be for a certain part of the population” but computational thinking is the element that we should have to at least give people a sense of the structure of these things. If I compare it to my kids, I was, at school, at their age, closer to computers than they have been until now, which is really really strange I think.

GH : Our political system works in such a layered and modular way that, here you are, Deputy Prime Minister, and you don’t really have a say over what goes on in schools.

You were talking just now about giving more freedom to schools and earlier you were talking about the fact that you have chosen to act outside of the school system with your Digital Skills Fund. You don’t really have a choice, though.

De Croo: That’s true. In the end we’re not the only country where’s it’s organized that way. It’s the same in Germany and, in a lot of countries that are federal countries, education is decentralized. It would be easier if everything was federal but then it would also create some other issues.

I think what is crucial is that we work together and that ministers of education have the same ideas. That’s also part of the effort that I should do. I see a lot of good developments taking place — at least in Flanders we have more view on it. As I said before, change in education is slow because it’s a people business and it’s about our kids’ future. It’s not an environment where it’s easy to experiment because no one wants to experiment with their kids, so very often it becomes a very conservative world.

GH: So the key to having more women in computing is to have programming in schools but schools are very conservative, very slow to change and they have a lot of inertia. So from what you’re saying, it’s not gonna happen very quickly.

De Croo: I mean… it depends. In the end, it will happen when you have motivated teachers and motivated school directors. Giving them more freedom will help. Some schools are doing some very interesting things that are in parallel to the official curriculum that they have to follow. My feeling is that if you give the schools more autonomy, a lot of things will happen. This is one of the debates that we have today: how much autonomy can you give schools, especially in this domain.

GH: During your first mandate as the Minister of Digital Agenda, you introduced among other things, new legislation around Open Data, a tax shelter for startups, fiscal measures for the circular economy and your Digital Skills Fund.

If your party fares well in the upcoming elections, which are the challenges that you would like to take up next?

De Croo: I’m not sure I will be Minister of Digital Agenda again. I would love to, but it’s not clear today. I think one of the main elements is our taxation system in a digital world. Our taxation system has been made in an industrial world and the technical way we tax and the basis which we tax, I think are becoming more and more obsolete. Today we tax corporate profits, but that is something quite hard to define in a digital world and it’s a very volatile thing in this global economy. We are also not using technology enough to simply taxes and to make it much more fair.

You mentioned the taxation system for the circular economy, what we used is a very easy system: instead of asking you to fill out all types of forms, we just ask the platforms every 3 months to give us a report of all the transactions that happened and we’ll just tax 5% on it. This is a very efficient way of taxing: there’s no way to avoid it, it’s a broad base and a small percentage… and it doesn’t cost us anything, because it’s all being done by the platforms.

Changing our taxation much more in such a way, by using the technology that we have, and doing it much more transaction-based than the way it’s being done today, I think, is one of the main challenges and could make Belgium an interesting testing ground for all types of innovation. In the end, in the world of today, being big or small doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s being fast that makes the difference. If as a country you are quick to create legislation —

GH: This goes back to what you were saying about the entrepreneurial mindset for politics.

De Croo: Exactly. That is the role that a country like Belgium can play. We can try to be fast and to be the place where testing out things can happen because we were first in having a regulation.

GH: I have to mention this: a thousand pages long report came out saying that Telenet, Proximus and VOO had a significant place on the market and needed to be more open to competition. The decision now lies in the hands of the European Commission.

Using the Internet here in Belgium is much, much more expensive than it is in neighboring countries like France. What are you hoping will come out of this? How do we change this situation?

De Croo: A few elements. First of all, the quality of our Internet infrastructure is outstanding. Any comparison that you will see, Belgium will be Top 3 in Europe on the quality and on the availability of very high Internet speeds.

That aside, yes, we are not the cheapest country in Europe. But if you compare it to France and others, you have to look at the total cost of telecoms and not just the promotional tariffs that you see very often. It’s a different dynamic. Still, I consider that we need more competition in Belgium and this report makes it quite clear.

There are three elements which I think are important in the report. First of all, the third party access — so this is others using the network to provide commercial services. The regulator ensures there’s a way of having a lower cost of access, which is calculated in a better way. This is a good thing and will provide more space for innovation by Orange.

A second element is that now, it will also force to give third party access for Internet only. This is a very important element because today if Orange is using the network of Telenet it has to take the Triple Play product. Whereas today, a lot of people are not interested in Triple Play. A lot of people just want Internet, so they can stream anything they want (and they definitely don’t want a landline). This is giving the possibility for other players to provide what they call “cord-cutting” packages.

And then the third element is fiber. We have to make it clear that when there’s fiber investments, some type of access is required. I think that these are good measures but we will see how the commission is looking at it. This together with the auctioning of new spectrum for 4G and 5G which is going to happen soon, could bring a new competitive boost in the Belgian telecom market.

GH: The celebrity you’d love to meet, favorite band, favorite concert you’ve ever been to?

De Croo: [Laughs]

Elon Musk. The Pixies. Rock Werchter/Pukkelpop.