Nadine Siregar

Nadine is recruiting young women, as young as 14, and engaging them in acquiring and mastering both a set of digital skills and soft skills that will allow them to be strong leaders and advocate for women in the workplace and on how they are treated and viewed by society. Beginning in 2018, Nadine has since engaged thousands of students and teachers across 34 provinces in Indonesia.

In just three years, Generation Girl (GG) has gone from a bootcamp to a nationwide platform for young women enthusiasts, including peer-to-peer programs that involve middle and high schoolers, university students, and young women professionals to learn, share, and connect with each other. Generation Girl enables female students in Indonesia to learn about STEM for free and have a support system from other female students, female tech engineers, and female professionals in the industry from around Indonesia. These industries are currently male-dominated workplaces which stigmatize women from entering or being promoted, a male-centric perspective that extends to the school system and government programs. GG has instead created a new clearer path for teenage girls if they want to pursue careers in STEM, including sharing basic knowledge, providing how-tos, connecting with peers nationwide, and bringing them to the tech industry.

The existence of the Girl Generation has shifted the mindset of big tech industries such as Gojek and Tokopedia (one of the biggest tech companies in Indonesia) to open internship programs for female students in the company and create co-learning programs for female students in Indonesia. Reputable universities are starting to create a specific program with GG for female high school students to boost the participation of female students in STEM majors. These circumstances increase the opportunity for female students to be exposed to STEM careers because they now have a supported ecosystem from education institutions and tech companies that lead young women to be future leaders in Indonesia.

To strengthen the influence on students and parents, Nadine engages with their teachers and places them into the movement by creating Pengajar Belajar, a program for teachers in Indonesia where teachers can learn to use digital technology in their day-to-day teaching activities. The module of Pengajar Belajar program is now being replicated by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Information & Technology. It has been taught to 16,000 teachers from 32 provinces in Indonesia. The community of teachers also helps Generation Girl to influence parents. Currently, many parents in Indonesia still have doubts whenever their daughters want to pursue ‘non-traditional’ careers in STEM. GG challenges this narrative by making the community of teachers the ‘frontline’ troops to influence parents. In addition, GG has created a demo day as a place to showcase the innovation of GG students to their parents. Nadine uses demo day to bring parents into the movement as well, as they are impressed first-hand with their daughters’ innovations in technology such as creating apps or designing a website. These parents in turn help GG spread the information to other parents, making the parents part of a network for the GG program.

Female professionals working in the STEM industry face many challenges. The issue of gender bias toward women starts at the family level, where parents prefer their daughters to work in more ‘feminine’ industries such as law, hospitality, or education, etc. The stereotyping continues at the school level where most teachers have the mindset that STEM is, by nature, work ‘for men.’ Textbooks don’t even show girls working in STEM and, in the end, young girls choose what their parents, teachers, and society encourage them to do – pursue a degree in “feminine” fields of study. According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS), 29% of Indonesian women graduated with STEM degrees in 2020, compared to 34% of men who graduated with the same degrees. Research from the University of Indonesia shows that only 1 out of 4 students in STEM vocational schools is female. STEM education is already very limited in Indonesia, including the number of vocational schools for STEM, a broader sign that the government isn’t giving enough attention to this issue despite the fact that STEM is a rapidly growing industry that men and women could equally fill in.

Outside of school, it is also difficult for female students to learn the basics of STEM. Many bootcamps are available, but requires participants to pay a fee, a fee that girls’ parents may not provide if they don’t support their daughter entering into the industry. As a result, bootcamp participants are mostly male students, making girls even more reluctant to join. Female students lack an ecosystem to learn about basic STEM, one that can be a bridge to change their mindset to choose a career in STEM. According to Master Card research in 2018, 15 years old is the critical age for girls to decide to pursue STEM, so young women are missing a critical window of opportunity.

Research shows that women often face more obstacles including harassment than men when entering STEM fields and while on the job encounter discrimination and bias. In 2017, statistics show that 56% of Indonesian women resigned from the technology industry and switched careers to other fields. In addition, BCG shows that only 22% of Indonesia’s technology sector is female, the lowest ratio in Southeast Asia. Women in STEM often receive less support and mentorship than their male counterparts. This can make it more difficult for them to advance in their careers and reach leadership positions. In Indonesia, only 18 percent of females hold senior management, and only 15% hold CEO or board positions. The lack of female role models as leaders in the field further strengthens the male-dominated workplace atmosphere. These numbers are even lower when compared to the Philippines and Thailand, whose STEM workforce is more than 40% female.

To build an ecosystem, Nadine creates strong pillars of the Generation Girl program, which focuses on bringing fun, easy-to-follow, and engaging lessons to their target beneficiaries. Nadine chose to expose middle to high school students to Generation Girl’s programs, identifying this as the right moment to intervene and build a community of young women that could become the future leaders of technology. Nadine created Holiday Club, a free bootcamp program for female students to learn about STEM for a week during the summer and winter holiday season. The students learn basic skills such as data science, website development, computer science, and others. The module is light and aims to introduce students to each field. What makes it different is that Nadine emphasizes that each module has five core soft skills: problem-solving, critical thinking, compassion, confidence, and communication. These skills are the most important for a female student to become a leader and practice empathy as the core value in every field. Nadine believes the beauty of learning about STEM this way is that you can learn these five skills within, with each activity emphasizing both the technical skills as well as developing the core soft skills. When female students master these five soft skills through the Generation Girl program, they can play a bigger role not only in the STEM industry but also in bigger avenues of female empowerment. Moreover, the design of these programs aims to create a less threatening space for female students and parents who, in the current status quo, are still reluctant to join STEM programs because of the field being assumed as a men-only space.

The Holiday Club program successfully grabbed the attention of female students in Indonesia. The participants gradually increased yearly. In 2019, only 315 girls joined the program, but by 2020 the number of participants significantly increased to 15,000 and then 48,000 girls in 2022, from 32 provinces in Indonesia. Now, Generation Girl became widely known by the public. Nadine took this momentum to build a community of young women in STEM. She developed other programs, such as Electives, a program to learn STEM in a project-based approach for young women. Another extension, Holiday Club Explorer, is the second phase program for alums of Holiday Club who want to learn more about technical skills at an intermediate level. Nadine went on to build Leaders, a program for alums to create a chapter of Generation Girl in their city, as well as HACKHERTHON, a programming competition for high school and university students to create a solution to a specific problem. These programs enable Generation Girl to create an ecosystem for the community to engage in STEM programs continuously. The community can be involved in any number of programs and play its own role. For example, Generation Girl community members have the freedom to choose whether they want to be a mentor in the program, develop modules, be a trainer, or even become community leaders in their city. Many professional women working in well-known tech companies in Indonesia and South-East Asia have become part of Generation Girl as volunteers – developing modules, upgrading new curriculum, becoming a mentor, and creating partnership programs. These professional women were inspired by Nadine to create a nationwide young female STEM community, something they didn’t have in the past, and to help the community to grow faster and reach as many women as possible.

To involve more stakeholders in the ecosystem. Nadine created a program for teachers in Indonesia called Pengajar Belajar. When the pandemic hit, education tools moved to online platforms, but most teachers struggled to catch up with online learning tools. Pengajar Belajar equips teachers with industry-relevant skills and helps them transition into the online learning environment. But the bigger goal is to empower teachers to be lifelong learners. Through Pengajar Belajar, Nadine and the team introduced Indonesian teachers to best practices and technologies to aid their teaching experiences. And specifically for teachers involved in STEM-related courses, Pengajar Belajar created industry-relevant lesson materials that can be immediately used in their classrooms. Pengajar Belajar has received support from the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Information, universities, and major tech companies such as Microsoft and Gojek. Currently, the program has reached 16,000 teachers in 32 provinces in Indonesia. Like the Generation Girl community, the teacher also creates their own community where they share tips and experiences. The teacher network also helps spread awareness to the parents about the future of a career in STEM, persuading parents to be open to let their daughters pursue it.

To engage potential alums already at intermediate skill levels, GG partners with Gojek to create an accelerator program that allows them to work or intern at Gojek and other big tech companies and allows them to contribute back to the programs. In addition, GG is exploring collaboration with reputable universities in Indonesia, such as the University of Indonesia, Institute of Technology Bandung, and Gajah Mada University, for a scholarship program for the GG community. Moreover, with the stronger local chapter community, Nadine enables the community to localize the program and guides them to partner with local governments, universities, teachers' organizations, and corporations. Three local chapters have been successfully established in Bandung, Depok, and Yogyakarta. Three more cities are in progress including Bali, Surabaya, and Medan.

Born with a strong passion for learning, Nadine Siregar has always been eager to try new things and pursue various interests. Nadine spent her schooling life in Singapore with various activities—she was once involved with 40 projects in a single year at her school. Out of her many interests and hobbies, Nadine also nurtured her interest in science by joining math camps every year. Despite her parents’ support in her interests in math and science, she was advised to follow traditional careers like going into law practice.

During her studies at Boston University, Nadine discovered her interest in technology by stepping in to cover for a sick graphic designer in her magazine club. By the time she realized it, the then-undecided Nadine was halfway through Computer Science classes. Nadine continued her passion by working part-time as a Teacher Assistant and freelance graphic designer. She finished her degree in Computer Science and moved to Jakarta to work at Gojek, a now-unicorn start-up.

When Nadine was working at Gojek Indonesia, she was the only female engineer out of 30 on the team. Not wanting other women to feel as isolated as she had been when working in tech engineering - trying so hard to find a role model, and always feeling like she had to go above and beyond male colleagues to prove her capability, Nadine decided to create Generation Girl.

In following her vision of Generation Girl, Nadine resigned from her position as a software engineer at Gojek. She studied Social Entrepreneurship to learn how to scale Generation Girl, reach more young girls, and become financially sustainable. While maintaining her studies, Nadine keeps Generation Girl running with her team.