Decoded’s Kathryn Parsons says she wants women to claim the digital vote at SWIMM event

British tech guru Kathryn Parsons has told a group of women in Sydney that coding is the most democratic tool ever invented and that she wants women to claim the digital vote.

“This is for everyone,” world leading technology educator Parsons told about 50 women at an event organised by the Senior Women in Media and Marketing group, SWIMM. She said her ambition was to make coding “unscary”.

Says Parsons: “I want to show people they can do what they didn’t think they were capable of.”

Parsons co-founded and heads up the company Decoded, based in the UK with offices in London, New York, Sydney and Amsterdam. Decoded was launched in 2011 with the single proposition of demystifying the digital world through an understanding of the languages behind the screen. Its first and most famous product is Code in a Day, where attendees are taken from zero prior knowledge to coding their own app in a single day.

Says Parsons: “Within you lies a technologist. There’s no dark art that we think can’t be decoded.”

She said that the kinds of things that had inhibited women from entering and mastering digital technology were a lack of female role models and a lack of funding for startups for women.

Her talk, which was moderated by We Are Social MD and SWIMM co-founder Suzie Shaw, covered a host of topics ranging from the “transformative” capacity of virtual reality to how coding is becoming part of school curriculums.

The event was held at the Ivy Penthouse on Wednesday October 12 and sponsored by Optus.

Parsons is in Australia for Vogue Codes on Friday October 14.

(Pictured: Group 1:(L-R) Emma Rozario, Penny Willcock and Michelle Katz, all from Optus, which sponsored the event; Group 2: (L-R) Jodie Richmond and Helen Graney from Jack Morton, with Jess Gill from Growth Mantra; Group 3: Decoded’s Kathryn Parsons (right) with local Decoded team members Dennelle Exton (left) and Victoria Shillingford)