About Us

In 2021 the membership prices are:

• $5 per year for DUSA members
• $10 per year for non-DUSA members.

Deakin staff are also welcome to join!

We are officially based at Burwood. In addition to our members there, many Deakin Girl Geeks members are Cloud students (some of whom live interstate) and we have some Geelong-based members as well. We aim to hold events at multiple campuses as well as online.

We also understand that students have jobs and other commitments which means everyone’s availability is different, so we also mix up the scheduling between days, evenings, and weekends.

We currently don’t have regular formal meetings, instead we discuss ideas and socialise in an online, asynchronous fashion using Discord to give everyone the best possible opportunity to participate.

Women are still a minority in STEM fields, and face particular challenges to entering and remaining in STEM careers.

While things are improving, the STEM Equity Monitor reports that just under 24% of people employed in ICT roles in 2020 were women. The Second National Data Report on Girls and Women in STEM states:

• Women made up less than a quarter of students studying STEM in 2019 (22% of enrolments and 24% of completions of total STEM VET and university enrolments)
• Five years after graduating, men with a STEM qualification were 1.8 times more likely to be working in a STEM-qualified occupation compared to their women peers
• Fathers are more than twice as likely to have a STEM qualification as mothers (47% of fathers, 20% of mothers).

When you’re just starting out, it’s important to be able to find your crew.

It’s hard enough to make friends at uni, let alone when you’re the only woman in the room in some of your seminars. This challenge has been magnified during the pandemic with less opportunity to meet people on campus – a struggle very familiar to Cloud students too.

For these reasons, Deakin Girl Geeks was created specifically to support women and non-binary students to find like-minded people, be engaged in the university community, and get the most out of their time at Deakin.

Fortunately for all tech geeks, we aren’t the only IT-related club at Deakin –  there’s also the Deakin Software Engineering Club and Deakin University Computer Society.