Featured image credit: WOCinTech Chat Creative Commons License

The Current Situation

There’s no doubt that there is a glaring gender gap in tech. The widely accepted number of jobs held by women in the industry is 30%, but when you look at the percentage of women actually filling engineering roles, that figure shrinks considerably.

Let’s take a look at some of the giants in tech. At both Facebook and Google, women make up around a third of the company’s payroll, but only 16% of technical jobs at Facebook and 18% at Google are held by female engineers. At Twitter, it’s only 10%. These figures are the norm across the industry – in Europe, only 7% of engineering jobs are held by women!

Now, this isn’t just a women’s issue, a corporate responsibility problem, or a diversity issue. This gap is hurting companies’ bottom-lines and is detrimental to the industry overall.

If you look at any number of metrics, a gender-balanced team outperforms a predominantly male or predominantly female team. The numbers show that gender diversity has big payoffs. Teams with at least one female executive tend to receive valuations that are 64% larger than companies that only have men in leadership positions.

As Toptal Co-Founder and COO Breanden Beneschott put it, “If men and women are equally intelligent, statistically speaking, then out of the smartest ten people in the world, five should be male and five should be female.” Therefore, “if your team is anything less than an equal balance of men and women, then your team is probably not the best it can be.”

What is being done to address this gender gap?

The good news is that leading tech companies agree on this and they’re launching initiatives to get more women into top engineering positions. The solution here is more complicated than just doubling down on recruitment efforts for female engineers, though. There simply aren’t enough female engineers in the job market right now. While there’s no one reason for this, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani explained that popular culture has a lot to do with turning young women away from tech. Girls take cues from TV shows, fashion magazines, and social media that tech is a man’s domain and figure it’s not a path they should follow.

So companies are trying to get involved at the ground level, not just recruiting computer science graduates but also showing girls at a young age that they actively want them to enter STEM fields, both in the classroom and after they’ve received their diploma. Both Etsy and Intel partner with Girls Who Code and Girl Develop it to build a strong educational pipeline that supports aspiring female developers.

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In October 2015, Toptal launched Toptal Scholarships for Female Developers, which will award 12 aspiring female engineers $5,000 and a year of one-on-one mentorship with a senior developer from the network. Toptal is encouraging girls of all ages and educational backgrounds to apply by making a meaningful contribution to open source and then writing a personal blog post about it. They’re announcing one winner per month for a year.

Through partnerships with educational organizations and the creation of mentorship programs, these companies are getting at the root of a systemic issue. There’s a long road to gender parity in tech, but they’re at the forefront of a solution that will bring more female engineers into the industry and give their companies a competitive edge.

About Grace

Grace Fish Headshot
Grace Fish is a writer from San Francisco currently working at Toptal. She graduated with a degree in History from Princeton in June 2015, and has been been living as a digital nomad ever since.

TechGirls Sara and Sarra with Samita and TechChange souveniers

Last Friday, TechGirls returned to the TechChange headquarters. For the last few years, TechChange has had the privilege of hosting TechGirls at our headquarters for their Job Shadow Day.

TechGirls is a selective exchange program that encourages and supports the desire of Middle Eastern and North African teenage girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). During the 3 week long exchange program, the girls (ranging from ages 15 – 17) travel around the U.S. getting a taste of the various careers one can have in STEM. One of the ways they experience a STEM career in the U.S. is by spending a day at a tech company during Job Shadow Day.

This year, Sara Chikhi from Algeria, and Sarra Bouchkati from Tunisia arrived at TechChange to learn how a day looks like at an edtech social enterprise. Sara and Sarra aspire to have a career in astrophysics and aerospace respectively.

After an introduction to TechChange, we dove right in to give the TechGirls hands-on experience with each of our team. The girls were very curious about TechChange’s work and were very excited to learn more.

TechGirls featured image
Sara tries her hand on creating an asset and animating it.

Check out what the gif they animated!
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Then the TechGirls transitioned on to hear what our Tech Fellows were working on this summer.

TechGirls with Tech Team
NIthya, You Jin, and Ellie shared the various projects they were working on with the TechGirls.

The TechChange experience is incomplete without a team lunch at our nearby Ethiopian restaurant, so we all went to get some Ethiopian food for lunch!

After lunch, Delanie and Emily showed the TechGirls the various TechChange projects from the past and showed them how they create a course on articulate. The girls then created a short course about themselves! Check it out!

 

To sum up her experience, Sarra from Tunisia said:

“Be confident , always be eager to learn and search, and team work: these are one of the most valuable lessons that I have learned today at TechChange aside to learning about animation process, graphic design, and meeting with the tech, marketing and content teams. The collaboration between the teams portrays the company’s philosophy of learning from one another and giving each employee the chance to shine and sharpen their skills.”

TechGirls with the Team

Always a pleasure to have you here TechGirls, thanks for joining us!

On this year’s International Women’s Day, we recognize the important work our alumni and partners are doing to empower women and girls across the world.

At TechChange, there are few areas we see this empowerment happening than in the field of family planning and reproductive health. As we’ve seen in our mHealth online course and community, many organizations are doing fantastic work in this area including the UN Foundation and MAMA, D-Tree International, FHI 360, Jhpiego, John Snow Inc., and more.

We’re hoping to further explore the issue of gender in global development programs and technology in our upcoming online course on Gender.

Use the coupon code, IWD2015, by this Friday, March 13, to get $50 off any TechChange open online course such as mHealth, Mobiles for International Development, Gender, and more.

 

 

TechChange Graphic Designer Rachel Roth explains to TechGirls Ghada and Nataly how to draw characters using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Yesterday, TechChange hosted a job shadow day with Nataly Ayyad and Ghada Missaoui, two incredibly talented young ladies participating in this year’s TechGirls program with the U.S. State Department. This selective exchange program encourages Middle Eastern and North African teenage girls to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Within the next few weeks, they are travelling throughout the U.S. for their first time to visit technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Instagram.

Nataly and Ghada, hailing from the Palestinian Territories and Tunisia respectively, were selected to participate in this program and spent the day at the TechChange headquarters to learn what it’s like to work at an international edtech social enterprise. Nataly hopes to go into web design and believes that technological skills can be empowering to underprivileged people, especially women. She looks forward to sharing her new skills with them. Ghada is very passionate about astronomy and one day hopes to pursue studies in astrophysics. She has built her own website called “Go Girls Engineering” using Adobe Muse to showcase engineering role models for young students.

2014 TechGirl Ghada and OscarTechGirl Ghada shows Oscar Chen her website, Go Girls Engineering, she created using Adobe Muse. They discuss the pros and cons of using design tools like Muse as opposed to coding by hand with WordPress. 

Throughout the day, Nataly and Ghada met with different members of the TechChange team to learn about digital animation, graphic design, digital photography, web design and programming, interactive infographics, data visualization, search engine optimization (SEO), customer relationship management (CRM) software such as SalesForce, instructional design for eLearning with Articulate Storyline, and more.

Upon arriving to TechChange, the TechGirls were eager to know when we would show them how we do our animation videos.

Alon Askarov explains animation to TechGirls Ghada and NatalyCreative Director Alon Askarov explains how he uses Adobe Edge Animate and After Effects to create TechChange animations.

“My favorite part of my day at TechChange was definitely learning about the animation process!” said Nataly.

Emily Frutcherman guides TechGirls Nataly and Gadha through ArticulateEducation Technologist intern, Emily Fruchterman, shows the TechGirls the online learning courses that TechChange developed with the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center to scale HIV prevention

TechGirls Ghada and Nataly learn about photography with CharlieCharlie Weems demonstrates how to change aperture settings on a DSLR camera.

Cathie Chen explains Articulate to TechGirls Gadha and NatalyCathie Chen shows the TechGirls how to create a hotspot on Articulate Storyline.

Eric and Emily go over a project with TechGirls Nataly and GhadaEric Bihl and Emily Fruchterman do a hands-on session to show how to create triggers and slide layers on Articulate Storyline.

“Everything I learned at TechChange was very interesting, from learning about animations, digital photography, eLearning software, to understanding the diversity of online courses available,” commented Ghada.

TechGirls Group photo

Thanks for joining us, TechGirls!

See a summary of last year’s TechGirls Job Shadow day at TechChange here and click here to learn more about the TechGirls program.