Reflections
Reflections
November 21, 2014
There is a growing problem in the tech industry these days. It's the large disparity between men and women that work in the tech industry. Just look at Twitter, Google and other tech giants. They all have released their company makeup and they all have an average of fewer than 25% women employed. It's far less in their engineering departments. This is a common theme throughout the Silicon Valley and rest of the tech industry. But what does this mean?
The tech startup culture is built on bros starting up a company in their garage like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (the founders of Apple). It's made of young males adolescent entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg and his friends. The culture has not really changed since its inception. Those that start these tech companies usually hire their friends and others like them, usually young white males. This pattern just keeps on perpetuating.
This type of culture has caused problems for women entrepreneurs looking to get funding from venture capitalists, which are dominantly male too. Many venture capitalists don't feel these women led startups are as competent or efficient as their male counterparts. A lot of women in the industry end up leaving it.
There is actually some hope for this problem only if people are willing to understand and be active making a change. It's ironic in the tech world how every startup is "Making the world a better place by (insert what they do)" yet they're perpetuating this problem. Etsy is a good example of a company willing to make a change. In the past year they have hired 500% more women engineers. They went from 3 to 20 developers. You would expect Etsy to have more women working at their company especially since their site is has mostly women customers. They did a massive hiring while keeping their productivity up. They were able to do this by holding their own hacker schools for women looking to learn to code. The company ends up hiring a lot of their engineers from this program. Some other companies are doing the same thing by reaching out to the community and providing coding programs for young girls and women. A lot of girls are turned off about programming or the tech industry is because they never had the chance to try it. By providing cheap or free programs in the communities or even in schools, it gives girls access to instruction that they would not have otherwise. Garnering the interests of girls at a young age in STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and math) programs is one way we can start to change the culture in the tech industry.
