Resources For Women In Tech
While the business is still dominated by men, these groups are dedicated to ensuring that women have a place in it.
Women's advocacy organizations are critical to the tech business today. They've evolved to provide money, research, and other resources to help girls and women overcome the industry's gender-based challenges.
In recent years, advocacy for women in technology has expanded, and many groups are expanding their chapters to go global. To assist women in STEM, there are open inclusion lists, specialist job posting sites, education centers, mentorship programs, and hackathons. Here are some resources for women in tech.
Girls In Tech
Adriana Gascoigne, a tech activist and author of Tech Boss Lady: How to Start-up, Disrupt, and Thrive as a Female Founder, started this foundation in 2007. The mission of Girls in Tech is to empower, educate, and mentor women in the field of technology. She accomplishes this by providing coding workshops, bootcamps, and hackathons that are open to women of all ages. Accessibility is the key. Girls in Tech began in San Francisco and has since grown to include more than 62,000 members from 33 countries.
The Girls in Tech Podcast, hosted by Zuzy Martin-Aly, was started by Girls in Tech in 2020. They talk about women who create our future on this platform, and they talk about their employment board, which offers the most urgent tech positions. Having a safe forum to discuss job access encourages women to forego the entire process and establish their own businesses. "A lot of women who used to work in-house are discovering now that they can start their own businesses," Gascoigne added. "Being a part of these events and meeting individuals from the business side of things is all vital in growing a firm," says the entrepreneur.
The Anita Borg Institute
The Systers Community was created in 1987 by computer programmer Anita Borg and twelve other female scientists. The purpose was to build an email list for women in the "systems" field. It was the first online network for women working in technology. The Systers Community became the Anita Borg Institute, one of the first non-profits for women in technology, ten years later.
The Anita Borg Institute is a key player in helping women in technology and computing network and encourage one another. They continue to assist hundreds of women in finding their voice in technology and working to magnify it. "Women are not full partners in driving the design of new technology that will define their life," Borg explains. This is bad for women and bad for the world; we need to restore women's rightful place at the table when it comes to developing future technology."
Girl Develop It
What makes Girl Develop so special? It is a component of their education program for women in STEM fields. They provide low-cost online courses on everything from software development to machine learning and algorithmic work. Since its inception in 2010, Girl Develop It has spread to 60 cities throughout the United States and released its curriculum online in order to reach a wider audience.
"It started as a call to action for women, by women, who were weary of the poor representation of women in IT and wanted to do something about it," explains Katie Nohe Franco, the executive director. "There's an urgent need for the developers of technology to reflect the people who are consuming that technology," Erynn Petersen, one of the board members, said. "I'm passionate about boosting the number of women and non-binary adults in technological fields."
Project Include
Project Include's purpose is to promote corporate diversity and offer women in IT a fair chance. Project Inclusion acts as a diversity rulebook, ensuring that underrepresented groups are treated equally in the software industry. They collaborate with technology businesses to draft a code of conduct, make recommendations for equitable compensation, and build procedures for resolving workplace problems. They urge organizations to make significant changes by providing case studies that highlight diversity concerns and data-driven solutions. Founder Ellen Pao adds, "Project Include is focused on data-driven solutions to offer everyone a fair shot to succeed in tech." "We look at everyone's inclusion through an intersectional perspective, holistic approaches across all organizational operations, and accountability measures." Pao has written a book called Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Long-Term Change.
FutureGirlCorp
Let's face it: not everyone wants to work for someone else. FutureGirlCorp is for women in tech who want to start their own company. The group assists women in determining the best approach to starting their own business, as well as providing assistance with fundraising and employee recruitment. FutureGirlCorp teaches young women how to attract investors and shares examples of successful business models. They also cover the less glamorous aspects of business, such as identifying your target market and learning how to reach out to them.
The purpose of FutureGirlCorp, which was founded by British-Jamaican businesswoman Sharmadean Reid, who also owns a cosmetics firm, is to enable young women to come up with significant ideas. "I want to teach females that if they have a project concept, it might be a global project," she said.
500 Women Scientists
We frequently hear that girls in STEM fields require role models, which is correct. However, only 18% of the biographies on Wikipedia, one of the most popular websites on the internet, contain women. Despite the fact that women have played an important role in STEM for hundreds of years, they have been mostly overlooked in history. Wikipedia Edit-a-thons are organized by 500 Women Scientists, where women learn how to develop pages for women in STEM. Women will also have the opportunity to listen to speeches about why representation is important and network with a group of like-minded women. Physicist Jess Wade and biologist Maryam Zaringhalam, the co-founders, even produced a Wiki Education Course. The six-week Zoom training course, developed in collaboration with Wiki Education, produces professionals in the process of writing biographies for women.
"We do have the capacity to help more people perceive themselves in science – and on Wikipedia," Wade and Zaringhalam said of their quest to normalize women's achievements. We don't have to wait for the next Nobel Laureate to share her accomplishments with the rest of the world."
Change Catalyst
Change Catalyst, a San Francisco-based group, aims to provide solutions for inclusion and to eliminate barriers that women face. They advocate for equal compensation for women, recommend ways for companies to hire more women, and assist women in achieving work-life balance. Melinda Briana Elper, the company's founder and CEO, points out that intersecting identities are often ignored. "It has to be about all women, not just white women; women with disabilities, people from other backgrounds." We talk about colour, ethnicity, gender, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ people, and age when we talk about diversity." Elper offers dialogues with experts on ideas for actionable change on her weekly podcast, Leading With Empathy and Allyship Show.
Despite the incredible work that these groups are doing to support women in technology, they remain underrepresented in STEM disciplines. According to McKinsey, women's participation in computer positions has decreased over the last twenty-five years. The gender gap is still difficult to overlook, with only 15% of women in CEO positions. As more women tell their stories of how they got into computing, there appears to be a steady increase in activism, awareness, and, yes, change.