Mission: #SheCanCode Begins

Written by: Nicole Pretorius

#SheCanCode is an initiative to bridge the gender gap in technology.

We aim to educate, inspire and inform the entire industry- university students, interns, apprentices, young professionals, experienced professionals, female returners, executives, venture capitalists and hiring managers- of the resounding effects of a diversity imbalance in the technology sector.

We feel that by sharing and continuing to grow our knowledge of the industry, as a community of active participants, we will be able to help women enter, remain and prosper in the tech industry.

In order to do so, we are on a mission to tell the stories of women within the industry, those deterred by the industry and those looking to enter the industry. With our blog as a medium we intend to encourage women, and men, to share their stories and experiences with regard to the lack of women in technology.

By using these experiences as a tool for storytelling, from which people can relate, learn and change, through which a library of role models are both created and celebrated, we hope to learn more about the origin, depth and scope of the problem. However, we feel that although storytelling is a powerful tool to advocate meaningful change and create a sense of unity, we feel that any solution that is long-lasting needs to go further — that is, it needs to be actionable.

The direction of our actionable response has been a topic on our minds for a couple months now. The bottom line is that there is no all-encompassing solution that will dissolve the problem, so we hope to listen to our community and action a number of solutions from the way we know best — the hiring perspective.

As consultants for a niche tech headhunting agency, Campbell North, Michaela and I are deeply immersed in the tech scene, particularly within London’s EC1 tech ecosystem (offices opening in Toronto this month, and have a strong presence with clients in Europe, the US as well as in Asia and Australia). We are on the forefront of finding the best tech talent in the world, helping our clients build companies based on meritocracy, but are faced with the challenge of overcoming the implicit bias in the decision making behind hiring, which is arguably one of the least talked about subtopics within the overarching theme of gender inequality in tech.

We hope that this will end with #SheCanCode.

Join #SheCanCode, Share #SheCanCode, Embrace #SheCanCode And finally, believe that #SheCanCode.

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