This startup pays $500 to a girls-in-STEM nonprofit every time it hires a man

We need to increase the pool of female software engineers available to hire in future

Spill — an app providing message-based therapy to workplaces and universities — is currently a very, very male company. And we understand this makes us the worst.

We didn’t want to be like this.

There are now seven people working in the Spill office team (excluding all our therapists, who work remotely) and still only one is a woman.

In the tech industry overall, it’s not a much better story: less than one in five employees are female. And that proportion is declining, down from 32% in 1990.

When the need for another software engineer came up at Spill, therefore, we wanted to make sure as many female candidates as possible had the opportunity to apply.

We posted the job description on AngelList and some female-only job sites like Code First Girls, but the applications we got back were overwhelmingly male. Our co-founder Calvin then spent days trawling through LinkedIn and manually messaging female developers who looked like they might be a good fit, trying to encourage applications. There just weren’t as many out there with the specific skills and experience we were looking for: out of the 130 relevant CVs we managed to get through for the role, only 18 were women.

In the subsequent stages of the application, this is how the gender split broke down:

After the final round, the male candidate had clearly demonstrated in practical tasks set during the interview process that he could quickly and effectively solve the kind of problems the role required. In contrast, the two female candidates were less experienced and so were less competent in the tech tests.

We held off for a few weeks and did another round of LinkedIn scouting, to see if any other potential female candidates could be encouraged to apply, but we didn’t get anywhere. In the end, we hired the male candidate: our development team were really struggling with their workload and we couldn’t put off the hire any longer. It was incredibly frustrating, because we were keen to try and improve our female to male ratio but instead ended up making it even worse!

What we realised throughout this process, however, was that the problem starts much earlier on. By hiring a female developer to work at Spill we’re simply moving her from one tech company to another, redistributing amongst the pool of women working in the industry rather than adding to it.

The real problem is that only 15% of computer science graduates are female; for engineering and technology degrees the figure is a similarly dismal 14%. At school, 10% of girls take Computer Science and I.T. at A-Level, 22% take Physics and 29% take Further Maths. An IFS study from last year found that, although girls tend to do much better than boys in STEM school subjects like maths and science at a younger age, they lack confidence and worry they’ll be one of the only girls in the class if they continue studying these subjects in later years. The biggest drop-off happens in early adolescence: while 66% of girls aged 6 to 12 are interested in (or enrolled in) computing-related subjects, only 32% of girls aged 13 to 17 are.

Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organisation we came across while looking into this problem. They’re doing amazing things to tackle the issue at its root cause, namely setting up free intensive summer bootcamp courses and after-school coding clubs for girls, as well as organising inspirational trips and guest speakers, to help give girls both the ability and the desire to pursue careers in technology. The U.S.-based company has already served 185,000 girls and recently expanded to start teaching courses in the U.K.

So we decided that, whilst we will go above and beyond to try and find female candidates for roles going forward, every time there isn’t a suitable woman for the role — and we end up hiring a man — we will make a $500 donation to Girls Who Code.

Our little attempt to increase the pool of female coders available to hire from in future :)

So, to summarise: we’re still terrible, and there’s still way too much Y chromosome in our office, but we’re trying to do what we can — even if it’s just in a small way.

A few asides to end on:

1. As well as having fewer women entering the tech industry, they are leaving at an alarming rate according to a survey by Fortune — and it’s largely because of the macho culture. Many leavers reported simply feeling too uncomfortable in such an environment. To help promote a more open and emotionally attuned kind of environment, we do a few things. Everyone has a 1:1 every week with their direct manager. Everyone has a £400 ($500) per month budget to see a personal therapist. The whole company works from home every other Wednesday. And we all do a group therapy session on Friday afternoons, so we can get any work or personal grievances off our chests before heading out for the weekend.
2. We tried making everyone’s salaries the same, to reduce not only gender pay gaps but any pay gaps, but sadly it didn’t work out.

We’re still pretty new to all this running-a-company stuff. What are we missing out on when it comes to creating an inclusive working environment? Have any examples of great ideas you’ve seen implemented, or suggestions for how we could do things differently? We’re all ears. Comment below or email will@spill.chat