These 5 Initiatives By Tech Giants Are Increasing The Participation Of Women In STEM

According to a report, India ranks 5th lowest in having women in top tech leadership positions. It is found that for every 3 men engineers there is one women engineer in India, which makes women engineers only 26% of the whole. Most of the women shift to managerial positions which shows that STEM attracts women less. This gender gap situation need to be solved and many companies including Accenture, Twitter and Pinterest pledged to increase the percentage of women they hire. When many technological companies are rumoured to be the ‘boys club’, many organisations took a step forward to remove the gender gap in their organisations. Some of the opportunities for women in STEM are listed below:

1. Codess

Codess is a community of female coders, initiated by Microsoft to promote more women towards coding, and to remove the gender parity. Various networking and mentoring events are held to inspire women. Through Codess, Microsoft offers internship opportunities to women.

2. CodHers

Adobe has come up with women only hackathons like CodHers to celebrate women in STEM. They claim it to be a hunt for brightest women developers and coders in India through a series of algorithmic programming challenges.

3. Protégé Sponsorship Initiative

Intel runs the Protégé Sponsorship Initiative, which aims to create development opportunities for select senior technical women employees by mapping each of them to a senior leader as sponsors. Intel has a public-private WiSci to bring together girls from diverse cultures to create technology solutions for positive social impact in their communities. MakeHers is also an initiative engaging girls and women in STEM through making, creating and inventing.

4. Develop Her

Accenture offers all female hackathons called Develop Her that is open to female students and professionals who are 18 years old and above. The goal of this challenge is to prototype ideas, products and services that are able to create social and economic value for women by hacking everyday objects and using open data, open-source libraries, public APIs, frameworks for fast prototyping and software development, microcontrollers, sensors, and other hardware (e.g. 3D printers, beacons, wearables, among others).

5. Change the Game

Google recently came up with Change the Game initiative to promote and empower teenage girls to design their own games. The top winner could also share her vision for the future of gaming and have a chance to win a $10,000 college scholarship and a $15,000 scholarship for her school’s technology program.

Also read: Beyond #WomenInTech: 7 Ways You Can Make Every Single Woman Count

This is by no means an exhaustive or representative list. Suggestions to add to this list are welcome in the comments section.

Featured Image Source: MDX.ac.uk