Technology’s gender problem is well known.
Women represent under 30% of technical roles in the tech industry. According to McKinsey, the most gender-diverse companies are 21% more likely to experience above-average profitability.
It is imperative to address the gender diversity problem in tech as technology moves so fast. Women need to be at the spearhead of innovation, alongside the men; otherwise, prevailing models will not change. So, to do so, we need to incentivise girls and women to enter and lead in tech. Le Wagon, the #1 ranked coding school worldwide, are leading the way as educators at the start of the pipeline of tech talent.
As part of their Women in Tech initiative, Le Wagon is working with companies such as us to host free coding workshops to empower women by giving them the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in tech.
Towards the end of 2019, Le Wagon hosted a coding workshop at Seedrs HQ for our female employees, teaching the basics of coding and creating a landing page from scratch using HTML and CSS.
Thanks to Le Wagon, we learnt HTML/CSS core notions, Bootstrap and its responsive grid system, as well as lots of graphical tips and tools! It was a really fun afternoon and around 30 women attended, with more dialling-in internationally.
We are proud to partner with Le Wagon for this initiative to strive for more diversity in the tech field.
As a fintech business that is democratising the investment landscape, diversity and inclusion (D&I) sit at the heart of what we do, and providing opportunities for everyone is a key driver of our success.
Last year, it was a priority to make active changes to increase D&I within our internal and external communities; from hosting our first Female Founder Office Hours event to signing the HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter.
A key instigator of this step-change was forming a company D&I group, to agree on initiatives, educate the wider company, communicate updates and support an overall culture of trust and participation for our employees.
One of the key initiatives was looking at our hiring process to help improve the diversity within teams such as tech. Some of the strategies included training hiring managers about unconscious bias during recruitment, simplifying the application process by focusing on competency over experience, and focusing on the language we used in job advertisements to ensure it was as inclusive as possible.
This is only the start of the journey, but we’re developing our D&I initiatives as we learn along the way. Thank you Le Wagon for inspiring and educating our employees, as well as your work providing opportunities for everyone.
Here’s to more collaborations in 2020!
