Image by Etsy Brand Design Team
Part of collaborating in online communities is collaborating with people from all backgrounds. The online marketplace Etsy realized that even though their main consumers are female, they did not have enough female software engineers. In fact, by December of 2011, only one of their 40 newly hired software engineers was a woman, making a total of 35% of their technologists female.
My first thought of how to make this workplace more equal was to just hire more female coders, but Etsy found an even better solution. They decided to invest in training women, with the hope of hiring them in the future. This “Hacker School” had over 600 applications from potential students for the Summer of 2012.
Eventually, this 600 was narrowed down to 23 actual students. By the end of the summer, eight were hired by Etsy and five were female. The “Hacker School” grew in the summer of 2013 with the support from Dropbox, GitHib, and PhotoShelter. I am excited to see companies like these embrace what movies and documentaries, such as Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, are fighting for.
To read more on how Etsy is supporting women in technology, click here.
-Hannah Leigh Johnson
I like how you focused on the impact Etsy has had specifically on producing female coders. I think it's important how you noted that this started with Etsy and has spread to several other large technology companies. It's also interesting that out of their own school they hired 5 female coders for their own company. As you mentioned in the Code documentary, it's small steps like this one that allow the computer science to open up and reduce stigmas around it being a male only field or being something women aren't smart enough for. Thanks for sharing!
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