Archives for category: Code & Development

People often ask me for help finding more women to hire for their coding and engineering teams. Their main motivation is to hire great developers to fill their growing their workforce. Their secondary motivation is to increase diversity — not just in gender, but also in ideas, perspectives, people skills and problem solving.

I believe this is important and so I offer as much help as I can. The thing is, there are high hurdles to overcome when it comes to hiring great senior devs and engineers, especially great ones who are women because there just aren’t that many currently working in the industry.

Earlier this week, a video about increasing the number of women engineers at Etsy hit the web. If you care about hiring more women on your technical teams, it’s worthy viewing. In about 19 minutes, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea elegantly sums up almost every piece of advice I’ve given, and offers a viable path to achieving the goal.

First Round Capital, which hosted Kellan’s presentation, also posted their own take.

Around the web you’ll find other good advice on how to get more women to apply for technical roles. If you’ve found something that works, please post it in comments. The 2012 report from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology offers additional caveats and 10 high-level solutions that would work especially well for large businesses.

NYC Ruby WomenA few years ago, I founded a code and social meetup for female Ruby developers called NYC Ruby Women. It’s been great to see a whole spectrum of Rubyists — from highly experienced pros to novice coders, all of whom are women — get something from the group.

As Ruby Women learn more, they want to go from learning the language and working on personal projects to working on teams and bigger projects. In other words, they’re looking for apprenticeships.

I know they’re out there somewhere. So friends, readers, do you know of any? NYC is preferred, but it’s good to know about opportunities in other cities too. (Direct hires only, no recruiters, please.)

There’s a Branch, which I’ve embedded below (a perfect excuse to test Branch’s group feature, which is currently in beta), or you can post a comment. If you’d rather contact me privately, write me here.