IT is becoming increasingly feminized

Mentoring programs and scholarships for women – every year there are more and more initiatives aimed at increasing the percentage of women working in the IT industry. And it works! More and more often feminine subjects appear in advertisements, and recruiters of technology companies strive to equalize the proportion of employed women and men in their teams. Increasingly there are even IT teams completely dominated by women.

There is more and more talk about the success of women in the IT sector and the numerous projects that help them develop in the industry. There are initiatives to support already active female programmers, but also scholarship programs to subsidize coding lessons for those women who just want to enter the IT world. One of them is the CoderGirl scholarship, funded by the Codecool programming school, thanks to which two women will be able to participate in a year-long weekend course of full-stack developer at no cost.

In the European Union there is a shortage of approx. 600 thousand. It is estimated that in Poland, the number of programmers is 50 thousand. Insufficient number of human resources is the result of stereotypes, popular for years, that the IT industry is for men. However, nothing could be further from the truth – women thrive as programmers, and as mostly rebranded individuals, they are much more versatile and bring a good dose of diversity to the industry as a whole. Meanwhile, in Poland, in the IT sector, women account for 30 percent. We want to reduce the gap in the labor market and equalize the proportions by inviting women to participate in creating a more diverse future.

You can apply for the scholarship until 18 September. This is a unique opportunity to learn programming for free and enter the job market right away, as the grant includes a job guarantee.

Help to get started

Scholarships are not the only initiative supporting increased representation of women in IT. One of the most interesting and dynamically operating on the Polish market projects for better position of women in the IT sector is Dare IT, which conducts mentoring programs, training and offers psychological support for women starting work in IT.

Dare IT is largely made up of people who are re-engineered. Tailored individually to each participant, the path of the mentoring program helps to systematize and broaden technical knowledge, but also prepares for recruitment and work in the IT industry. It is also an irreplaceable support from other women who are in the same place and struggling with the same problems. What is most important, however, Dare IT is created by women and for women, which makes it perfectly suited to the needs of women entering the IT market.

Programmer wanted

However, activities promoting programming among women are not everything – the key is the actual demand for female programmers on the labor market and the willingness of employers to hire them. Feminativity is becoming more prevalent in job ads, and recruiters at tech companies are looking to even out the ratio of female and male employees on their teams.

It would seem that our industry is heavily masculinized, yet we are successfully changing that. We hope that during the current recruitment process we will be able to increase the percentage of employed women – said Joanna Jaworska-Piszkiewicz from SatRevolution, a company operating in the space sector, inviting female programmers, mechanics, technicians and engineers to the recruitment process.

An interesting – and increasingly observed – case are also companies, in which the development teams have been dominated by women. Dataplace is an example.ai, a company specializing in services such as „location intelligence” where in the development team of seven people, as many as five are women.

You can see that in many industries, including the IT industry, limiting beliefs are changing and we are very happy about it. The job market is moving in the right direction.