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That women are underrepresented in the startup community is hardly news. Just eight percent of startup founders are women, according to EZebis, a site that supports women in tech. This is despite the fact that women-led private tech companies have been shown to achieve a 35-percent-higher return on investment. After all these years, the face of tech startups is still a young guy with fashionable stubble and thick black glasses.
I’d like to think my company HootSuite is anything but a stodgy old boys club. As a social media company, the heart of our business is building relationships. Our employees are by and large young, progressive and open-minded. We have a yoga studio at our headquarters and get fresh, local fruit delivered daily. On any given day, around a dozen dogs roam the halls of our pet-friendly office.
But the numbers don’t lie. Out of every 10 people interviewed for a tech position at our office, 9 are men. We have approximately 50 engineers and developers on our team, and fewer than 20 of them are women. (By contrast, the gender breakdown is closer to 50-50 for other departments.) Figuring out why this is and what can be done about it is a question that keeps me up nights.
Why? You can point to the scarcity of female role models in tech, though thankfully high-profile leaders like Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg are slowly changing that. Or you can blame it on the obstacles to building a culture of entrepreneurialism among women: According to a recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, more than half of women doubt their abilities to start a business, while men report having a much more robust professional network for advice and inspiration.
But it’s hard to get around a simple reality: Computer science, the backbone of any tech startup, is still a male-dominated field. Women comprise fewer than 30 percent of U.S. computer science and engineering programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels,according to the National Science Foundation. Coding, in particular—caricatured as marathon, ramen-fueled computer programming sessions in movies like The Social Network—has traditionally been seen as a guys’ thing. But does it have to be?
Girl Dev is a pilot program started from our offices at HootSuite. Once a week for three hours, groups of women interested in improving their computer coding skills meet in our cafeteria after work. The focus is on teaching not just the basics of HTML and CSS but more advanced topics including Javascript, PHP and app development in a supportive and non-competitive environment.
We also host monthly meetups of Ladies Learning Code, a Toronto-based initiative that has introduced more than 4,000 women and girls to programming and technical skills since 2011. One Saturday a month in our office, 14 mentors and roughly 40 attendees spend 8 hours working together. Importantly, it’s not all code. Mentors introduce themselves, share their personal stories and offer insight on ways to thrive as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
Creating supportive environments like these to learn computer science skills is a start. But truly narrowing the gender gap in the startup community—like the solution to so many challenges—comes down in large part to how we educate children. Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old boys club.
To that end, Ladies Learning Code recently introduced Girls Learning Code, camps and workshops aimed specifically at 8- to 13- and 13- to 17-year-old girls. With a focus on teamwork, creativity and technology, the program aims to help girls see tech as a medium for self-expression and a means of changing the world, notes Emma Nemtin, marketing director for tech company Hubba and one of the organization’s mentors: “By giving the girls a great learning experience, putting them in a room with dozens of other girls who also think technology is cool, giving them access to mentors and role models, and then showing them examples of what it can mean to work in tech, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that these girls grow up knowing that they have a choice . . . .”
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