Every year, major tech companies publish their diversity reports, with special attention paid to their gender diversity. The lack of female employees in technical or engineering positions has become a yardstick for measuring efforts towards parity.
For 10 Degrees, a company of WordPress specialists in the UK, it wasn’t enough just to wait for the gender imbalance to correct itself. The company’s employees decided to take a more proactive approach to gender diversity.
For International Women’s Day, 10 Degrees’ business manager, Lynda Vaughan, posted a blog entry with the rather provocative title “Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers.” Addressing the gender disparity in its technical staff, Vaughan say in the post: “…we’ve never had any women apply for our developer vacancies. Not one.”
Rather than accept that the gender disparity in its technical staff, 10 Degrees intends to reach out to teachers in the area to start the 10 Degrees Academy. The intention is to teach the young women of the community about coding, rather than wait for them to apply for jobs as adults.