Etsy, the handmade goods marketplace fueling the online community of crafty entrepreneurs, wants to give women in technology a boost.
The ecommerce network is driven by a large community of female vendors and buyers, but Etsy‘s own engineers and operations managers don’t reflect its audience.
[More from Mashable: 13 Products You Can Make From Your Instagram Snapshots [PICS]]
It’s a constant effort for Etsy to find and hire qualified female engineers, but there just aren’t enough. Three of the 96 engineering and operations employees last September were women. Since then, that number has gone up to 11.
To try to continue to improve that number, Etsy will send 40 passionate programmers — including 20 women — to Hacker School in NYC, the “writer’s retreat” of the coding world.
[More from Mashable: When Does It Make Sense to Outsource Your Software Development?]
The VP of Etsy’s engineering team played a big role in facilitating this women-in-tech-driven project. In an Etsy Blog post, Marc Hedlund explains that he has been an engineering manager for 17 years, hiring talent from coast to coast. He has hired hundreds of men and only dozens of women.
“In sharp contrast, before joining Etsy, I had hired about 20 women in engineering roles, total, and it wasn’t for a lack of effort. Other managers I know have reported similar experiences,” Hedlund said in the blog post.
“Many people agree that real solutions to this problem need to start as early as middle school,” Hedlund said. “For my three-year-old daughter, I am thrilled to hear discussion of solutions at that level. For our company, I’d like to start solving the problem a lot sooner.”
The initiative should also improve the male-to-female ration within the developer program. Since the Hacker School‘s launch in July 2011, it has only had one female participant. Participants in Hacker School’s three-month, round-table hack sessions are carefully selected. Must-have characteristics include a die-hard love for programming, experience and a great personality.
Sonali Sridhar, one of the cofounders of Hacker School, told Mashable the summer session will be business as usual. Although, the Hacker School will have its sessions at Etsy’s headquarters in Brooklyn.
“We bring an extremely passionate group of people who want to learn more,” Sridhar said. “It’s all about coming together; it’s a peer-to-peer system and work on projects.”
SEE ALSO: Women in Tech: How One Entrepreneur Blazed a TrailThe learning-intensive Hacker School is free, and the $5,000 per-person scholarship will help students fully immerse themselves in the program.
“We want people who love programming who want to be hackers, we don’t focus on people who want to make a product or become entrepreneurs,” Sridhar. “It’s a nurturing community in that sense.”
In the blog post, Etsy said Hacker School will maintain full control of participant selection. Both companies are rooting for women.
The Hacker School sessions are project-based and don’t derive from a curriculum or anything formal. Rather, individuals are offered a space to add fire to their own projects, with help from peers.
Do you think opportunities like this will get more young women interested in tech and coding? Tell us in the comments.
Image courtesy of Etsy
This story originally published on Mashable here.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/etsy-send-20-women-summer-hacker-school-174242140.html
View full post on National Cyber Security » Computer Hacking