In the tech world it is not common to have a gender distribution of 50/50 even if we all strive for it and really want to achieve that goal. It is especially difficult to attract women to dev teams or tech oriented positions and teams. Among administrative teams however, it is seems to be much easier to recruit women.

At Narrative we are about 29% women and 71% men. Sue and Fernanda work within dev/tech and the rest of us within administration and support. I would love to see more women in all our company, but mainly I would love to see more women apply for positions in the dev team. Why is it so hard to find women for tech positions?

It seems like a world wide “problem” and many companies experience the same as we do. There are so many blog articles with best 5 tips on “how-to”, and so many blog posts on the topic. While some suggest that companies should show that their business is so much more than just programming or tech, some suggest that showing coding women is the key to success. I am not sure if that is the key, but I do believe that something needs to be done.

First of all, I can’t believe that we even talk about this today in 2015 when tech is so much more than just programming or coding. This problem with male domination in tech educations is ridiculous. Does competence really have a gender? Looking at gender distributions in tech related educations there is as little as 1/3 of the students in Linköping being women and at KTH about 40% in all engineer programs are women. So it seems the problem starts a lot earlier than when it’s time to apply for a job.

So what is my responsibility and what can my company do to attract more women?

In Sweden there’s an initiative called Women In Tech gathering women within tech for all kinds of business and inspirational activities, in US there is Hire more women in tech showing a great spectrum of companies and organizations that can contribute to more women applying for tech positions.

Being an HR nerd, I love to follow up on these numbers and would love if Narrative was a 50/50 company in all teams. So what can we do to attract more women and get more tech women to join companies like ours?

One idea that pops up in my head is to show a bit more of our culture and what we “Narrative ladies” do. Like having dinner together, celebrating our mothers to be, running the Swedish “Tjejmilen” (10 km track race in Stockholm) or just hanging. Believe it or not, we also spend time with the Narrative guys (Oh yes we do!), so we are not an isolated group hanging out alone. But we have a special bond and a special connection being a minority in the same situation and in the same company.

So help me figure out what we can do to attract more women and to get more women to join the tech world.

Email me at louise@getnarrative.com or reach our on LinkedIn

Best!