Gender Diversity in Tech Requires Applicant Diversity

I would love our company to show more gender diversity, but where are the female applicants?

From what I've read women make up 17% of the Drupal community - though there is some question as to how many of those women are actual developers. Even in speaking with women in the Drupal community, it often seems that the women working in Drupal tend more to be in marketing positions than in highly-technical jobs.

Support for Women & Girls

As a father of a young girl, I am vested in making sure that that the technology field is a more friendly and welcoming industry to women. Our company has sponsored the Portland Rails Girls (even though we do very little Rails work) and we are excited to open up our space for an upcoming Women Who Hack event (thank you to Kronda Adair for championing this). It's always difficult for disenfranchised minority groups to break into an industry, in the best case because of a lack of personal in-industry advocates and worst case a true deep-seated gender bias. So, if we as an industry want to advocate for diversity, I think it's important to show support for these kind of functions.

Lack of Female Candidates

Yet, today with the careers we have listed at our company, I have yet to see many women applying for our jobs at all.

• 19% (3 of 16) of the recent Project Management candidates have been women.
• 8% (4 of 50) of applicants for Developer listings in the past 9 months have been women.
• 0% (0 of 4) applications for Senior Developer have been women.

So where are all the female applicants? Here in Portland the adult demographic is 51% female, so it's not for lack of women being present in the city.

How Are We Doing?

If you include contractors we work with on a regular basis (which includes the HR world), Metal Toad Media is currently 23% (6 of 26) female. However, if you take contractors out and focus on just the in-house tech positions, women make up less then 10% (2 of 19) of our overall work force. That's about inline with the applications we have received overtime. So what does that mean?

We Need More Female Applicants

For our company to maintain (or get in place) a high-level of gender diversity, we need more female applicants. This means we need you! As a decent-sized development company, we have all kinds of positions available to be filled by women (or men - we are equal opportunity after all). This includes both senior positions and entry level positions, so I would like to encourage both seasoned professionals and recent CS graduates to consider Metal Toad Media as a potential employer.

We can do it!