By Lisa Wirthman
When developer Julie Ann Horvath sat down for her first one-on-one meeting with her new boss, GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner, he asked her an intriguing question: If you had money to support women in technology, what would you do?
For Horvath, who grew up in a community where few young people went to college, the answer was instinctive: Provide more role models.
“There are so few women who are in leadership positions that it’s really hard to see yourself in that position unless you see someone else succeed there,” she said.
A year later, Horvath created GitHub’s Passion Projects. The monthly talk series, launched in March, features successful women in technology who share the work that inspires them.
Founded in 2008, GitHub is the world’s largest software code host, enabling programmers to share and collaborate on projects. Passion Projects is a critical piece of the GitHub’s strategy to recruit more female developers and engineers: Show women they can have successful careers in technology – and that GitHub is a great place for women to work.
Figuring out how to recruit more women in technology is an industry-wide problem. Although the U.S. Department of Labor predicts the U.S. will have 1.4 million open technology jobs in 2018, just 29% of the applicants will be women.
Hiring more women can help companies better connect with their customers, says Preston-Werner. “We can build better products and have better services for our customers if we have better representatives from a more holistic demographic,” he said.
Research shows that diverse groups also make better decisions. When women aren’t involved in product design, their needs can be overlooked, according to a report from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). For instance, a mostly male group of engineers tailored the first generation of automotive airbags for adult male bodies, which caused avoidable deaths for women and children, the report states.
Online store Etsy attracted widespread attention earlier this year for its innovative recruiting strategy to attract and develop female engineers. Although 80% of Etsy’s customers are women, the engineers building the site were almost 90% men.
After attempts to recruit senior female engineers were unsuccessful, the company changed its interviewing process to be more female-friendly and sponsored a Hacker School training program for junior employees. As a result, Etsy increased its number of female engineers by 500%.
“Simply saying that you value diversity internally isn’t enough – there’s just no reason for an outside observer to believe you if they come and see a scarcity of women in the organization,” said Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea at a First Round Capital summit earlier this year.
Etsy’s initiative attracted so much attention that the company plans to announce a new recruiting project around women in the first quarter of next year, a company spokeswoman said.
At GitHub, which co-sponsored the 2013 Hacker School Class, the company’s recruiting strategy focuses on widening its pipeline of applicants rather than modifying its hiring standards, says Preston-Werner.
“We’re getting better about proactively going out and looking for people who are unlike us,” he said. That includes having female employees like Horvath speak at industry conferences -- and bringing women developers and engineers to its San Francisco headquarters to attend its Passion Projects series.
Besides providing female role models, Passion Projects taps into another key motivator for female employees: Women look for jobs where they can derive a deep sense of meaning from their professional work, according to research by McKinsey & Company.
That’s good news for GitHub, where all employees are encouraged to work on projects they care about. The company sponsored about 30 different initiatives to support women in technology this year and works to communicate its family-friendly work environment.
“For women that might have families or are thinking of having families, we want them to know that’s something that we’re happy to accommodate,” said Preston-Werner, who had his first child last year.
GitHub’s passionate approach to recruiting seems to be working. Over the last six months, 25 percent of the company’s last 60 hires have been women, said Preston-Werner: “It’s really exciting to see how thinking about these things a little bit deeper and being proactive about these programs can drastically change the trajectory.”
Lisa Wirthman is a freelance writer who covers business, sustainability, and public policy. Her work has been published in The Atlantic.com, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company, Investor’s Business Daily, the Denver Post and the Denver Business Journal.
