Cheer up ladies! Silicon Valley wants to have more women employees on board

Yes, you read that correct. Silicon Valley is planning to have more women employees onboard. While one might think that it is a move for empowering women in the corporate world; for social media giants like Twitter and Pinterest, this is a move to narrow down the difference between both the genders.

In India, where women are emerging as promising entrepreneurs, meeting the industry’s requirements, the technology industry’s numbers are still conspicuous. No specific targets have been set by the sector so far. Surprising results came up when a business daily, The Economic Times reached out to India’s 10 most highly valued startups for details on female participation in their tech and non-tech teams.

At In-Mobi, there were just 15% women employees in their tech team while at Paytm, the situation is slightly improved with 20% women employees. Startups like Flipkart, Freshdesk, Practo, Quikr and Snapdeal declined to share any details while Mu Sigma and Ola didn’t responded to the queries.

The micro-blogging site Twitter recently made a public announcement stating its goal to increase the number of its overall women workforce from 34% to 35% and in its tech division too, the firm wants to have 16% women employees from the current 13%.

"(Inclusion) enables companies to solve complex problems and innovate more effectively, which is particularly beneficial for startups, who differentiate themselves through innovation," said Natalie Johnson, partner at Paradigm, a Silicon Valley-based agency working with highly-valued startups such as Airbnb and Pinterest on their diversity initiatives. It's not that startups do not recognise this.

Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said that gender ratios in the finance and tech teams were "very lopsided". Goyal also said that half of all senior management roles at Zomato were held by women.

Indeed, promoting gender diversity in the workforce starts early, said Johnson of Paradigm. "A key way tech companies can promote gender diversity is by mitigating bias in how they attract, recruit, manage, and retain talent," she said.

"Raising individual awareness of bias and implementing structures to reduce bias can enhance efforts to hire a diverse workforce." Some startups have initiated measures to achieve this. At InMobi, all recruitment managers are women. The company is also set to establish HackerSchool, a month-long scholarship and sponsorship program for women software engineers who will be taught by In-Mobi engineers.

However, "startups don't lose their sleep over their gender diversity ratio. It's not their number priority. But they should, because their business depends on it," suggested Geeta Kannan, managing director India of Anita Borg Institute, a non-profit advocating the need for more women in the tech industry.

"For startups, the need of the hour is talent, not gender or any other aspect," said Shachi Irde, executive director of Catalyst India, an organisation advocating more roles for women in business. The diversity agenda is a smaller subset of a more important talent program for startups, she said.

But to attract talent, startups should introspect whether half the population will prefer the fast paced work environments that these firms thrive in, said Kannan of Anita Borg Institute.

To correct this, she said it was important for startups to draft policies like work-from-home arrangements and flexible hours. Change on this front will take time as well as effort, said Abhay Singhal, founder and chief revenue officer at In-Mobi, which in the past year had drawn up a slew of initiatives to ease gender bias in workforce.

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