Well, we hail from over ten different countries, and, although we haven’t *yet* reached a 50/50 guy-to-gal ratio, we envision that day and we meanwhile have a good number of female Code Tailors…
We come from a variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds and religions, and while some of us wear to work button downs or dresses, others enjoy sporting tee-shirts and jeans around our comfortable office. Maybe it is for all these reasons, that the recent #ILookLikeAnEngineer hashtag trend resonated with so many of our engineers at Stylight.
When the trend began, we immediately jumped on the bandwagon and tweeted a photo of some our own female engineers. But looking at all of our Code Tailors, we also realized that there are so many different faces of modern-day engineering that don’t fit into the archetypal image of an engineer and, furthermore, how much value this diversity brings to the profession. For example, this is the countries our engineers are coming from:
Namely: Germany, USA, Brazil, Ukraine, Romania, Spain, Russia, Bulgaria, Egypt, Austria, France, Serbia, Mexico
For this reason, we decided to host the first-ever Tech Diversity meetup in Munich, to provide a space for engineers to come together to discusses stereotypes, personal experiences, and brainstorming for promoting more diversity in tech.
Julie’s slides:
We hosted the meetup last week and welcomed about 20 engineers from around Munich into our office. After some getting to know one another while munching on pizza, attendees listened to a talk given by our software developer Julie who talked about what has shaped the image of engineering and what factors contribute to “technical privileges.”
Based on the University of Michigan “Privilege Walk,” recently popularized by Buzzfeed, we tried an experiment where we adapted the walk to dig deeper into what factors in a person’s life may have hindered him or her from having equal access to engineering professions. The exercise proved to be a great starting point for discussing many sometimes neglected factors that may contribute to a lack of diversity in the tech industry. All in all, the meetup provided a great space to bring together some incredibly motivated engineers from Munich, all with the desire to promote tech diversity. Stay tuned for the next meetup!
Julie’s talk:
Read more:
Diversity in Tech companies
