By IWA
25.02.2018

We at IWA pride ourselves on supporting gender equality in all walks of life. We are originally from Finland where this has been a common thing for a long time now. For example, Finland was the first country ever to grant women full political rights, i.e. the right to vote and to run for political office, over one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, there are still noticeable gender equality issues at work in the tech industry.

The gender equality issues are complicated and deeply rooted in the tech industry. Some claim that women are not interested in tech and some think that coding is suitable for men alone. The studies say otherwise. Women may even be better suited for tech jobs than men!

Ead Bannamol works at our Thailand office as a web developer. She is using Ruby on Rails and React.js as her tools for creating amazing web solutions. She confirms not having any special challenges as a female coder and she is an important part of our work community. She loves working at IWA and she is especially happy while working on challenging projects and alongside a good team.

Still, the majority of our workforce is currently comprised of men. We do employ skilled female web developers, but the ratio of women to men in those roles is skewed heavily towards men.

We would like to change that. We would surely love to see more women send us their CVs and we would gladly hire more women.

This is why we are actively participating in initiatives aimed at attracting more women to coding. One of these initiatives is "Mimmit Koodaa" (Chicks Can Code), a lecture series organized by Ohjelmistoyrittäjät ry (Software Entrepreneurs of Finland), which begins on the 28th of February. More information regarding the lecture series (in Finnish) at https://ohjelmistoyrittajat.fi/mimmitkoodaa/.

We are participating in the lecture series with our own lecture about front-end technologies and techniques. Other lectures focus on various important tech issues such as E-Commerce, image recognition, AI, information security and mobile technologies.

We hope that initiatives such as Mimmit koodaa will eventually encourage more women to consider tech as a career choice. There's precious little that can be done other than making web development more accessible to women in the first place.

It is also imperative to make work environments more accessible to the entirety of our workforce. We do our best to facilitate a friendly and accepting atmosphere at work. We are also an exceptionally flexible workplace when it comes to work location. You don't like Helsinki's slushy streets or cold temperatures? No problem, you can work at our offices in Thailand and Abu Dhabi during the winter months!

Check out our Career pages for more on our work culture and vacant positions at https://iwa.fi/careers/.