Django Girls: How to get more women into IT

Seeing great potential in women interested in IT who were too afraid or simply didn’t know how to enter the field, a group of friends visiting the Europython Conference last year in Berlin decided to found Django Girls.

In the last few months, these one-day workshops have developed into a global project empowering women, encouraging them to learn to code and as a result increasing the diversity in this mainly male community. During these workshops aspiring female programmers can improve their skills in Python and Django, alongside with HTML and CSS. Divided into small groups of three girls, the attendees are coached by professionals working with these technologies on a daily basis.

The Wrocław edition was one of its kind: It was an all-female event co-organized by an excellent software developer from 10Clouds – Ania Warzecha and this is just the beginning: Four of the workshop coaches were 10Clouds girls, trying to educate and inspire a new generation of female coders.

This weekend I myself had the amazing pleasure of teaching ambitious girls, and one of my students was an English philology graduate working as a HR specialist. In her everyday work she recruits many people with an IT-profile, including software developers. She admitted that she was always curious about how their actual job looks like and that her main goal was to discover how a developers typical work day looks like, but as it turns out she also discovered how fun coding can be. A few days after the workshop she wrote me an enthusiastic email that she had found her new passion, completed a Python online tutorial and bought herself a book about Django. There is one thing I am sure of: You can’t learn to code in one day, but workshops such as Django Girls are one hell of a start.

Statistics from all over the world don’t lie: The gender gap in IT is still a fact. Computer science related fields remain reserved for men and this is exactly why we need projects such as Django Girls and this is when companies like 10Clouds should show off. Because this is a place, where passionate developers, eager to learn and create amazing products can improve themselves regardless their gender and where female coders are in majority.