Which businesses are paying attention to gender inclusiveness

It is very easy to think that gender equality and inclusiveness are only the responsibility of women because one can believe that in this century women already have the right to decide what they want to be in their professional careers.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth than that statement: In the 21st century, many women around the world still do not have the opportunity to make their own decisions or even the tools and knowledge to do so according to their desires, such as having a technical career.

For this reason, bringing women into technical fields is a huge challenge for all societies in this century, and requires joint efforts from governments, businesses, and civil society organizations to have solutions in the short term. But for companies, it is not so easy to design policies and ways of working that reinforce the impulse of women to take part in the tech field in the variety of opportunities it has for them.

Several feminist organizations are looking forward to positive actions to increase the number of women leading projects in the tech industry. Most of their actions are focused on building safe places for women to work and building learning pathways taught by women for women, to offer them not only the women’s perspective in the learning process but also fresh references for women in tech.

At the same time, some of the largest companies in the tech industry are thinking about how they can make their workplaces more welcoming to women, either by supporting gender equality initiatives or by implementing affirmative action policies for women, and today it is very common for some large and mid-sized companies to have a Gender Equality and Diversity offices with essential responsibilities in the hiring and onboarding processes.

Companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Salesforce, and Adobe already have their own gender and diversity offices, which help them to have a more inclusive workforce and also offer women a better place to work and equal pay. Although the big motivation for these companies would be the opportunity to improve financial and operational performance with the presence of more skilled women in their organizations.

However, for sure many of us will have some complaints about these big tech companies, especially about how they manage user’s data and information, and how they were changing the human relationships between all of us in this 4th industrial revolution we are all facing.

For this reason, this article would not be understood as an advocacy action for these companies, but only as a simple enumeration of examples of big tech companies taking care of having a more inclusive workforce.