International Women’s Day has the theme of Balance for Better this year.

Working in tech, where there is a clear gender imbalance, we are well aware that there is still lots to do to encourage women into technology, and this needs to extend into schools to make an impact when young people are forming their ideas about career paths and jobs that they would like to follow.

The recruitment and career events that our HR team attend (see our article RDT works with local young people to improve their skills and prospects) give RDT an opportunity to talk to young people to see what interests them.  We have found, shockingly, that a lot of young women have been turned off technology before they even start secondary school.  By working closely with our education partners, RDT use this unique opportunity to talk to young women and encourage of the benefits and exciting careers in technology that are available to them.

Women have proven very successful in technology careers.  RDT can give examples of our positive experiences with Software Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers, Database Engineers and Scrum Masters.  We are also delighted to boast of the recent promotion of Laura Bridge onto our Executive team.  Laura’s background is highly technical and we hope she is blazing the trail for more female techie success at our company.

Companies such as ours are always looking for women to join our team, we know that women have all of the qualities we seek when developing software and bring diversity and different ideas to the mix.  We consider each person’s needs and can offer a flexible working approach for those who would benefit from it – see our Employee Spotlight about our QA Engineer Kate Alshaker for an excellent example of how this works in action.

We invited all of our staff to join a seminar at lunchtime today, which examined how we create a more gender-balanced environment for everyone.  Run by Dr Sam Collins, the founder and CEO of Aspire, the seminar generated interesting discussion from both sides of the gender divide and proved inspiring for all attendees.