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One of the best ways to get more women through your door is to spread the NCWIT message to folks you know — it’s that “rising tide lifts all boats” thing.
 When you see opportunities, I hope you will talk about your company’s involvement with NCWIT and the Entrepreneurial Alliance, and encourage others to join, too. Maybe you know other startups, VCs, accelerators, or entrepreneurs, in your neighborhood or elsewhere, who are challenged by a lack of tech talent. Maybe you know a small company that’s growing too fast to focus on building its culture. We hope you will tell them about your involvement with us: tweet it, recommend it, pass it on.
Membership is as simple as completing the membership form or contacting Stephanie.
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We know that a lot of startups are small and bootstrapping, and that every dollar counts. So we’ve adopted a tiered scale for our annual member company contributions, because we want to be sure that cost isn’t a barrier. The new tiered approach means that startups with fewer than 50 employees can join the Entrepreneurial Alliance for free. As companies grow beyond 50 people, we suggest a contribution between $1,000-$2,000.
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You talked, we listened. Earlier this year you told us that one of your big challenges was attracting young people, especially women, to your open jobs. Startups may not have the HR machinery and generous benefits of a big company, but you’ve got other perks to offer and we want grads to know about that.
So: we asked you what characteristics you wanted to advertise to college grads, and we asked our social scientists to contribute some women-friendly research, and the result is Top 5 Reasons You Should Work at a Startup.
We’ll be mailing you some of these cards and encourage you to ask for more as you find more places to distribute them: talent fairs, universities, recruiting events, startup conferences, career panels, and wherever your employees volunteer. Big thanks to Tracy Carsten (UNAVCO), Leanne Smullen (SpotXchange), Leslie Osborne (Standing Cloud), Josh Ashton (SendGrid), and Jennifer Bisser (Oblong) for their contributions and input.
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In his new book, Startup Communities, Brad Feld talks about how building an inclusive startup culture isn’t enough – you need to “engage the entire entrepreneurial stack,” and this includes taking active steps to increase your diversity. In his capacity as board chair of NCWIT Brad calls out some of our research-backed tips for men who want to help bring more women into the fold, like:
- Mentor and sponsor women
- Notice and correct micro-inequities and unconscious bias
- Establish accountability metrics
- Model alternative work/life strategies
- Make discussions of gender less “risky”
You’ll find these tips and more in our resource, Top 10 Ways To Be A Male Advocate For Technical Women.
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Pacesetters is a fast-track “personal trainer” program in which company and university leaders commit to increasing their numbers of technical women. Pacesetters organizations set themselves a goal number of “net new” women, and then work at an accelerated pace to recruit previously untapped talent pools of technical women and retain women who are at risk of leaving.
If your startup is ready to kickstart its efforts to build a diverse company culture, or if you just want to work on this issue in the context of a peer cohort a concrete goal, then this program is for you. What gets measured, gets done, right?
Apply online by November 9, and contact Stephanie or Pacesetters Program Manager Jill Ross with questions.
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Want to say you knew the “next Steve Jobs” when she was still in high school? You have until November 9 to register as a virtual judge for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. The Award, which recognizes young women in high school for their technology and computing aspirations and achievements, needs tech-savvy folks to help score applications. Being a judge is a great way to volunteer with a commitment of just a few hours, and it’s a great way to get a first-hand look at the future tech talent pipeline.
To register as a new judge: http://www.ncwit.org/review
To re-up if you judged last year: https://awardportal.ncwit.org/
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The NCWIT Entrepreneurial Alliance is supported by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. and EMC2.
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