Perficient Latin America’s Women in Tech program is driven by a community of professionals committed to creating an inclusive environment from which to drive the discourse and implement solutions for gender parity in tech. We want to create a world where women play a larger role in technology, positively impacting the world in profound and tangible ways.
WIT seeks to provide a space where women and other minority groups are supported, respected, and encouraged to excel within STEM careers. This initiative is about bringing together everyone to create innovative solutions to elevate underrepresented groups regardless of gender or identification, with a focus on women.
-Global Gender Gap Report, WEForum 2018
The program has five areas of focus with different metrics and objectives for each. Those areas are:
This component focuses on reaching girls in high school and university, with a special emphasis on underserved communities within Bogota, Medellin and Cali. We don’t wish to create new programs, but rather find organizations and communities already doing impactful work and partner with them to expand their reach or enhance their programs. Perficient Latin America has committed to hosting hackathons, workshops and visits for high school and university students, girls strongly emphasized, but all participants are welcome. This year, Perficient Latin America collaborated with international and national organizations to break the world record for greatest number of girls coding in multiple locations. The event in Medellin featured 50 high school girls building their own website.
Perficient Latin America hopes to remove biases in our recruiting practices in a number of ways, including ensuring there are women participating in all internship groups and the shadow program, diversify how and where we recruit senior level candidates to account for the differences in where each gender gets the majority of their information, and include more women from Perficient Latin America in creating and implementing the recruitment process to encourage diverse candidates to apply. We don’t believe in elevating resumes only based on gender, but we do believe in removing the biases that make qualified women avoid applying in the first place.
“Based on collaboration with LinkedIn, we find that only 22% of AI professionals globally are female, compared to 78% who are male. This accounts for a gender gap of 72%, which has remained constant over the last years and does not at present indicate a positive future trend.” Global Gender Gap Report, 2018 Perficient Latin America wants to be sure women are given the support they need to excel, while understanding that the circumstances and requirements of their development may be different from the majority. Women in leadership positions provide coaching, Perficient Latin America COO Lina Jaramillo and other female leaders throughout the company play a large role in this initiative.
The idea is to create a space where we can openly and transparently address the issues facing women and underrepresented groups and how we move to including those groups at every stage in technology. Perficient Latin America and those involved in this program want to stress inclusion and diversity as a way to bring people together and not create more siloed groups. Perficient Latin America will be putting together small group talks to discuss different aspects of the company’s culture which could move nicely into more in-depth conversations about gender parity.
Perficient Latin America has a robust schedule of internal events covering a variety of topics, such as conferences, lunch and learns, courses, internal trainings, and more. WIT hopes to encourage more women to participate and lead at those events. Then, the company hopes to foster at least 1 meetup or workshop or conference each quarter for women at Perficient Latin America without making it discriminatory towards any other group.
