Is Your Hiring Sexist? Here’s How to Attract Female Engineers

You can blog all you want about Purple Squirrels, Rock Stars, and Coding Ninjas. Sure, when it comes to STEM positions, recruiters are pushed to the brink. But one of the rarest and frustratingly hard-to-land hires is the female engineer. The hunt for talented software engineers is a crowded and never-ending one, even before taking into consideration more slippery aspects of hiring, like the need to build a well-rounded, representative team. Finding candidates from disparate sources across the web is a great way to get on the path to diversity, but if you want these candidates to eventually accept an offer, you’ll also need to prove your organization espouses the sort of culture in which they’d thrive. Let’s break down three key tactics to finding and attracting female engineers.

What Women Want

If I could truly answer this question, I’d be filthy rich. There are, however, a handful of no-brainers to take into account when assessing the likelihood of female engineers joining your team. Having diversity at higher levels of your company can go a long way to proving to newer candidates that your organization is one ripe with opportunity, regardless of race or gender. Also, the presence of potential female mentors at your company is an attractive asset that not all companies can offer.

Next, take a critical look around your office and ask yourself if a woman would truly want to spend 40+ hours a week there. Especially at start-ups, office spaces can often be filled with kegerators, pizza boxes, and nerf guns. This doesn’t exactly present a woman-friendly atmosphere. If your office looks more like a frat house than a place to get serious work done, good luck signing up the girls. In a similar vein, and for reasons that go beyond the need to attract a more diverse workforce, make sure your lunches or snacks are appropriate, meaning, there’s more variety than pizza, wings, and burgers.

Every Engineer’s Must-Haves

Remember of course to stress non-gender specific benefits of your company’s engineering culture. Regardless of gender, engineers want to work on challenging problems, with new technologies, and in a place that encourages growth and development. Give examples of team members who have risen from their initial roles or learned new languages beyond what they knew when they started. Engineers also thrive in systems where they’re afforded some degree of freedom in technical implementation, and only have rigid processes to a necessary extent.

Find the Community!

Attending events hosted by tech groups diverse in nature is a great way to open up your funnel to female talent. In addition to finding female engineers where they engage with their professional community, you may find the opportunity to explain why your company is a great fit for female techies. There’s a whole host of these type of groups, a handful of which I’ve included for your perusal:

• Women2.0 – http://women2.com/ 
• Startup chicks – http://startupchicks.org/ 
• Women’s startup lab http://www.meetup.com/WomenStartupLab/ 
• WEBA – http://www.meetup.com/Women-Entrepreneurs-of-the-Bay-Area/ 
• WomenLaunch – http://www.meetup.com/WomenLaunch-Startup-Accelerator/ 
• HackBright Academy – http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ 
• Women Who Code – http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/ 
• Geek Girl Camp – http://geekgirlcamp.com/ 
• RailsBridge – http://www.railsbridge.org/ 
• Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – http://gracehopper.org/ 
• Association for women in computing – http://www.awc-hq.org/home.html 
• ACM’s Women in Computing – http://women.acm.org/ 

There you have it, talent acquisition pros! Foster an open-minded, accessible culture; provide opportunities for growth and prove your commitment to creating a well-rounded team; and, source female talent where they express their professional interests, and you’re well on your way to building a solid, representative team. Happy recruiting!