Huawei has launched a program designed to support and empower aspiring female developers.

The Huawei Women Developers (HWD) program aims to encourage more women to join the technology industry by providing skill training and opportunities and platforms to develop their careers.

Chen Lifang, Senior Vice President at Huawei, said:

“We believe that women will lead technological innovation. We hope that the HUAWEI Women Developers program will help women better leverage their talents and unique value, and give them opportunities to demonstrate their leadership abilities.This will help make our world a better place.”

Only around 8-11% of global software developers are estimated to be women.

With fields such as AI making workforce diversity more important than ever – to ensure all parts of society are represented and treated equally in potentially automated decisions about their lives – creating an environment to help more women to enter and succeed in STEM careers is vital.

In a press release, Huawei wrote:

“In the digital era, more opportunities and support must be given to women to ensure they have access to the education and training that they need to be fundamentally competitive in the digital economy. Equipping women with these skills has proven to promote social integration and inclusive and diversified societies.”

Huawei’s program will provide training and offer guidance on potential career paths along with enabling participants to meet with experts in technologies across various fields.

“Try to find strong mentors early on in your careers, they might help guide you along the way,” advised Nithya Krishnan, Director of Marketing for the India & SAARC region at Trend Micro, on International Women’s Day earlier this week.

Yesterday, Developer put a spotlight on just some of the inequalities women face in software development and the wider tech industry including the continued pay gap, difficulties in breaking into the industry, feeling unable to reach senior positions, and having to shoulder more of the burden of things such as home-schooling and household chores during COVID-19 lockdowns.

During a recent webinar hosted by Huawei and Financial Times Live, Sarah Greasley, CTO of Direct Line Group, said:

“A change of approach is important, where we don’t talk down to girl students, but rather engage them to understand that technology comes with a purpose. Only when we encourage girls to be curious, we make technology fun and interesting for them, and when we provide them with appropriate role models and mentors can we hope to overcome the gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects at school. “

Pallavi Malhotra, Director for ICT Academy Programme, Western Europe at Huawei added:

“We believe that the future of the workplace will become increasingly flexible and virtual, but we also observe that large gaps still exist, including a gap in access to a quality network, a gap in digital skills as well as a gender gap. By empowering women with the skills they need, we can fundamentally support women to look at careers in tech. By improving industry-academia engagement, we can increase knowledge sharing between businesses and academic institutions, create great content and curriculum that will help attract more women and more young people from diverse backgrounds into tech.”

Huawei says it offers female participants in its Shining-Star program special incentives to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. Women who develop particularly outstanding projects are offered to be featured in future campaigns.

The company also says that over 30% of the trainees who take part in its ICT training programs, like Seeds for the Future, are women.

this article has been retrieved from https://developer-tech.com/news/2021/mar/09/huawei-launches-program-support-empower-female-developers/