Code Like A Girl
How it started
Ally Watson spent eight years working as a software engineer, experiencing the isolation and barriers that come with being a woman in a male-dominated industry, exacerbated by having moved from Scotland without family or peer networks.
A casual meet-up with like-minded women quickly grew into Code Like A Girl, a social enterprise with a measurable impact on tech’s gender imbalance by working to attract, train and find placement for women in software engineering.
Growth
Measuring its success on social impact, Code Like A Girl has placed 130 women into tech jobs since 2017.
Grants from Toyota partly funded taking classes on the road, while funding from Colarus Ventures was used to build an ed-tech platform with short courses to upskill women for sustainable IT jobs.
In revenue, the business has had a healthy growth of 46% in the past 12 months to reach $819,000.
Where to next?
By 2030, Watson and the Code Like a Girl team plan to be training 5500 women annually, with the business currently looking into crowd equity funding and partnerships to make it possible.
As Watson puts it, running a social enterprise often means more emphasis on social than enterprise, but maintaining commercial viability is crucial to their goals.
