Women’s History Month spotlight: Honoring women developers

March is Women’s History Month: a unique time to celebrate the myriad impact of women leaders, both throughout history and today. It’s also a time to reflect on the challenges that still exist. Data shows high rates of attrition for women in development roles. This—at a time when we are facing shortages of developers—represents a pivotal moment to reimagine the developer workplace and open source community to create a space where women have equal opportunity for growth, advancement, and fulfilling lifelong careers.

During my career in tech, I’ve personally been the only woman at the table many times. As someone who has made it a personal mission to bring other women along with me, I know how important it is to engage with women, encourage them to share their incredible ideas, and help them use their voices. So, I am very proud to help celebrate and amplify the voices of women currently making an impact in development through a new series on The ReadME Project. Please join me in reading and sharing these stories:

Creating Opportunity for Women in Development takes a look at how companies can start from the top, invest internally, and rethink their pipelines to combat attrition of female developers. Because we all win when women are included.

How Python is Building a Welcoming Community for Women gives us an inside look at the Python and PyLadies communities and how they are addressing the gender parity problem in open source by recruiting women into core roles and offering more—and more supportive—opportunities for growth.

In addition to the two feature articles, we are proud to share four individual profiles from women within the open source community:

Marcy Sutton
In this profile, we meet Marcy, an award-winning independent developer who’s on a mission to make accessibility in tech the rule rather than the exception. She knows we have a lot of work ahead, but believes in the power of advocacy to encourage others to do the right thing.

Jory Burson
Jory saw a group of people making decisions about open source standards and took matters in her own hands—asking tough questions and challenging the status quo along the way. A long-time active community member of the W3C and TC39, she is now a consultant and educator working to improve open source collaboration.

Lorena Mesa
Before she was a coder, Lorena Mesa was a political analyst for the Obama campaign. Then she found Python and never looked back, passionately pursuing tech-minded initiatives and taking care to ensure the Python community evolves into a globally diverse, welcoming place.

And me, Kath Korevec
I’m currently leading the documentation team here at GitHub, and share more about how I got here (including falling down the stairs at a very inopportune time).

I’m so excited and honored to celebrate this important month alongside such an inspiring group, and encourage you to share these stories with your network on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook!

Written by

Kath Korevec

@simpsoka