Aiming To Upskill Women in Tech, Scaler Announces INR 1 Crore Diversity Program

Endeavouring to decrease gender disparity in the tech industry, Scaler, a thriving Edtech company, has earmarked a sum of INR 1 crore for a women-centric campaign called Scaler Include. The program aims to improve the participation of women in India's technology domain.

With International Women's Day knocking on our doors, this is perhaps the best time to appreciate women's technical abilities and provide the space for women to shine to their full potential. The capital of 1 crore will be used to fund merit-based scholarships to 1000 women to enrol in Scaler Academy.

Selected candidates will undertake a nine-month course with classes run by leading technologists from companies such as Hotstar, Facebook, and Media.net. Selected candidates will have the opportunity to take one-on-one sessions with India's leading software professionals. The curriculum encompasses concepts such as programming constructs, data structures and algorithms, and system design. It allows candidates to choose between specializations in front-end and back-end web development.

The course involves guided learning and is well structured, alongside being immensely flexible. CTOs from the industry vet these courses, which revolve around hands-on experience through regular projects and application development.

Another facet of Scaler's upcoming investment in women's empowerment is CodeX-For-Her, a coding competition and business conclave meant exclusively for women software engineers to be held over two days in March 2021. Women engineers from all participating companies can enrol in the competition, and Scaler will provide scholarships to the foremost candidates on the leaderboard.

These scholarships will allow them to upskill using Scaler courses. The conclave will include talks and keynote speeches from the leading female voices in technology and allow participating candidates to network with industry professionals working at the world's largest software companies.

Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder, Scaler, has commented on Scaler's vision, saying:

"We will help women avail Scaler-sponsored and employer-sponsored scholarships. We also understand that women might need more flexibility and have launched an industry-first Course Pause' feature, allowing women learners to pause their Scaler Academy course at no cost."

Features such as 'Course Pause' that address comfort and accessibility issues take the progress of gender equity to another level in the technology sector. The concept of this feature revolves around the fact that many women have to give up on their career due to societal expectations to focus on familial needs. A feature like 'Course Pause' allows women to restart the course at their convenience without the added financial burden.

The Scaler program will also give ample opportunities for participants to upscale their skills and prepare for interviews using mock interview sessions. Scaler Include is only one among a series of initiatives that Scaler hopes to take in the near future for other underappreciated communities as well. In the words of Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder of Scaler:

"As we partner with more employers to build an inclusive tech workforce in India, we are keen to build upskilling programs that cater to other underrepresented communities. We hope to launch similar initiatives for the LGBTQ community and people with special abilities soon."

Initiatives like this will help to downscale the ongoing trend of low participation of women in the IT sector (only 26% according to Zinnov-Intel India) and can be a concrete step forward in women empowerment.

(Disclaimer: This is a featured content).