17 Scality’s Technology Education Initiative shortlisted at Women in IT Awards Information Age and DiversityQ organized the first Silicon Valley ‘edition’ of their Women in IT AWARDS — what a great program (and a nice event). We are so, so proud to have been shortlisted for Diversity Initiative of the Year for Scality’s Technology Education Initiative. Recognizing diversity’s strength Our Technology Education Initiative helps the greater community as it helps Scality: we recognize that diversity brings strength. Our employees span a wide range of age and background and come from different cultures, faiths and educational backgrounds. It follows, then, that the company supports diversity inside and outside of its offices around the world. One example of this is the company’s consistent support for software engineering education. The company has offered its support under the education initiative to four schools thus far and continues to support tech education in formal and informal ways. Removing barriers Scality is committed to removing barriers to careers in tech. The company provides scholarships, directly and with CloudNOW, and hosts hackathons for two highly innovative Bay Area software engineering schools: Holberton and 42 (we support 42’s Paris school as well as the Fremont campus). Both schools encourage diversity, admitting students regardless of prior education, gender, race, nationality or any other kind of exclusionary criteria. In addition to supporting students’ educations, Scality also hires from the schools’ pools of diverse graduates–another really key form of support. We have also been supportive of Hackbright Academy, an engineering school for women, most recently by hosting their graduation. Empowering Students The value of scholarships and empowerment are clear; the investment in hackathons provides another enriching opportunity that augments the students’ educations. Scality has hosted several hackathons at the schools. At the hackathons, Scality engineers coach teams of students, helping them by vetting ideas, helping with troubleshooting and other issues as they work to build software applications over a very short period of time – usually just a weekend or a few days’ time. In addition to contributing our engineers’ time as coaches, Scality also provides refreshments and prizes for the winning projects—and weblog about the student teams, which helps get their projects, and their talents, recognized. Stepping up Real help toward supporting diversity sometimes takes a more individual contribution, and our support of the Holberton School took a turn to the individual when Scality learned that one of the Holberton School’s students who had traveled across the country to attend the San Francisco school was homeless and living in his car. Scality stepped-up with funds to get Max Johnson a place to live while he attended school. That help was instrumental in his successful completion of the program. Max is now employed as a software engineer, as described in an article in Black Enterprise Magazine dated July 8, 2018. Congratulations to Lauren Hasson of Develop[HER], the winner in our category this year. We’re going to keep at it; expanding and improving our diversity programs, inspired by our desire to be inclusive and exemplary, and inspired by being shortlisted along with other really stellar programs that aim to close the gender gap and promote diversity in tech. Can’t wait to do it again next year!
