In the last blog on Spotlight on #BeBoldForChange Campaign at Addteq, we talked about our individual 2017 goals for the Women in Tech movement, and Pledge 1% growth at Addteq. Our goals were to empower women’s advancement, promote women’s education and promote gender equality. Now that we are nearing the end of 2017, Addteq is proud to say that we have succeeded at our mission. With minimal to no effort, the program is organically growing within our culture.
We feel that everyone can play an integral role in helping drive better outcomes for all genders. Through result driven actions we can all be responsive in creating a more gender inclusive workplace. The World Economic Forum predicts that the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2186. This is just too long of a wait. This is how Addteq shapes their company culture to help in closing the gender gap.
Our Journey with #BeBoldForChange
We are continuing to Empower Women’s Advancement while driving more focus on education and gender equality.
Promote Women’s Education
Addteq wanted to offer the opportunity to continue education with a tuition reimbursement program and flexible work schedules. We were set out to allocate one tuition reimbursement for the year. However, we over succeeded and allocated three tuition reimbursements for employees. 2 out of the 3 recipients were women.
According to the Department of Labor, “only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women. Among computer programmers, the situation is better – but not much. “Women account for only 26% of all American coders.” (via Wired).
Sneha Sheth was one of the employee at Addteq to take benefits of the tuition.
“I am a firm believer that women must have the opportunity to get educated and earn success in life. The tuition flexible schedule helped me achieve my education goals without the burden of paying a large sum of money at the same time. It eased my worry as I could concentrate more on the actual studies than being concerned about the cost”. Sneha Sheth, Atlassian Implementation Expert at Addteq.
We also re-elected, for the second year in a row, a female student from India to receive the Iris Foundation’s International Scholarship award. Suvarana Maji was the first and second year recipient of Addteq’s very own, scholarship award. Addteq continuously works toward our goal to bring more women into technology by promoting women’s education.
Promote Gender Equality
In October of 2016, we launched the gender equality program at Addteq and introduced paternity leave. This was in hopes that the men have equal opportunity to take time off with their loved ones. In October, we had one of the first male employees who took advantage of this new benefit at Addteq. We also allocated flexible work schedules to allocate extra time to the new parents.
Addteq hopes that this new benefit will take the pressure away from new mothers to have to take time away from work. With the new fathers being able to also take time away from work, it alleviates the family’s pressure of missing out on paychecks.
How is Pledge 1% shaping our company’s culture?
We noticed that since we have taken the Pledge and associated Addteq with Room to Read interest by our teammates to give and volunteer has sparked.
A few of the employees volunteered to donate a portion of their paycheck toward the Iris Foundation Scholarship Fund. Leaders are becoming philanthropy role models at Addteq by utilizing 1% of their time to volunteering efforts.
Recently Himanshu Chhetri, CTO at Addteq, presented a “DevOps with Atlassian Tools” talk session at nPower. Motive for his presentation was to bring awareness of DevOps to students in the IT field by showing real world examples of DevOps and Atlassian tool usage. Himanshu also wanted to set an example for his team, that you can utilize your day to day work and still volunteer. To continue his effort, Himanshu is interested in setting up an internship program at Addteq to support the nPower students.
Also, while Himanshu is taking leave to visit his home country of Nepal, his goal is to visit ECDC. ECDC’s goal is that “No child should grow up behind prison bars.” Himanshu’s goal is to build an education partnership with ECDC to help promote their cause back in the states.
Pledge 1%, Room to Read and the addition of the Iris foundation has shaped our company’s culture and allowed the leadership team to look into different causes and programs from another perspective.
