Scaler to spend Rs 1 cr. to empower, upskill women techies

Edtech startup, Scaler, has announced the launch of Scaler Include, a programme aimed at enhancing female participation in India’s tech workforce. The programme offers merit-based scholarships to women to enroll in Scaler courses and coding contests in collaboration with top tech employers in India. It also organises talks by leading women business leaders. Scaler has kept a budget of Rs 1 crore to create a more diverse tech workforce in 2021. This amount will go towards offering merit-based scholarships to 1000 women to join the Scaler Academy.

Although the IT sector is thriving in the country and the culture has seen a shift, participation of women is still low. Only about 26 per cent of the Indian tech workforce has women, a number that the programme wants to raise to 50 per cent in the next one decade.

The nine-month structured, flexible and guided learning programme from the Scaler Academy aims to accelerate software engineers’ careers. The curriculum— including programming constructs, data structures and algorithms, system design with a project and a choice to specialise in full-stack or back-end development — is vetted by industry CTOs, and taught by software engineers from Facebook, Hotstar and Media.net. In addition to live, online classes, Scaler Academy provides 1:1, video-based mentorship sessions with leading software engineers in the industry, allowing learners to chart their career and practise mock interviews.

Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder, Scaler, is concerned about the fact that even though there has been a very slight increase in the number of women in software engineering, women are “not encouraged to be as ambitious as the men” and are expected to get married early, start a family or take care of the elderly. Therefore, Scaler “ will help women avail Scaler-sponsored and employer-sponsored scholarships”. Understanding that women may require more flexibility, The Company has launched the ‘Course Pause’ feature. This allows women students to pause their course at no cost. Saxena says, “As we partner with more employers to build an inclusive tech workforce in India, we are keen to build upskilling programmes that cater to other underrepresented communities. We hope to launch similar initiatives for the LGBTQ community and people with special abilities soon.”

To celebrate the launch of the Scaler Include programme, an exclusive coding competition and networking event — CodeX-For-Her— has been planned for women software engineers currently working in service- and product-based tech companies.

This two-day event to be held in March 2021, will include keynote speeches from women leaders in business and technology, and will witness participation from leading technology companies in India. The participating organisations can enrol their women engineers in the contest and networking events, and also give out merit-based scholarships to the winning women engineers, encouraging them to upskill through Scaler’s courses.

Launched two years ago, Scaler focuses on upskilling college students and tech professionals and creating the finest software engineers in the country.