Outsourcing to Gain Gender Diversity

Outsourcing your software development to another part of the world gives you the benefit of having a more diverse software development team. It’s not just from having people of a different culture on your team. You also get gender diversity.

Highly Competitive Field

The competition for software development talent is worldwide. Software outsourcing companies face the same issue in hiring and hiring well is a critical success factor for providing expert service. It would be foolish of them to ignore a third to half of the talent available to them – women. It’s not just a numbers game. They hire women to achieve diversity in talent and ways of thinking that an all-male development team would lack.

It takes great focus to develop software and to “play computer” to step-by-step debug your code. Are men better suited to this intense activity? Men's and women's brains fundamentally different, study finds, men are better at focusing, women are better at multitasking.

Difference Between Men and Women

• Hunter Killers – men are better at learning and performing a single task – like coding or killing bugs in software
• Multi-Tasking – is easier for women to do
• Math skills – and analytical thinking is stronger in males
• Social Context - Women are better at social thinking & interactions than men. They have a better chance of seeing the bigger picture of an app than just the feature they happen to be working on
• Memory - Studies have shown women are generally better at recalling words, names, faces, pictures, objects and everyday events.

These skills are important in the very human process of creating great software. The best software is created by a diverse team of people with different skills. That’s why smart companies are including women on their development teams.

It’s not a fad or even a trend. Some software outsourcing companies include recruiting women developers as part of their mission. Women have always played an important role in the work force in some cultures. For other cultures where women played a lesser role in the work force there are social reasons to increase the number of women hired in meaningful jobs like software development.

For example, an Accelerance partner in Palestine is purposely hiring women to improve their stature in Palestinian society. In Vietnam 72% of women are employed making it likely there will be women on your software development team when you outsource there.

In general software outsourcing firms are proactively hiring women to create more diverse teams that provide a higher level of software development services. You can take advantage of gender diversity in an outsourced software development team leading to more innovative and higher quality apps.

Watch the webinar She’s Not a Myth: The Female Techie Exists to learn more about the progress women in tech have made and why it matters to your company:

• Why a gender diverse technical team is advantageous to your bottom line
• How executives and those in leadership positions can help career changers enter the tech field. How to design your culture and recruitment strategy to attract and retain women
• Who you can hire now in order to start making a difference.