When we think of female friendly tech companies there are the usual suspects: Facebook, Google, and Twitter. However, there is one more tech company that deserves praise, Walmart and in particular it’s innovation engine @WalmartLabs. @WalmartLabs is showing some serious commitment to changing the ratio for women in tech. @WalmartLabs has fostered a female friendly environment, through its in-house programs and mentorship circles.
It has even gone farther than most by providing public speaking workshops, to give engineers more confidence in voicing their accomplishments, and encouraging them to speak on panels at tech conferences, which are often dominated by male panelists. The goal of all these programs is to prepare female software engineers for leadership roles.
Companies that are stuck wondering if these sorts of efforts will pay off, should note that Walmart is already proving it with tangible results! The extensive effort both internally and externally has resulted in an increase in female software engineers as new hires and into leadership roles in 2013. It’s great to see these efforts, especially since there are a number of points where women choose to leave engineering altogether.
@WalmartLabs recently reached out to Femgineer to host an upcoming forum on “Building Online Street Cred”. The goal of this forum is to help female software engineers become comfortable talking about their accomplishments, and teaching them how to brand themselves online in social communities like CoderWall, LinkedIn, GitHub, and providing advice on increasing their presence at events like technology conferences. @WalmartLabs has generously opened this forum up to the community, welcoming those outside of @WalmartLabs to participate.
Our previous forum on Building Street Cred drew quite a crowd! As a result, we’re continuing the theme with a stronger focus on steps that heads-down, time-starved, shy or humble software engineers can take towards creating an online persona for themselves.
Our founder, Poornima Vijayashanker, will share her story, and demonstrate how others can get started. The goal of this forum is to help people overcome any mental blocks they might have when it comes to creating a persona online, and showcase simple strategies for getting started.
We also want to take this forum as an opportunity to showcase the company culture at @WalmartLabs, giving people a chance to network with their employees, engineering directors and dispel myths out there about Walmart.
@WalmartLabs has become a center for technology innovation for Walmart and in the Valley. Internal teams resemble startups – technologists work in small teams, but their innovations are realized at the global scale of the world’s largest retailer.
This structure has enabled the organization to move fast and innovate nimbly. It allows for them to focus on
With a projected $10 billion in global revenue coming in this year through Walmart.com, @WalmartLabs definitely has the capacity and great company culture led by women to handle the massive traffic and workload that comes with it.
But don’t take our word for it, come see, and experience it for yourself at next month’s Femgineer Forum on Building Online Cred!
