Women in Tech @ Hotels.com

Now, more so than ever, technology companies from startups to enterprise organisations are struggling to find the very best female engineers in what is often a tricky market at the best of times. Whilst many companies in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe have a 50/50 split across engineering, how come the market in the UK is so male dominated, and what can be done to help improve the balance of males/females in technology?

There have been some excellent initiatives put in place and we are now seeing many extremely useful groups and programmes designed to help get females into engineering. These steps and measures are a fantastic start, but they may take time to come through on an impressive and acceptable level.

For this event, we will hear interesting discussions from Hotels.com’ CTO – Thierry Bedos, and Senior Director – Su Crighton on how Hotels.com are attempting to bridge their gender gap and attract the best women in tech to their business. We will get some great insight into the steps they are taking and also how (and why!) engineering should be a great career choice for women and men alike.

We hope that this meetup will allow any fellow CTOs, VPs Engineering and Technical Leaders will be able to take some useful information and advice on how to bridge the gap at your company, as well as looking at what works, and what doesn’t.

This event will be held on-site at the awesome Hotels.com offices in Angel. We have some excellent food and drink for the evening as always and – weather permitting – we will be able to use Hotels.com’s amazing balcony with exquisite views of London. Please aim to arrive at 6.30pm for a 7pm start if possible.

We really want this to be an open and interactive discussion, so I would love to ask any attendees with some insight on this topic to drop me a PM on the following, which we can use to start debate on the evening:

• Have you, as a Technical Leader, had problems in attracting strong female engineering talent to your company?
• Why do you think there is an imbalance in the team?
• What can be done to improve this gap?
• What active measures are you and your team taking to improve the amount of female engineers at your company and what is working for you?

Please be sure to book your seat for the event ASAP and pass on to anyone you feel may be interested so that we can get the message out to the community.