Etsy Proactively Looks for Women Engineers, Announces Grants

Etsy wants to hire more women engineers and announced a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology in conjunction with Hacker School (which is like a "writers' retreat for hackers"). Etsy will host the summer 2012 session of Hacker School at its headquarters and will provide ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each - a total of $50,000 - to women who want to join but need financial support to do so.

Etsy's goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate and said it hoped it would be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.

Etsy VP of Engineering Marc Hedlund wrote about the initiative on the Etsy blog:

"Last September, three out of 96 employees in Engineering and Operations at Etsy were women, and none of them were managers. Talking this over with others here, we thought that Etsy - which supports the businesses of hundreds of thousands of female entrepreneurs through our marketplace, which sells a majority of all items to women, and which already has many talented and amazing women working for the company - should be one of the single easiest Internet companies at which to correct this problem."

Hedlund said Etsy now has eleven women in Engineering and Operations, calling it a great start, but writing, "we still have no female engineering managers, and we're nowhere near a gender-balanced department." He urged the Etsy community to help it spread the word about the grants to "women who love hacking."