Scaler Earmarks INR 1 Crore to Upskill Women in Tech

Edtech startup Scaler launched Scaler Include, a program aimed at enhancing female participation in India’s tech workforce. The program offers merit-based scholarships to women to enroll in Scaler programs, coding contests in collaboration with top tech employers in India and talks by leading female business leaders.

This comes on the back of what has been a significant cultural shift for the Indian IT sector, but a continuing trend of lower participation from women. According to Zinnov-Intel India, women form only 26% of India's tech workforce, a number that the program wishes to raise to 50% over the next 10 years.

As part of Scaler Include, Scaler has set aside INR 1 crore in capital spending to help create a more diverse tech workforce in 2021. The INR 1 crore fund would offer merit-based scholarships to 1000 women to enroll in Scaler Academy.

Scaler Academy aims to accelerate software engineers’ careers via a nine-month structured, flexible and guided learning program. The curriculum, encompassing programming constructs, data structures and algorithms, system design with a project and a choice to specialize in full-stack or back-end development, is vetted by industry CTOs and taught by lead 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 which enables learners to chart their career and practise mock interviews.

Commenting further on how Scaler is tailoring its program to meet the needs of women, Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder, Scaler said, “While we have seen mild growth in the proportion of female software engineers in India, we are yet to build a truly equitable tech workforce. Women are often not encouraged to be as ambitious as their male counterparts because of an added, unfair expectation to get married quickly, start a family or tend to elders. We will help women avail Scaler-sponsored and employer-sponsored scholarships. We also understand that women might need more flexibility and have launched an industry-first ‘Course Pause’ feature, allowing women learners to pause their Scaler Academy course at no cost. As we partner with more employers to build an inclusive tech workforce in India, we are keen to build upskilling programs that cater to other underrepresented communities. We hope to launch similar initiatives for the LGBTQ community and people with special abilities soon.”

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

To be held over two days in March 2021, the event will include keynote speeches from women leaders in business and technology, as well as participation from leading technology companies in India. Participating employers could enroll their women engineers in the contest and networking events, along with giving out merit-based scholarships to women engineers who win CodeX-For-Her, encouraging them to upskill via Scaler’s programs.