StartHer launches a job board3 min read

StartHer is a French independent association that was founded in 2010 with the aim to give visibility and help young women access jobs or become entrepreneurs in the tech and IT sector. They organize events, formations, give tips for education among other things, thanks to an international network and community. Highlighting women success in new technologies and entrepreneurship is the mission of StartHer (previously Girls in Tech), founded by a mainly feminine team, with Roxanne Varza (coming from the Silicon Valley and Microsoft) and Mounia Rkha (former expert in capital risk management at Ventech). The association has always supported women to work in this exiting sector where feminine workers are not enough represented. They were delighted to launch on the 25^th of April their job board. We will see why they have decided to add this feature to their action and how it works.

Why the association decided to add a job board feature

In partnership with the French specialist job board Welcome to the Jungle, the French association decided to launch its tech job board. There are around eighty offers of business developers, graphists, commercial dedicated to women’s work in tech. Note that these adverts are not for women only (forbidden under the French law), it is to make it easier for companies concerned about gender equality and parity to meet women looking for a job in the sector. They also ask companies to make valuable efforts to recruit more women and to establish an inclusive culture and a fair wage policy. StartHer was already doing this on Twitter, but now the job board allows them to publish more regularly.

The adverts are neutral but are essentially intended to the whole feminine community of the association. “Before, we were only relaying some job offers on request of the companies that found it difficult to find some profiles. We thought that it could be useful for our faithful community to benefit from these offers”, explained Johanna Kirk, co-director of the association, to the French edition of Forbes magazine.

How does it work?

StartHer team selects the companies that will have the possibility to publish their job offers on their network. It is completely free to publish on their job board, and also free for the candidates. As mentioned before, it is handled by their partner Welcome to the Jungle, a job board as well, that has also committed to enhance female employment in IT and tech.

Each company that wants to appear on the job board has to sign a charter of commitment that consists in 5 key points:

• To create an inclusive culture
• To be active to publish offers for feminine communities like StartHer or others
• To offer equal wages between men and women
• To ban sexist behavior during all types of interviews
• To establish concrete actions to improve diversity

This is a good road towards equality, and StartHer will probably add other rules to the charter. This job board is only available in French as it is a national job board, but the community is international. We are sure that this could give some ideas to other female IT specialists and engineers all around the world.

StartHer will have its profile on Jobboard Finder soon!

Author: Anne-Marie