Software giant VMware is breaking the gender stereotype that only men are good at coding. There has been a surge of women in the field of software all over the world. VMware has established a partnership with a ‘Women Who Code’ to train 15,000 women in India over the next two years.
Women Who Code is a global non-profit organisation to promote women in IT. With a presence in 20 countries, including India, Women Who Code has executed more than 7,000 free events around the world and has a membership exceeding 137,000.
VMware will be training women with previous experience in IT for free. These women had to quit their work to maintain a work-family balance or some other reason. It’s a golden opportunity for these women to return to work and hone their skills in diverse areas of technology.
The programme is titled “VMware VMinclusion Taara: Women Return to Work” and will be launched on 1st December. It has already received wide support from top-notch enterprises like Bharti Airtel and Cognizant which will provide a workplace for women certified through VMware program.
“We are in a good position to help skilled women, who are currently home, come back, gain the right skill-sets and join the professional stream once again. We can make a difference. This is a journey and we feel learning never stops. This programme is a first such step,” Duncan Hewett, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, told IANS.
The programme is meant to educate women in cutting-edge Cloud technologies like networking, virtualisation, data centre, storage and security. It is designed to equip women with foundation-level training courses on digital business transformation; professional-level courses on virtualisation software for Hybrid Cloud and multi-Cloud platforms and infrastructure; and an advanced course on network virtualisation, data centre virtualisation, Cloud management and automation and digital workspace technologies.
“I am happy to see that in India, 42 per cent of women are part of the IT workforce as compared to the US where it is merely 30 per cent.
“Many women in India have an IT engineering diploma or background. But those who have left the workforce tend to have concerns that their knowledge and skills are outdated and have reservations about returning,” said Regina Wallace-Jones who is on the Board of Directors at Women Who Code.
Technology is a vast field and every person, being male or female can contribute a lot to it. But sadly, women are generally suppressed and often excluded in the industry. With the right education and opportunities, we can change that and accelerate the growth of rapidly evolving tech industry.