Tuuli Hirvonen • 11.10.2017 • Frantic • Reading time 3 min
Technology companies need diversity more than ever as diverse thinking gives birth to the best products and solutions.
This second week of October is a special one for us. Frantic is a partner of the Women in Tech Week (9.–13.10.2017), and from Monday to Friday there’ll be interesting events all around Helsinki. Women in Tech activities discuss how women could have a larger role in creating success stories in business and technology.
We practice what we preach
We at Frantic are serious about gender equality. We want to inspire and encourage more women to get interested in technology and make a career in the industry.
For a technology company, we have a rather nice gender ratio: at the moment more than one third (39 percent) of our almost 90 professionals are women. Almost one fifth (17 percent) of our developers are women, and roughly two-thirds of designers (63 percent) are women. We are also a company strongly led by women, as 57 percent of our management team members are female. “Luckily Frantic has always given equal opportunities to develop ourselves and has supported personal growth from specialists to management roles,” says Business Unit Director Maija Typpi-Häkkinen, happy to represent Frantic at Women in Tech.
“When I first came to Frantic, I was the female employee #3. Today we are 34 women working at Frantic in various roles. I'm very proud of the evolution of our company in a very male-dominated industry,” she sums up the changes over the past 17 years. “But there is still work to be done to make this industry (and the world) more inclusive and gender-equal. This is why Frantic is partnering up with Women in Tech - and also with other networks like Future Female, etc. We’re as well working with various educational facilities to bring new (female) talents to the industry."
To us, design and technology are inseparable and good design requires diversity. “Our industry needs diversity, not only from a female perspective. At Frantic we want to embrace diversity, be it designing and developing inclusive products and services or hiring talents with diverse backgrounds. You don’t have to be an engineer to make a career in tech. Take me as an example. As a humanist at heart and with my educational background, the digital industry (or new media as it was called back then) was not the most obvious choice, but I was curious enough to take that path and become kind of an accidental technologist with a very human-centric perspective,” Typpi-Häkkinen explains. “A variety of different perspectives makes us strong in designing and developing human-centric solutions for our customers - and even more importantly for their customers.”
Code Camp for Ladies is back
To make a real contribution and celebrate Women in Tech Week, we are bringing back our highly successful Code Camp for Ladies on October 25th. The popularity of the first two courses showed us there’s a high demand for these kinds of initiatives. More info on the course can be found on our Facebook event, but hurry, the application period is open only until Sunday the 15th.
