Women Who Code CEO Alaina Percival Discusses VMware Collaboration

Project Taara 

Late last year, Women Who Code was proud to announce that we formed a Partnership to launch a VMinclusion initiative called Project Taara. This ambitious program is designed to retrain women in India who have left the tech industry and help them to return to work with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the industry.

Even as organizations work to improve gender equality and representation in tech, it is also important to focus on the large number of women who are leaving the workforce prematurely. In India’s IT sector, nearly 50 percent of women move out of core engineering roles after close to eight years, with the biggest drop-off happening after the first five years.

There are a number of reasons why women drop out of the workforce ranging from personal priorities such as marriage or childbirth to inadequate support infrastructure and inflexible office policies. While the last two can and are increasingly being addressed by changing organizational policies and infrastructure, not enough has been done to understand why so many women were not able to re-join the workforce.

When we examined the problem, we realized that many of these women were concerned about their skills being outdated by the time they thought about returning to work. This is a valid concern and challenge in the tech sector which is evolving and transforming at an incredible pace.

We partnered with VMware to address this specific challenge and the result is Project Taara. Through this program, we aim to upskill 15,000 women in digital technologies over the next 2 years. What’s more, many VMware partners and customers have already pledged their support to the initiative, and we will be working with them to help these women restart their careers.

We are proud to share after just a few short months a Women Who Code Bangalore member is among the first people to have completed all three levels of training and is now Project Taara certified. I am now hopeful and looking to the future when we can see this WWCode member and 15,000 others successfully find a job and re-enter their technology careers.

To find out more about Project Taara, and how it is working to help 15,000 women return to work in tech jobs, visit:  www.vmware.com/taara