Technology

Posted on October 3, 2018 by staff

FinTech unicorn offers free coding classes for women

Technology

FinTech unicorn Revolut has announced the launch of free coding classes for women at its London office.

The company is on a roll, recently achieving unicorn status with a $1.7bn valuation and announcing its latest funding round of $250m last week, along with plans to massively upscale its London engineering hub.

“There is a serious lack of female engineers in the market, so we’ve decided to do something about it,” reads the company blog announcing the classes.

“While attracting the best and brightest engineers is always the goal for any high growth start-up, we also want to ensure a strong gender balance within our engineering teams and to attract more women into technical roles.”

Recent data has shown that only 20 per cent of women study computer science at GCSE level, and fewer than 16 per cent then go on to study this at university.

To help combat this issue and improve its own gender balance within engineering teams, Revolut will be running free monthly coding classes for women at its new office space in London.

“While a lot of tech companies talk a good game about how important gender balance is to them, we’ve identified our own imbalance within our engineering teams and are taking action ourselves to help tackle this issue,” said Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky.

“I hope Revolut can really kick this kind of initiative off in the hope that other tech companies follow suit and provide more opportunities for women who are keen to learn code.”

The classes will be available at the company’s new headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf where the aim will be to run the free classes on a monthly basis with personal coaching from some of its most experienced engineers.

Classes will be limited to 15-20 students in order to ensure that the team can provide as much 1-1 support as possible.

Keen coders will have the chance to cover as much of the space as possible, including web, mobile and server development. Attendees will also receive practical advice for those women looking to break into the tech scene as an engineer.

With limited places left for the October course, anyone who misses out can sign up for the next, starting in February next year. Those that do well may even be able to land a job with the company.