On May 16 at VivaTech Paris, leboncoin, leading French marketplace, signed a manifesto supporting the vocational retraining of women towards careers in digital, along with 35 other French companies.
The manifesto aims to advance the presence of women in tech. Even though the tech and digital sector is blooming, women are still largely underrepresented. leboncoin and the 35 other signatories are committed to remedy this issue, alongside France’s Secretary of State for Digital, Cédric O.
It is estimated that only 28% of the tech population in France are women, and that number falls to 5% in tech training programs. Although leboncoin shows great results when it comes to gender balance in the company as a whole, especially in middle management roles for instance (62% women), we are no exception when it comes to women in tech.
Several initiatives to counter this issue have been implemented in the last few years. leboncoin financed the Miss Code Training Program in partnership with Simplon school, tutoring around 20 young women converting to tech (and hiring a few of them in the end). We also organizes a company screening of the film “Code: debugging the gender gap” to raise awareness of the issue.
“We believe that educating recruiters and managers while sensitizing collaborators are key levers of progress in this field,” said Alexandre Collinet, Deputy General Manager, who signed the document last week.
Signatories of the manifesto commit to take concrete actions on at least 3 of these 6 areas: broaden recruitment criteria, value atypical resumes, recruit candidates of all ages, dedicate resources to help integrate profiles that are new to Tech/Digital (through vocational conversion), encourage internal mobility towards tech, educate collaborators to inclusive and gender-balanced practices. A report will be published at the end of 2019.