Video ad platform BrightRoll has decided to get proactive about the gender gap in engineering.
The company is announcing a new mentorship program for women in its engineering ranks in collaboration with Hackbright Academy, an engineering school for women. So far, BrightRoll has paired nine of its female engineers with mentors.
On its blog, BrightRoll encourages other startups to join the program and to help female engineers out there get the support they need to be successful.
“By mentoring female engineers, we can help open the tech industry to broader, more diverse backgrounds and perspectives,” the company writes.
While BrightRoll’s participation in a mentorship program for women is a first step toward lowering the number of white males that dominate Silicon Valley, it is by no means a panacea for diversity in tech. The notion that injecting women into the tech sphere will automatically bring diversity to the industry as well is a flawed conceit — and one that brought down Patricia Arquette at the Oscar Awards earlier this year.
Because while there are few women in engineering roles, there are also very few people working in tech who are not white.
To tackle cultural and racial diversity in tech, Silicon Valley needs another mentorship program altogether — potentially one that starts a lot younger.
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