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Facebook, Box, & Pinterest launch 'WEST' mentorship program for women in tech

Facebook, Box, and Pinterest announced a mentorship program today called “Women Entering and Staying in Tech,” or WEST, which aims to provide “more direct support” for “women in the early- to middle-stages of their technology careers.”

The announcement came today at the Grace Hopper Conference, an event in Phoenix, Arizona, that celebrates women in computing.

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The program will be piloted in the Bay Area next year and will place emphasis on helping “women in engineering, operations, product, design, and web development roles,” according to Facebook. Mentors for the program “will come from Women in technical roles from Facebook, Box, and Pinterest,” Facebook said.

The initiative, Facebook said, was prompted by the disturbing fact that as the number of engineering jobs grow, increasingly fewer women are represented in tech-related roles.

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It is not yet clear, however, how many applicants the WEST program plans to accept. We’ve reached out to the companies involved for more.

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