MakerSquare and WP Engine Work to Close the Gender Gap in Software Engineering

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- MakerSquare, a software developer boot camp with schools in San Francisco and Austin, and WP Engine, the leading managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress, awarded a $2,000 tuition grant in MakerSquare's 12-week immersive educational program. The inaugural grant recipient, Christine Oen, will also receive professional mentorship from WP Engine Engineers during her time at MakerSquare.

"One important study from Payscale shows women make up only 10% of software development engineers," said WP Engine's Director of Engineering, R.C. Johnson. "There is a systemic and ever growing shortage of skilled, innovative workers. WP Engine has created this grant to educate, train, and grow the number of women in software development."

The collaboration between MakerSquare and WP Engine is designed to encourage more women to enter careers as software developers and become active in their communities as well as advocate for getting more women into software programming. Resources such as The National Center for Women & Information Technology suggest efforts that enable a more gender neutral market in software development would bring long term financial benefit to any enterprise that employs software developers.

"This grant is just part of our mission to create, not just skilled female developers, but women who are leaders in the technology space," said Shaan Shah, co-founder and CEO at MakerSquare. "Only a handful of tech companies within the Fortune 100 have female CEO's. Yet Dow Jones tells us that successful startups have twice as many women in senior roles than unsuccessful companies. We need to better understand that divergence and invest in a consistently diverse work force."

One possible cause for the imbalance of male and female software developers is the lack of women who pursue computer science majors and technology studies at four-year universities. Hack schools, the emerging developer boot camp training schools, are disrupting traditional technology education and has great potential for female programmers to quickly get into the industry.

About MakerSquare

MakerSquare is a software development training and educational company offering an immersive 12-week web development boot camp and a part-time, 10-week front-end boot camp in Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA. Specialties include Web development education, Test Driven Development, Javascript Frameworks, Ruby on Rails, HTML5/CSS3, Javascript, jQuery, Git, Version Control, Popular APIs (Google Maps, Facebook), Templating languages: HAML, SASS, LESS.

Find us on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/makersquare
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/makersquare 
Instagram: http://instagram.com/makersquare 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerSquare 
Blog: http://blog.makersquare.com/

About WP Engine: 

WP Engine is the leading managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress, providing clients with a simple and secure way to host their WordPress web site. WP Engine hosts 120,000+ domains for more than 20,000 customers and provides them all with 24/7 technical support. 

Find us on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wpengine 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wpengine 
Google +: https://plus.google.com/+Wpengine 
Blog: http://wpengine.com/blog/

Contact MakerSquare: Rod Taylor, 512.825.8709, [email protected]

SOURCE MakerSquare