Decoding Technology: Alaina Percival and Her Vision for Women in Technology

More than 150,000 members in 60 of 20 countries with one vision – to enable women to excel in technology. Women who code (WWCode) is a nonprofit organization for women that are committed to improving the skills of women and helping them build careers in technology. Alaina Percival is the co-founder, CEO, and Board Chair of WWCode been steering her ship to a significant outreach globally since 2011.

Alaina organizes events all over the world to provide valuable resources and mentorship to women trying to succeed in technology-based careers. Alaina described the purpose of WWCode in an interview: “By connecting women from around the world, we are showing everyone involved that they are not alone…And by holding thousands of training and leadership events, we are preparing our members for success by giving them the tools and the experience they need to accomplish anything they set their minds to.”

Women often do not enter the domain of technology due to lack of guidance and motivation. Through Women Who Code, Alaina Percival aims to level the playing field for men and women by helping women engineers and software professionals thrive and succeed in the challenging sphere of technology. Her initial involvement with WWCode was incidental, but soon she realized the potential of the organization and the impact it could have on women all over the world.

She has worked at several firms such as Puma, Nfinity, and Riviera Partners in the past and brought her vision and work experience to Women Who Code to make it the success it is today. One of the organization’s latest initiatives is VMinclusion Taara in India that seeks to retrain women who have left jobs in technology due to personal obligations. The program provides free training for women to re-enter technologic careers.

To date, Women Who Code has organized more than 8,000 events to train women with about 1,900 free training opportunities. The website statistics state that 80% of members describe a positive effect on their jobs after joining Alaina’s community. The Global Leadership Program has empowered about 500 women to become leaders. Alaina wants the technology arena to embrace diversity, with women occupying a significant number of jobs and leadership positions.

She says that diverse organizations with more women representation are more productive and succeed more than homogeneous corporations. In an interview, Alaina talked about how the gender gap in technology is sometimes a matter of mere perception: “The problem is with perception, as long as people view technology as being predominantly ‘male’ expectations will be set at that level, and people will naturally behave according to certain assumptions. Understanding that this is an issue is the first step to resolving it.”

By empowering women to attain success in technology, Alaina is looking into the crystal ball. The future of all industries, be it health, the arts or entertainment is technology and Women Who Code is helping women get on the highway to success.