Our CEO Melinda Matthews-Clarkson is one of the nominees on the first Scottish Tech Startup Awards shortlist.
Melinda is shortlisted in the Diversity in Tech Champion category alongside four other finalists.
This award recognises an individual who has demonstrated a remarkable passion for increasing diversity and inclusion in the tech community, and for working to increase diversity in their own or other tech startups.
Celebrating the people and companies leading the way in building Scotland’s digital economy, the awards are being organised by the team behind the hugely successful Turing Festival. On the night there will be eight outstanding achievement awards and two community/advocacy awards.
From almost 200 nominations, to just 50 finalists: the shortlist for the first-ever Scottish Tech Startup Awards is finally here! https://t.co/Kofvplnrxp pic.twitter.com/VgtGQDVPe1
— Turing Fest (@turingfest) November 6, 2018
The judging panel includes technology leaders and investors including Sandy McKinnon, partner at Pentech, Sitar Teli, partner at Connect Ventures; and Calum Forsyth, chief executive of Seed Haus.
Melinda commented: “It’s a huge honour to be nominated at these inaugural awards, but the real champions are the amazing team around me – including Pawel Orzechowski and Tony Goncalves – who have helped bring the likes of CoderDojo and Codebar to CodeClan.
“The nomination follows the recent news that the proportion of women working in tech has increased from 18% to 23.4% in the last two years in Scotland. This is due in no small part to more than 25% of the graduates from our intensive Professional Software Development course being female, a number we’re keen to see rise to 40% by 2020.
“Our Digital Women’s Group, a supportive community for our female graduates to continue growing in their careers, has had a great uptake in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2018. We’ll also add education for mums in 2019 via the Tech Mums programme. CodeClan is the first organisation to embrace this model.
“The next 12 months will see CodeClan grow in many innovative ways and diversity a core part of what we do.”
The first Scottish Tech Startup Awards take place in Glasgow on Thursday 29th November.
