THE STORY OF CZECHITAS
Let us share with you the story of Czechitas, the community behind the scenes of womENcourage 2021 conference.
Czechitas is a Czech non-profit organization that has emerged in 2014 with the purpose to empower and encourage girls and women to engage in computing education or career transition. It strives to demonstrate that tech is an interesting career direction that is not necessarily difficult nor, more importantly, limited to one gender. Initially established to provide female students in the Czech Republic with an opportunity to put their hands on programming, it now aims at achieving a major social change.
Over the time, Czechitas has became a movement that has attracted a strong community of tech professionals, companies and volunteers, and gave rise to a portfolio of female-tailored courses in various areas of tech, such as programming, web development, mobile app development, data science, testing, digital marketing and graphic design.
Thanks to the success of our education activities, consisting of hundreds of events a year (each receiving multiple times more registrations than its capacity), we have become recognized as the leading platform in the Czech Republic actively addressing gender diversity in tech and computer science. We have also been recognized abroad with numerous European as well as overseas awards, e.g. becoming the first organization from Central Europe awarded the prestigious Google.org grant in 2015, and in 2018 becoming the first organization worldwide being awarded the Google.org grant for the second time, and in 2020 for the third time.
We have influenced over 20,000 women who graduated from our courses to use their new tech skills to advance their careers. Besides students, our community includes lecturers, professionals, partner companies, volunteers, the core team and social media audience. The core team includes over 50 employees, with the support of more than 500 volunteers actively involved in our activities (tech professionals, 40% female).
Our mission is to inspire, educate and apply new talents to enhance diversity and the competitive edge in IT
