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According to the data of Statista, software development tops the male-dominated sectors in the world with 91.5%. As efforts continue to avoid this similar picture in Turkey, the Turkish software company Kolay announced that it has signed the UN Global Compact's principles for the empowerment of women.

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İSTANBUL (TR) - Failure to achieve gender equality in employment is among the main problems of sectors all over the world. Software, which gains more importance especially in the age of technology, is one of the male-dominated sectors. According to the data of Statista, it is seen that in 2020, 91.5% of software developers were men, while the rate of female developers was only 8%. While many companies started to work to prevent this picture, an important step came from the Turkish personnel management software Kolay. The company announced that it has signed the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) prepared by the United Nations' organization for gender equality and women's empowerment, UN Women.

“Solid steps must be taken to break stereotyped judgments”

Making a statement on the subject, Kolay Co-Founder Gizem Sevinç said, “Gender equality is an important problem in the technology and software sectors as in every sector. The way to avoid this problem is to break stereotypes such as "Women cannot be engineers". At this point, it is necessary to get rid of the supportive statements that are not put into action and to take concrete steps. As Kolay, we signed the United Nations Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) in order to further the atmosphere based on gender equality that we have created within our own structure and to increase the prevalence of our practices in the technology and software sector. In this context, we will cooperate with the WEPs ecosystem to encourage business practices that empower women, and develop studies in many areas such as equal pay for work of equal value, gender-sensitive supply chain practices and zero tolerance against sexual harassment in the workplace.”

“Our goal is to increase women's employment above 50%”

Stating that she started her career in the software industry and continued her struggle despite the sexist attitudes she faced in this process, Gizem Sevinç said, “Women have an important position especially in the software industry and technology production. However, their internalization of certain behavioral patterns prevents them from seeing this reality from time to time. I studied in the field of computer engineering at the university and despite the barriers I faced in the industry, I was one of the founding partners of a successful software company. Today, we take the responsibility of increasing the awareness of female engineers and software developers on gender equality and setting an example for the sector. Currently, 39% of women work at Kolay at both management and employee levels. Our goal is to increase women's employment above 50% with the contribution of the work we will do in line with WEPs and to make it widespread in the sector with these practices.”