New program draws Egyptian women to tech

An Egyptian tech school is shattering stereotyping in the tech industry by enabling more women to learn programming, coding and elements of building websites.

AlMakinah, a Cairo-based tech school, has initiated a new program exclusively for women titled “The Women in Tech Track” with the aim of addressing the imbalances in the gender ratio in Egypt’s tech industry.

“The program includes sessions on front-end web development, data visualization, digital marketing as well as workshops on confidence and resilience and talks by industry experts about the tech field,” Hoda Hamad, the manager of the program, told Al-Monitor.

Hamad was a participant in one of AlMakinah’s tech classes. After noticing that the AlMakinah classes were mostly dominated by men, she decided to join the school’s team and launch a program for women “to rebrand the field and remove any social stereotypes set by society.”