Kylie Woods’ list of university accolades is longer than most people’s resumes. The Mount Royal University alum stacked up a laundry list of accomplishments and awards in her time at the Calgary institution, including a spot on the Dean’s Honour Roll and winning an innovation tournament. 

But even so, she found that after graduating with a communications degree, her options were fairly limited. “I went, ‘Oh god, what do I do with this?’” she recalls. “Everybody and their mom has a generic degree and it’s so hard to find work.” 

Luckily, she stumbled upon a passion pretty quickly: “And then I found the tech sector and I fell in love.” Of course, carving out a spot for herself in tech wasn’t exactly the easiest thing for someone with no software development experience. As she struggled to find people who looked like her in the industry, she realized that was actually the key. 

Woods founded Calgary-based Chic Geek in 2013, initially as a grassroots initiative meant to support women in tech. Now, the nonprofit has come out of COVID with some $300,000 in grant funding (most of it provincial—Alberta doing something right, we suppose), six employees and the goal of retaining more women in tech in Canada. 

“We believe that retention will actually increase gender representation,” says Woods. “That’s kind of what makes Chic Geek different, we’re very targeted in terms of who we serve and how we want to solve that problem.”

For now, the strategy in dealing with the latter is, as Woods says, “profiling actions of companies that are working and sharing those takeaways, so that companies of all stages can actually start to put them into practice.” She adds that the company will mostly be focusing on startups that are at earlier stages of implementing and building initiatives from the ground up, instead of adding them on later. 

Currently, Chic Geek is doing work with at least one Vancouver-based company to promote its plan to build a more diverse development team and has already conducted a case study with Victoria’s Certn. The organization’s board members include Nika Pidskalny, former general counsel for Kelowna-based Bananatag before it was sold to Germany’s Staffbase, and Mong Dang, director of analytics engineering at Vancouver-based Aritzia. 

“We know that women's representation in tech in Canada—depending on the types of roles—can be anywhere from 16 percent to 25 percent,” says Woods.

“We want to see more women in technical roles specifically. 50-50 is ideal—that’s going to take a long time. If we can move the dial to the 35 percent representation, that's a critical mass where women are no longer minority voices and that's where I think we’ll start to see some change. Research has shown that if we can stop women from leaving tech, we’ll actually see 220,000 women in STEM roles across Canada. If we can keep 220,000 women in tech, that would be a great place to shoot for.”