Intel launches 2017 Women in Technology scholarships
This week the world celebrates International Women’s Day with thousands of diverse events taking place across the globe to inspire women and celebrate achievements. The specific theme for this year’s activities is to #BeBoldForChange and calls on people to help forge a better working world, a more inclusive, gender equal world.
To coincide with this celebration Intel Ireland has this week launched its 2017 Women in Technology scholarship program.
The scholarship program aims to encourage a new generation of high-achieving women to take up the challenge of a career in science and technology. The program forms part of a wider focus by Intel on empowering girls and women by fostering educational opportunities and encouraging females to participate, prosper, and lead in the global economy.
The Women in Technology Scholarship program has been running for a number of years and in 2017 Intel will offer up to 20 awards which will be available to female school leavers entering, in September 2017, specified four year undergraduate degree courses in science, technology and engineering beginning. The program offers a monetary grant valued at €3,000 per annum as well as opportunities for work placements at one of Intel’s Ireland locations in Leixlip and Shannon. Each scholar is also assigned a mentor who is an Intel employee to assist and provide advice on managing their academic career.
The application window is now open with submission being accepted until October 2nd and further details, along with the online application form, can be found at www.intel.ie/womenintechnology
The Intel Women in Technology scholarship program has been running for more than 10 years and a total of more than €1,000,000 has been invested in the initiative to date. The scholarship program is part of a broader strategy to support the attraction, growth and development of our diverse talent that makes our business thrive. In January 2015, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced the Diversity in Technology Initiative which includes a bold new hiring and retention goal to achieve full representation of women and underrepresented minorities at Intel by 2020. Intel also committed to spend $300M over five years in support of that goal. In speaking about diversity Krzanich said “We believe that creating a fully diverse and inclusive workplace is fundamental to how we deliver business results. As technology and markets continue to evolve, building and growing a workforce that is fully representative of the customers we serve and communities in which we operate is paramount to our success”.
Earlier this month Intel released its 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Annual Report which shows the progress the company has made toward its goal of reaching full workforce representation of women and underrepresented minorities in its U.S. workforce. Intel exceeded the 2016 hiring target with 45.1 percent diverse hiring and is committed to surpassing this in 2017. Positive gains were also made in the overall representation of women, which rose 2.3 points since 2014 to 25.8 percent. We hit our year-end goal of achieving 100 percent pay parity for both women and underrepresented minorities and achieved promotion parity for females and underrepresented minorities as well.
We met our overall diverse retention goal, retaining diverse employees better than parity, which means that we retained the overall diverse population at a higher rate than the counterpart majority. Read more about the report and Intel’s diversity progress in a blog by Chief Diversity Officer Danielle Brown.