Annie Thorell, an IT-consultant at Stockholm based Netlight, started the organization Faces of Tech with the aim of attracting more women to the technology sector and helping to make it easier for tech firms to better balance the gender ratio of their workforce. The initiative goes hand in hand with Sweden’s international reputation as the home of gender equality.

“The response has been fantastic! Much better than I ever hoped for,” she said. “So great actually that I now have three people working with me on Faces of Tech.”

She said there are two main advantages of a company having a better gender ratio. First, it strengthens competitiveness. “We know now that more diverse groups lead to greater motivation, innovation and creativity, which are things we can’t look past anymore,” she said. “Gender equality, or any type of equality for that matter, isn’t about opinion or doing the right thing, it’s about our business and how we can’t afford not to work towards more equal workforces.”

Second it creates a greater pool of talent, which is something that is crucial since there’s already a lack of technology professionals. Gender equality also attracts foreign professionals and international companies, Thorell argued. For Stockholm, that could prove to be a unique selling point. “If we solve the equality problem, we’ll have something in Stockholm that no one else has, and we’ll be able to build start-ups that truly change every part of the world,” she said. “If that’s not a reason for investors and companies to look closer at Stockholm, I don’t know what is.”

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This article was sponsored by Stockholm Business Region.

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