Apple is supporting female entrepreneurs with Entrepreneur Camp, a two-week camp which is free. The camp begins in January and female entrepreneurs will receive coding assistance from Apple engineers. Entrepreneur Camp will also have technology, design and App Store marketing sessions.
In order to participate, the company must be female-led, female co-founded or female-founded. It is also enough to have at least one woman on the development team. Anyone who identifies as a woman can take part.
Apple Senior Director of Worldwide Developer Marketing Esther Hare talked about this initiative:
We wanted to focus on women who already have an app-driven business, and we don’t require them to have an iOS app. This isn’t an incubator where you come with a good idea and we help you think through it. It’s about already having a good idea, maybe they want to incorporate machine learning or augmented reality, or use some of Apple’s other technologies.
Supporting women
Hare declared that she hopes that this initiative will “have a role in bringing women into more leadership roles” and help keep women in the workforce“. Each participant can bring up to three members from their team. “Even if they’re not the most advanced, they get to come to the workshop to get support, network and skill development,” Hare added.
This is not the first time Apple creates such a workshop, but it is the first time they have a program aimed at women-founded companies. Esther Hare also added that this camp focuses on “underrepresented minorities — particularly women of color.”
We can only applaud Apple’s initiative and hope that more similar programs will appear in the future. This year female founders have raised just 2.2 percent of all venture capital investment in the U.S. A project like this could improve the stats in the future.
Ernestina Saenz Salcido is a reporter for News Lair. She mostly writes on her free time about gadgets and tech news. When she’s not working she takes care of her 2 daughters.