Although more women have entered the engineering profession in recent years, it continues to be predominantly male dominated. The discrepancies begin in education. Only 35% of STEM graduates are women, and this number has not changed in the past 10 years1. Once these women enter the workforce, they might still change their career paths due to multiple reasons. Reasons include a lack of early encouragement, mentoring, and a clear onboarding path.
International Women in Engineering Day2 was established to celebrate the achievements and contributions of women engineers, to promote gender diversity, and to encourage more women to consider engineering as a career.b This year, in light of celebrating #inWed2025 and the theme #togetherweengineer, we at Evolveum would like to emphasize how important it is to make identity governance and administration more accessible to newcomers. This post offers practical suggestions how software vendors, integrators, and end users can become more welcoming, not only for women, but for anyone who is interested in joining this field.
1. Document Like You Want to Be Understood
Poor documentation is more than a tech debt issue; it is an inclusion issue. When contributors come from different backgrounds, speak different first languages, or lack corporate IGA experience, they rely heavily on documentation to onboard.
Inclusive IGA action:
- Use clear, plain language in how-tos and architecture docs.
- Provide small, runnable examples alongside theory.
- Flag sections that require advanced domain knowledge, and explain why.
Evolveum, as the vendor of an OSS platform, keeps everything public. Anyone can access the Support Portal, online technical documentation, midPoint’s code, etc. Hence, it is extremely important to us that a reader can easily navigate through our vast resources and comprehend it well. We are aware of improvements we need to make when it comes to our documentation and the language we use. One of our top priorities in the coming months and years is unifying the language with industry standards and simplifying, improving, and adding missing technical documentation.
2. Create a Clear Learning Path
Even with good documentation, newcomers may feel overwhelmed and not know where to start. Comprehensive and structured training can help them navigate through tons of materials and provide step-by-step guidance on how to work with a new piece of technology. This will ultimately give them confidence in their abilities to continue their education on their own.
Inclusive IGA action:
- Curate beginner-friendly training to introduce new technology.
- Where possible, link relevant parts of documentation to facilitate further study.
- Provide suggestions for the next steps upon successful completion.
Over the past couple of years, Evolveum has invested heavily in a new training curriculum, the MidPoint Foundation Training Series. Within the series, there are 3 training courses available in an online or a self-paced version that focus not only on building knowledge about IdM, IGA, and midPoint, but also to help newcomers with best practices and common situations they will encounter when entering this field. We even made the self-paced First Steps training available for free to anyone to help them get started.
Moreover, we published the Practical Identity Management with MidPoint book, which helps guide people who are just starting in this field in understanding both basic principles and more advanced topics.
3. Encourage Asking Questions Publicly
Private messages and insider communication channels often isolate information that could be beneficial to newcomers. Encourage people to ask questions in public spaces.
Inclusive IGA action:
- Create a safe space for your community to ask questions and engage with one another.
- Encourage public forums and Gitter discussions.
- Redirect questions asked privately into public spaces.
At Evolveum, we value the collective experience of our community and encourage newcomers to engage in a variety of ways. Questions can be asked through the mailing lists, which are also fully indexed and searchable via search engines. For more technical discussions, Gitter provides an active space, and we are also aware of ongoing public conversations on Reddit. We host online webinars where we give attendees the opportunity to ask questions in a form that suits them best – by unmuting themselves and directly asking the question, posting it in a chat, or writing it anonymously on Slido. During our recent MidPoint Community Meetup, there were opportunities to ask questions in person or anonymously on Slido as well.
4. Celebrate Contributions
For open source products, activities such as writing connector code, joining localization efforts, and configuring samples are vital to the entire IGA ecosystem. Regardless of the openness of the code, everyone can help by sharing a success story in a case study or writing a candid review on platforms like Gartner Peer Review.
Inclusive IGA action:
- Create comprehensive steps on how and where to contribute.
- Publicly recognize contributors and provide them space to shine.
- Encourage new members to contribute.
The midPoint community prides itself on its many contributions. Some of the examples include the collaborative efforts that added to the library of connectors with its almost 70 open code connectors, midPoint being translated into 20 languages, the expansion of the samples contribution directory, and case studies continuing to bring insights into real life examples.
5. Promote Diverse Voices in Content
If all webinars, blog posts, and case studies feature only one group, we risk reinforcing the image of who belongs in IGA.
Inclusive IGA action:
- Feature stories from different cultural and technical backgrounds.
- Use imagery and language that reflects a diverse global user base.
We are happy to see more and more women entering the IGA space, and we try to inspire others to join this field. At Evolveum, we publish a Women in IT blog post annually, each year highlighting the work of our female team members. In addition, last year we collaborated with engineers from the midPoint community who participated in #inwed24.
Inclusion isn’t about optics; it is about mindset. IGA projects can serve as platforms for equity, growth, and visibility, but we have to choose to build and run them that way. Ask yourself these questions often: Do we make time to onboard newcomers? Do we treat documentation as a first-class deliverable? Do we notice who isn’t in the room – and do we wonder why?
If you work on, contribute to, or deploy an IGA tool, this is an invitation to help shape a more inclusive ecosystem. Let’s build a welcoming IGA environment where everyone sees a point of entry, because #togetherweengineer.
If you would like to learn more about associations and societies that promote gender equality in IT and engineering, please consider visiting:
- The Society of Women Engineers
- The Women Engineering Society
- International Women in Engineering Day
- The Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN)
- IAM Her
- Global Education Monitoring Report Team. (2024). Global education monitoring report 2024, gender report: Technology on her terms. UNESCO, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000389406 ↩︎
- International Women in Engineering Day, https://www.inwed.org.uk ↩︎