CWA Blog Archive-Closing The Gender Gap What Climbing Can Learn From The Tech Industry

Closing The Gender Gap What Climbing Can Learn From The Tech Industry

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Originally posted on Medium, this article addresses a recurring question the author heard at the CWA Summit, how to hire and retain more women, particularly in management and routesetting, by drawing lessons from the tech industry's hard-won experience with gender parity. The author has looked into this extensively and found that tech has learned important lessons about the importance of gender parity and how to work toward it, and collects the most compelling lessons to share with the climbing industry, framing it as a collaborative effort to create a truly inclusive and diverse climbing gym culture that reflects the communities served. Importantly, the author notes that while they focus on gender equality, the same principles apply across all identity markers including race, sexual orientation, religion, and more. The article makes the case for why hiring women should be a priority: a significant percentage of climbers in facilities are women, so gyms need staff at all levels, including managers and routesetters, who understand women as customers, how women climb, and how to set routes that are fun for women. It then turns to lessons from the AI field (the text continues, drawing specific parallels from tech's diversity efforts). The throughline is that the climbing industry can and should learn from the tech industry's hard lessons about gender parity to hire and retain more women, especially in management and routesetting, because a substantial share of climbers are women who need to be understood and served by diverse staff at all levels. The recurring Summit question, how to bring more women into management and setting, reflects a genuine industry challenge, and rather than reinventing solutions, the author draws on tech's extensive, hard-won experience working toward gender parity. The business and cultural case is clear: with many climbers being women, gyms need women managers and routesetters who understand female customers, how women climb, and how to set routes women enjoy, benefiting both the member experience and the workplace. The author extends the principles beyond gender to all identity markers, framing this as broader inclusion work. For the industry, the article argues that achieving gender parity (and broader diversity) is both important and achievable by applying proven lessons from tech, inviting climbing to learn from another industry's journey toward inclusion so gyms can build genuinely diverse, representative teams that reflect and better serve their communities.

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Originally posted on Medium, this piece addresses a recurring CWA Summit question, how to hire and retain more women in management and routesetting, by drawing on the tech industry's hard-won lessons about gender parity. Since many climbers are women, it argues gyms need diverse staff who understand women as customers and set routes women enjoy, extending the principles to all identity markers.