'Giving the Haredim respectable, appropriate jobs will help close social gaps and break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness, but current plans create only the appearance of such processes.'
It's 11 A.M. in the religious community of Elad. Rows of ultra-Orthodox female programmers sit in front of their computer screens in 3Base's offices. One has printouts of computer code for the startup Conduit. Another is working on a program for high-tech company Contra. A third woman is talking with the team leader at a third startup.
A total of 85 young Haredi women work as programmers at 3Base, most as subcontracted programmers for well-known Israeli startups.
In the company's training room, the women learn the Ruby on Rails programming language, an open-source web development platform. Some will go through up to a year of training before they actually start working.
Over the past three years, 3Base has made itself into a very different kind of employer than those that usually employ Haredi programmers, such as i-rox or Matrix Global. The latter are modeled after development centers in the Far East - they rely on a cheap, trained labor force that can do relatively simple programming tasks, including maintenance of existing systems and quality assurance. 3Base's customers include dozens of Israeli high-tech companies, as well as several American, European and Far Eastern ones.
The company was founded by three young religious men: co-CEO Pini Mandel, 33; co-CEO Nadav Mansdorf, 31; and Chief Technology Officer Yossi Cohen, 36.
Mansdorf says 3Base is proof that with the right training, Haredi women can be excellent computer engineers who can compete with any programmer in Herzliya or Ra'anana. Most of the company's programmers work with advanced technologies, he says.
"Answering phones isn't bad, but it's not good, either. We decided to go with high-level programming," he says.
When hiring employees, the company pretty much ignores the women's grades, Mansdorf says.
"We check if the woman is sharp, curious and intelligent. We barely look at grades. We contacted several Haredi seminaries and they recommend students that could suit us. We currently take one out of every 25 interviewees," he says.
"We have women could compete with geniuses that graduated from 8200," the respected military intelligence unit and one of the country's biggest incubators of high-tech workers, Mansdorf says.
"They go through careful screening, and we don't ask that they have any advance knowledge of computers, math or English. After we pick out the brilliant ones, they go through long training periods of several months up to a year," he says. A few weeks ago, President Shimon Peres visited AIG's service center in Elad, another employer of ultra-Orthodox women.
Mansdorf says the state's plans to integrate Haredim into the workforce are fundamentally flawed. Easy jobs like those at AIG's service center are an easy default, he says.
Giving the Haredim respectable, appropriate jobs will help close social gaps and break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness, but current plans create only the appearance of such processes, Mansdorf says.
"As usual, Israel is offering a temporary solution to lower the flames and not to give a coherent and thorough solution to a complicated problem," he says. A large investment is needed to prevent the ultra-Orthodox community from stagnating, but the investment has to be in the right areas such as long-term, subsidized training programs.
One example of this is the fact that high-tech companies often pay Haredi women workers less than secular workers, by a double-digit percentage. However, they give them various benefits such as comfortable work hours.
Mansdorf won't say what he pays his programmers, only that he pays 15% to 20% more than other companies employing Haredi workers. He freely admits that they would earn more working in Herzliya, but says his company offers other advantages, including its Haredi-friendly environment and comfortable work hours.
Most Haredi women programmers are not given advanced programming jobs, he says. If a bank hires such a team to build a program for it, it will inevitably be given peripheral tasks. While there may be Haredi women working on complicated programming tasks, that's not the rule, he adds.
Employees come to 3Base after they finish Haredi women's seminaries at age 18. At that point, their options are becoming housewives or finding part-time employment with comfortable hours near home.
Most Haredi women choose to work because they are their households' main breadwinners - their husbands generally dedicate their lives to religious studies. But cultural norms restrict them to same-sex environments, and few challenging jobs are available to them. In addition, they start having children young, which means they are unlikely to go on to college.
3Base is a private company and receives minimal government support. Therefore, its training programs are very practical and are designed with the knowledge that the women must start work within a few months. Besides programming, they are taught to send basic e-mails in English. The training is led by other women.
Mansdorf says 3Base takes jobs that would otherwise have been outsourced to Eastern Europe.
"I don't know if we can offer prices like they do in Eastern Europe, but our prices are relatively cheap and the quality is better," he says.
However, Peres' goal of seeing 20 high-tech companies employing Haredi women is unrealistic due to the cultural gaps, says Mansdorf.
"It's a lot easier to hire graduates of 8200 who returned from India or finished college than to make the kitchen kosher," he says.
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