We exist to advance
women in tech
Toast is Canada's leading tech recruitment firm and community for women in tech. We place exceptional talent, build community at scale, and create the products and programs that move the needle on gender equity in the industry.
Toast was born out of a genuine need to diversify technical teams.
We observed that talented women were leaving tech and facing barriers to entry, and current hiring systems weren't doing anything to stop it. If we want women to change the system, they have to be in the system - building it, shaping it, and making decisions about what comes next.
To connect, champion, and advance women in tech through intentional hiring, community, and products that close opportunity gaps and open doors.
Three things that set us apart
1
We started as a white-glove hiring platform. Our recruitment services addressed the pipeline barriers through sourcing, matching, and connecting talented women with companies that may not have found them otherwise.
In the process, we curated a diverse talent pool of thousands of skilled women, creating more pathways for women to enter and advance in tech while helping companies diversify their teams.
2
Our community was created to address the lonely-only phenomenon, foster a sense of belonging, and increase retention in tech. It equips women with the resources, upskilling, coaching, network, and the support that keeps them thriving in the industry. We built initiatives like the Toast Summit, Supper & Spa Clubs, and The Champions Program to create opportunities for women to propel their careers forward alongside women who understand them.
We also launched the Toast Institute to facilitate research on gender equity and inform better practices and systems across the industry.
3
As we grew, we built the Toast Portal to power both our membership and recruitment. It gives candidates a place to track applications and receive feedback. We added Rollie, our AI-powered career agent, for on-demand support with resumes, interviews, salary negotiation, and more.
Clients asked for more direct access to our talent pool so they could hire talented women at scale. So we built our first SaaS product: the Toast Talent Marketplace, enabling us to scale our impact and accelerate the hiring of women in tech.
Everything we do feeds back into the Toast ecosystem. Our community, research, hiring services, and technology are designed to continuously create better outcomes for women, organizations, and society as a whole. When women have better access to opportunity, organizations gain access to stronger, more diverse talent. These diverse teams build better, more innovative products - ones that are better equipped to understand and serve the people they build for. By improving the experience for women at every stage of their careers, we're not just changing who gets hired; we're helping build a more equitable, innovative, and prosperous future for everyone.
The numbers tell the story
Toast is driving real, measurable results for women in tech across Canada. This is what happened in 2025.
47%
of Toast members received a raise in 2025, and 58% of those raises were 10% or more.
1 in 5
Toast members stepped into a leadership or management role in 2025.
85%
of candidates we place negotiate their offer, nearly 1.7x the industry norm.
1 in 12
Toast members transitioned into tech from another industry in 2025, breaking through in a challenging market.
The women building it
April Hicke
April built Toast around a simple conviction: that tech is better when it's built by everyone. With over 15 years in leadership and change management, she's spent her career helping organizations build teams more inclusively and intentionally.
She grew up in foster care and took a non-traditional path into tech, often as the only woman in the room. That experience shaped her drive to change the systems that weren't built for people like her.
A Certified Change Practitioner and TEDx speaker, April leads with a long-term growth mindset. She spends much of her time coaching emerging leaders and creating psychological safety inside teams, because that's where real change begins.
Nicole Shokoples
Nikki's career has lived at the intersection of strategy, change, and communications. She's built operating models, led transformations, and created brands at scale and in startups. What she's learned in both: business is always about people.
That conviction started with a sociology degree that taught her to ask who a system was designed for, and who it wasn't.
She joined Toast because she's had sponsors and opportunities that weren't always designed for women. She believes diversity of thought and experience isn't a nice-to-have, it's what makes organizations better. She's building Toast to help create a world where gender equity isn't a goal. It's how things work.
