Since childhood, we liked beautiful, sparkly things and instead of gift-wrapping code in glitter, it’s thrown at us in a dual toned black and green screen. Starting from color schemes to font choices, there is an unrecognized bias in coding favoring males.

Men would feel a lot more comfortable stepping into a tech career because it naturally flows from things they loved as children — video games, robotic gears. All so similar to the toys they played with at the age of six.

As a contrast, asking a girl who grew up playing with dolls to code would most likely yield disinterest. It’s too different from everything she likes and too far from everything she knows.

The ideal solution may seem like diminishing gender-specific toys, but it is too late for a lot of women who’ve already lived through their childhood. And that includes 18–22 year olds and therefore current college students.

A common response to the unfamiliar technicalities of programming would just be intimidation and then avoidance. The lack of women in CS isn’t because they are less able to be technical, they’re just often less passionate.

It might just be possibly because the field has been male-dominated for the longest time but the eventual result is that women aren’t really interested in tech. So, what do women like? Fashion and make-up and other things, but largely that really. What is computer science? Not that.

From a very generalized point of view, you’d find more women following beauty pages than men. And more men following tech-related pages than women. If you’re a woman and you’re in tech, chances are that you don’t share the same interests as the majority of women.

This comes down to being a very broad problem of the image the tech industry has and how it fails at blending with the glamor-oozing industries that women follow. The tech industry seems to have an image that limits who it appeals to — one that a lot of women don’t seem to identify with.

Being in tech myself and having observed my non-tech female friends, I believe a lot of women don’t even consider tech assuming its not for them.

Not saying coding should be pink and sparkly. Changing up color schemes might superficially lure her in, but it won’t make her stay when she begins to fail to identify with the tech culture. But how would women react if, for example, Beyonce started coding?

The way to get a community interested in a subject effectively seems to make people they can relate to or admire display interest in it. To what extent does the tech industry do that when trying to get women to code? Or make efforts to bridge gaps between tech and women’s interests?

Trying to change what appeals to girls through sheer exposure can work to an extent. But more thorough approaches might be able to make coding less unfamiliar for women overall, and thus create an appeal that will last.

Image Attribution : Heather Marks by Fervent-adepte-de-la-mode CC BY 2.0