“We need some more girls in here…”
What you are about to read is about women in coding and tech because, dearest reader, today is INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY.
I want to put something out there that is about women new(ish) to code. I think it’s important to talk about it and writing this might help me to later reflect on this bootcamp journey. I’m one of 23 students on the 16 week School of Code Bootcamp in Birmingham and I’d like my journey, as a woman new to code, to be visible.‘You can’t be what you can’t see’ and when figures suggest that just 17% of the tech workforce are women… well then… better get writing about what we’re thinking, doing and striving for in tech. At this point I think it’s important state, or rather, SHOUT that pretty much half (48%)of the School of Code cohort are w.o.m.e.n.
Then when thinking about what to write I thought, bloody hell, this is a massive topic so I did what I always do when I’m not sure about what I should do next… I asked around. Specifically I asked other women on my bootcamp what they thought. So one rainy lunchtime I cornered some unsuspecting ladies (and a few men) to ask them the broadest of broadest questions…
“What do you think women can offer the future of tech?”
Stick with me… because while it’s a massive question I was inspired by the thoughtful responses I heard. The women and men who contributed to this blog are part of an amazing group of people who bring with them a load of personal and professional experiences learned way before they started to code. It’s also not about bashing men and it doesn’t draw any solid conclusions, it’s more an audit of what I talked about with a group of fine people interested in the future of tech and coding…
Bukola: worked as a translator and in financial services
“Women should be doing the coding not just talking about doing it”.
She talked to me about what she sees to be the challenging nature of striving to be visible as someone who wants to be a skilled developer (who just happens to be a women) and the pressure she can feel to use social media platforms to promote herself. We talked about the roles that women may default to in tech: project management, public speaking for example. Roles where women manage and represent those who code but who don’t necessarily wrestle with writing it themselves. But she also talked admiringly of those very same women who are excellent in management and public speaking and sees collaboration across the varying skill sets as vital. It’s important to be mutually supporting and promoting one another.
Solidarity is key, hostile competition may divide us.
Kira: worked as a maths teacher for many years.
“Is what women offer tech really that different to what men offer?”
We talked about the emotional mindset that some people anticipate that women will bring to the workplace and when approaching work challenges. Do we, as women, worry that male colleagues assume this mindset will make us better equipped to deal sensitively with the inter-personal stuff, life stuff that can spills over into the work environments?
Are we as women complicit in typecasting ourselves in this role?
Maybe, perhaps especially when we sense there is an expectation that we are empathic and maternal. Conversely does this mean we cast men as our pragmatic, calculating, emotionally cold opposite sex who just get on with the job irrespective of how they ‘feel’ and expect women in their teams to be the ones who pick up all the emotional slack? Kira suggested that mindset is not binary and we learned about this when Joe from Mindset expert came in to coach us on communication, personality types, how to be more resilient and how to foster a growth mindset.
Communication is nuanced, and having a good balance of men and women as well as a balance of different personality types within a team is vital to a healthy and productive workplace. Kira is alert to the fight for more women to succeed in tech, she said she doesn’t want to be ‘the token women’ where a company will be able to boast of having a fairer balance of men and women, she wants to be recognised for her skills first and foremost.
Finally I spoke with Manu: originally from Brazil, she has been a journalist and a translator
Mareen: was a primary school teacher
Stuart: worked in a call centre handling financial advice
Robyn: worked in a series of unfulfilling admin jobs
Manu thinks having greater numbers of women working in tech can only help to foster a healthy culture, reflecting the balanced distribution of men and women that we see in the world around us. A work place dominated by woman can foster a culture as unhealthy as one dominated by too many men, that said…
“We need some more girls in here!” 33% more please…
Mareen anticipates the positive impact that women will have to reach and create products for female users. A pregnancy app for example created by women for women.
Robyn talked about access beyond gender and actually we started talking about how language and cultural barriers might compound gender marginalisation. Stuart reflected on how few CEOs in the world are women and that greater numbers of women need to be in these positions of leadership, leading by example.
If more women can make their way into positions of leadership it can inspire other women to do the same and to make those opportunities for themselves. But herein lies the problem. What are the barriers for women to get into those senior roles and how do we overcome them?
In a brief conversation with a male executive, I began to understand some of these barriers from an industry perspective. The developers he works with are incredibly skilled and experienced and this only comes from practise, practise comes from experience and the experience of the tech world thus far has been predominately male. His clients like to work with developers that look like them. Hmmm. If influential parts of the industry only feel comfortable working with people who all look the same way, then yet again women have to work harder to be seize the same opportunities. It might be that as women we just have to make and take the platforms of seniority and not look for permission from the male gatekeepers who currently hold the power.
I’ve been wondering about this gender problem in relation to what coding does as a problem solving skill. I think, as many do, that it’s a bit of a problem having just 17% of tech jobs held by women, so we need to do more about that. We need to challenge the established institutions to look beyond working with people they naturally gravitate towards. They are at risk of missing out on working with some fantastic talent if they do. I spoke to someone else who suggested, ‘well, you’re only going to start to solve a problem if you can see it’. Maybe the community of gatekeepers need to look at little bit harder to see that the problem is right in front of them.
Conversely, with the lack of women in tech I wonder if the imagined glass ceiling here is a little more fragile and easier to break through than it at first appears? Since there is and overall shortage of skilled people working in tech it means that now is the perfect time for women to step up. One thing is for sure, to enable more women to feel comfortable moving into tech, we need to create role models within the industry. This, of course, is where School of Code may just be harnessing such talent…
Thanks for reading
