Question: Are there many female programmers nowadays?
Keeping young people keen on embracing diversity
Recently, I was asked by a young 18 year old if there were many female programmers nowadays. As someone based in Manchester, female programmers are such a regular occurrence in some contexts that I don’t even think about it. It’s certainly not like it was, yet it is all too easy to forget that clustering does cause people within the cluster to experience it like a bubble. Both positively and negatively elsewhere. The questioning began.
I’m a beginner programmer 18y/o female.. i know some successful female programmers like Margaret Hamilton and want to know if there are more. People keep saying that programming is not for females
This is an interesting topic, as part of the wider problem of diversity, women are the biggest single impacted group in the IT industry. It’s a topic I’ve been following for a while [1].
Most large tech companies now release their diversity stats. The vast majority of them sadly, reflect the worldwide proportion of women who leave university with a computer related degree. Of large, global tech companies who released their stats, the only exception to this rule is twitter, who have worse diversity stats than everyone else.
To summarise some of the previous articles from my experience setting up code clubs for children, at the ages of 9–11, girls and boys split equally. 50:50. There is no inherent reasons why women/girls should not engage in technology [or any subject]. Uninformed society made that meaningless distinction, pointlessly meaningful. Yet, by the age of 21 or 22 women make up only 17% of IT graduates. Hence, companies are reflecting the talent pool available to them. Yet, this is “better” than it was before. Since finishing my degree 18 years ago, young women are now 12 percentage points higher than then, in terms of engaging with higher education. That said, it simply isn’t happening fast enough.
Also, unlike men, women also leave the IT industry at a much higher and faster rate, as well as an earlier age. Not only is there a pipeline problem coming into the industry affecting women from the age of 11 upwards, there is something happening in the industry to force women to choose to leave. It could be any number of things and it gets really murky when you factor in other elements, including recruitment practices by agencies, certainly in the UK.
Exceptional Spots
Now, just to point you in the direction Alan Mellor’s answer. Alan and I work in the same city. I know his current company well, since I’ve both attended and spoken at his venue several times (we may have even passed like ships in the night). Manchester, UK is an exceptional city for Women in Tech. The city encourages female participation without positive discrimination or tokenism. Women are present in large numbers in every role from engineers, to operations, to QA, to Tech leads, to front-end devs, to STEM, to entrepreneurs, to PM’s, to architecture, to CTO’s, to coaching, to design, to databases, to analytics and so on. Through the work of CodeClubs and CoderDojos, engagement remains higher than the national average at all junior age groups because community events exist to keep engagement of all genders high without segregation.
Many of those larger community events are organised and run by women in tech (one a senior developer/tech lead and agile coach the other coder also runs a major digital laboratory in the city) and so is the UK’s premier tech ambassadorship organisation (Tech North). The city has a chapter of the Girl Geeks who run events including both the junior and senior Hack Manchester programming contests. It also has countless tech events in the evenings every week (which is frustrating to me as I am often triple booked) many of which are run by female devs in the city.
Some Evidence
In this picture are developers from the BBC and Laterooms.com, several senior web devs, both front and back end as well as a few tech authors. I hope they don’t mind me posting this pic. It’s public domain.
Here’s another from their “Appy New Year” event in January 2014 held in the old TechHub (which has now moved to a bigger place and been renamed Spaceport).
You may notice some other things about this picture. As well as sponsorship, there are women of all ages creating apps and programming and even under 16’s (who’s faces I have redacted) who were also coding in this event using AppShed. Turn 180 degrees and you would note a couple of guys there too. Dr Steckles and other organisers make a very deliberate point of not making “Girl Geeks” exclusive to women.
The lady with the blue hair speaking in the background is Dr Katie Steckles herself. A national mathematics communicator, who also codes. She heads up mathematics communication and organises several events throughout the year as well as the regular Manchester Math Jam. Indeed, many of the IT related community fields are headed up by females. So are almost all large tech events.
Clustering Hides
The moral of this proverbial story is that there are very definite pockets where clusters of women in tech appear. Clustering of anything, naturally means there will be sparser areas. Yet, these pockets exist, no thanks to local government, who are as good as useless. It’s simply a grass roots movement. Also, such clustering naturally means you may have to go out and find it in you local area.
In short, there may be several reasons to leave the IT industry. However, being a women should never be one. Definitely continue coding. It would be a real shame if you didn’t start because of false statements made by those not in the know.
What’s better is Girl Geeks Dinners/Tea parties are a worldwide movement. It is something you can sign up to host. However, the effects are of course, not instantaneous. It take a good few years to change the environment by changing culture. Indeed, culture, at any scale, is the largest single contributor to women leaving or not entering the IT industry. That’s out problem.
Oh and for a possibly humorous ode to diversity in tech, 2016’s Hack Manchester Junior winners came from a college that a friend of mine works at. That friend heads up the computer science department and entered them into the competition. We went to the same Grammar School many moons ago. Just to push the diversity “points” a bit further, she is also a Muslim ;)
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