Do Ladies Find Coding Boring?
A survey by stackoverflow on over 64,000 programmers around the world, showed a jaw-dropping imbalance in the ratio of male to female programmers. According to the survey only 7.6% of programmers are women; that is to say in a space of 100 programmers, only 8 are women.
Despite the exploit of techies like Grace Hopper and the ingenuity of Ada Lovelace- the first programmer- women are still lacking in the tech industry.
What can be attributed to this?
Many analysts, individuals and writers have given their thoughts on this. The writer of this article on Lions of the Blogosphere is of the opinion that girls find coding boring, Scripting News thinks sexism and the ‘scary’ nature of coding plays a key role in this, some contributors on Quora.com think crave for peer and community acceptance (attractiveness), lack of role models, societal and family stigma is a principal cause, Sexism was greatly attributed to this by ValleyWag, and this HuffingtonPost has a lot to say about this.
I was opportune to be in a Google Women TechMaker meetup recently, and the outcome of this event changed the perspective from which I viewed this issue.
My initial thought, was that women were lazy (pardon me), and that they craved societal acceptance and love to be attractive (as highlighted by the points in previous paragraphs) and thus had no interest whatsoever in coding. But Consequent to this meetup, I came to understand that as much as men, ladies are also very interested in tech (by tech I mean programming), but a lot of external factors are against them; you can put it straight, the odds are against them.
The lack of women in tech, is more of a traditional, societal and psychology nature than it is of ability, interest, intelligence or brilliance. (You can highlight and tweet this).
Come to think of it,
How many fathers buy computers for their daughters at tender ages as they do for their sons?
How many tech companies do not discriminate female tech employees and make them feel incompetent?
How many professors do not discourage female students from taking their coding and programming classes?
“This is not a class for girls, you can’t stand the pressure and stress, you may want to take art and fashion classes instead”.
“This is not a career for girls, marketing will be better”
“You can’t survive the ordeals of this job”
These and even more are what employers and the school system use to discourage even the few women that want to venture into tech.
These all have attritional effects on any desire that a girl may have in tech, eventually forcing her to change her mind- only the very few who by fate or a stroke of luck (or anything else out of the ordinary) persist in the line of tech make up the 7.6 % that we now have.
Families, Schools, Corporate institutions and the society should start encouraging girls to go into tech. (You can highlight and tweet this).
This is the age of disruptive technological innovation, and as a friend rightly said, it is a word where software is taking over. We can’t afford to make it a male monopoly. Our girls must be involved; they must see tech as something that they should be involved in.
What we must do
Schools should start encouraging female students to take CS and coding classes, more opportunities should be given for female techies in corporate organization, and members of the society should start appreciating tech women. More programs (like the Google Women TechMaker) should be introduced to educate and empower women and put them in the line of tech.
This is what we must do.
Call to action:
What more can be done to bring more women to tech?
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Happy coding.
