The State of Women in Coding

Recently at Posse I have transitioned from working on the social media side of things, to working in web design and development. I enjoy being able to create websites for clients–it combines multiple facets that I am interested in, including design, photography, solid writing, and company branding. I started to teach myself code in college to complete
a portfolio website assignment,and found that it was more fascinating than I had expected.

The ability to type pieces of words and letters that then turn a computer screen into something that looks like what I want, is a powerful and exciting skill to have. And in today’s online world, it is a huge asset in digital intelligence to be able to create and brand someone’s name or product on the web, and help them see more business through great design.

Women in Coding and Tech

The tech industry is a complicated issue, though. And a trending hot topic. More specifically, the place of women in coding and tech industries in general is under discussion. Both in the industry across the board, as well as top-level companies such as Google, Facebook or LinkedIn, women land at around only 30% of the workforce. The number becomes even lower when the category is narrowed to tech fields inside those companies^1,2. The disparity is large in scale and there are many different trains of thought out there on what exactly the issue is and how best to solve it.

The History

The statistics haven’t always been this way. Before 1985, women had a fair share in creating the computer science industry and new technology. After that year, however numbers started falling drastically. One article suggests this could be due to the rise of personal computers, which were marketed to boys, and college professors assuming that their students had grown up with access to that technology³. And now, only about 18% of computer science majors are women, and many that make it into a tech related job end up leaving after several years⁴. The reasons they leave? The tech industry remains highly sexist and misogynistic, resulting in lower pay, fewer opportunities, and sexual harassment. Women often leave the unwelcoming atmosphere once they begin having children and have to navigate their employers’ maternity leave policies. Or they simply get tired of not being able to move up in their own industry⁵.

So What Do We Do About It?

There are multiple attempts at combating these trends and convincing women to both enter and stay in both tech and coding arenas. Websites such as railsgirls, madewithcode, or girldevelopit aim to bring coding lessons and education to middle and high school girls and get them interested in the topic long before they reach college, while womenwhocode is a resource for female professionals to connect and grow a better environment. The documentary Dream, Girl is currently in production, produced by an all female team, to highlight women entrepreneurs who have achieved success with their own companies. And recently, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg has partnered with LinkedIn and the Anita Borg Institute to expand her Lean In movement to college campuses. Lean In Circles were started as a way for female professionals to connect and share advice; and now Circles are being started to encourage computer science and engineering majors to support each other and understand the possibilities that a tech degree holds^6,7.

Change in Perspective

However, as strides are being made to bring girls back into tech and coding, there is a perspective that needs to be kept in mind. The point of giving women a place in a certain industry means that they need to be allowed to be women. Some women have pointed out that many of the attempts to create coding opportunities for girls have resulted in overly girly, frilly, pink and purple and sparkly advertisements, reinforcing rather than breaking the stereotypes that create problems in the first place. Examples range from websites for teaching girls how to code having pink color schemes, to flyers for engineering clubs containing the words “are you a web diva?”. The examples for beginning coding projects are often bracelets or traditionally girl-oriented objects. Even girls who call themselves “girly” feel insulted when the industry approaches them as if they are only interested in super girly things⁸.

Tech doesn’t need to overcompensate and make women still feel like they are a different category, or that they need extra help in order to be able to enter the tech world. It simply needs to recognize that women bring valuable perspectives and problem-solving skills to the table, both because they are women and because they can code. If a girl is going to be interested in a computer science or engineering degree, she will be interested in the field for its own merits, and not because it has been glamorized or made to look feminine.