UK Edition
Can't code, won't code - cracking the secret of gender imbalance in STEM
Even though so many gender barriers are tumbling – at elite universities, where women now outnumber men, or running for presidency in the US, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference – some areas still appear to be lagging behind, as is the case with digital coding.
“I’m an anomaly,” admits Emma Reardon, a senior user interface developer at John Lewis. “We have got gender balance pretty much everywhere else, just not in the development teams.”
Only 27 per cent of those working in Britain’s digital industries are women. Worse still, when it comes to those who work with code at the coalface of the modern industrial revolution, the number of women is a mere 4 per cent.
“Most women prefer to work in a more balanced working environment,” says Denise Xifara, a product developer at Decoded. “I don’t have any female friends left as programmers.”
Women who enter a field that is dominated by men often say they love the work and want to fit in, but still cannot help feeling like outsiders. This would seem to hold true for many of the women who work as coders, who report being uncomfortable speaking up about the issue and the lack of respect, which often gets swept under the rug in the workplace – they just want to code and make software, not put their head above the parapet.
The problems can often begin even before they have got their foot through the door. “Finding a job was hard,” says a female full stack developer at an online retailer. “I was told time and time again that I couldn’t work part time, that it didn’t fit with the workflow.
“I was even interviewed by one company who asked if instead of being a developer, I might be more interested in project management.”
And the number of female developers in her company? “Perhaps six in a couple of hundred,” she replies.
You need diverse experiences to make diverse technologies, so the information technology sector needs to become inclusive and attract more women. But not all the signs are positive that it is moving in the right direction.
Take Apple’s move into health tracking last year – the Health app measures everything about your health; everything that is except periods, the menopause, or babies.
So how can we scale up initiatives that are already exist and ensure that things do improve? Chi Onwurah MP, shadow minister for culture and the digital economy, thinks more needs to be done to bring industry and education together.
“I’ve heard every excuse from practically everyone in the pipeline,” she says. “It’s a big tangled mess of reasons really. We have to look at school, at university, at the media, at attitudes. “I still remember being told by kids in the playground that girls can’t do maths. Thankfully, I had great teachers who told me that anyone can do maths.”
Currently, half as many girls experience coding at school compared to boys, and according to the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), only 17 per cent of computer science degrees are held by women.
Ms Onwurah studied electrical engineering at Imperial College London, before moving onto a career in telecommunications, working with both hardware and software. “I know what it feels like to be at a conference of maybe 3,000 people, and for there to be only 50 women present.”
As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for adult education and vice-chair of the APPG for FinTech, Ms Onwurah has also looked at ways of getting older people involved in technology.
She believes that one of the possible ways to encourage more girls and women into the sector may come from education after university. “We have so much potential in the older generations,” she points out. “Older people have more time, they can dedicate themselves and be a champion.”
Adult training represents a way into coding for millions of women who never learnt when they were younger. Meetups such as those run by organisations such as Women Who Code and Codebar can introduce women to the collaborative, problem-solving world of programming. Meanwhile, tech bootcamps such as Makers Academy and workshops like Techmums and Digital Mums can give women the tools to get into technology, social media and programing.
Evgeny Shadchnev, co-founder of Makers Academy, says that out of the last completed cohort of a 12-week bootcamp, 21 per cent were female, with nearly all going on to find jobs as developers – way below half, but still above the industry average for women who code.
Shortly after finishing Makers Academy, Sarah Young started as a junior developer at Deloitte Digital. “I like to code. I like the logic and the structure of it,” she says.
“When I started I definitely felt like a minority. In the current team I’m on, out of 20 programmers, I think just six are women.”
The efforts of these organisations are an invaluable first step, but there is still a very long way to go to redress the imbalance. And it would seem that without a dramatic cultural change in the way we see women’s roles in the technology industry, it’s a gender gap that may well be with us for many years to come.