Video: Where female coders shine

“The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem,” says one expert of the workplace gender disparity. And this data proves it.

Where are the female coders?New data shows where in the world women coders shine.

Posted by Tech in Asia on Thursday, 28 December 2017

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Transcript:

Women programmers are almost as rare as unicorns.

They make up less than a third of the tech talent pool in Silicon Valley – and at Google and Facebook, they account for just 17 percent and 15 percent of the technical positions.

And while you’ve heard about the tech industry’s diversity problems, you’ve probably also heard of the “talent pipeline” issue, where recruiters look for candidates in the usual institutions – MIT, Stanford, places like that – and thereby create the illusion of a skills shortage.

So where can we find more female developers?

In a recent analysis of its database of over 2 million developers, HackerRank found that Asian nations made up the majority of the top 10 countries with the most coders who are women – with Indonesia 10th, right up to India taking first place.

Diving deep into the numbers, you’ll notice that more developers doesn’t equate to better developers. Female coders from India ranked 9th when it came to algorithmic challenges and programming tests, while those from Singapore and China scored higher.

Despite the sizable talent pool, underrepresentation of females in more technical roles persists.

Conventional wisdom tells us that to reduce gender inequality in the tech industry we need to equip women with the skills they need to enter particular roles. But here’s a controversial opinion: in practice, when more women enter a role, its value seems to go down.

Researchers often cite the example of the strict gender hierarchy between front-end and back-end developers. Women are typically typecast as front-end developers (doing things like implementing visual elements that users see on a website), while men work on the backend (imagined as “logical” tasks on the server side of things) – which typically offers them more competitive pay then their front-end counterparts. Front-end jobs are easier for women to obtain, but some view them as “feminized” jobs that are less prestigious.

And here’s what’s pressing about the whole issue. The labor market develops its own circular logic – women are front-end developers because they appear eager to assume these roles, and we know this because women are front-end developers. And so it keeps going.

The question is – what comes next?

Marie Hicks, a computer historian, puts it this way: “The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.”

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