I learned to program at 16, and now I’m in my 30s. I got my PhD in math from Duke University. I still remember my pride in the “horse move” algorithm I wrote in C++ in high school; the awesome puzzle interpreter interpreting itself (my first semester college course Scheme); my fascination with different types of matrix decompositions in C in grad school; and my excitement for relational databases and web scrapers at my first job.

Ten years after I learned to program, I still loved algorithms, but felt alone and overwhelmed in the IT culture. While working at a particularly ill-suited company, I was so unhappy that I hired a career counselor to discuss alternative career paths. Leaving IT would have been killer, but it wasn’t easy to stay either.

I’m not the stereotypical male programmer in my early 20s who wants to “work hard, get off hard.” I work a lot, but I’d rather get up earlier than leave later, and I was already planning ahead for how my husband and I would coordinate our schedules with daycare. Beer taps and ping-pong tables don’t appeal to me. I’m not aggressive enough to thrive in a competitive environment. And talking to other women in the industry, I realized I wasn’t alone in my frustration.

When researcher Kieran Snyder interviewed 716 women who left IT after an average of 7 years, almost all said they liked the work but were unhappy in the work environment. In a study for the National Science Foundation, Nadia Fouad interviewed 5,300 women with engineering degrees over the past 50 years, and 38% of them are no longer working as engineers. Fouad summarized her findings about why they left with the phrase, “It’s the climate, dummies!”

It’s a huge, unnecessary and expensive loss of talent in an industry supposedly understaffed. Given that IT is now one of the main drivers of the U.S. economy, it affects everyone. Any technology company that has difficulty hiring and retaining enough employees should be especially concerned about solving this problem.

Your company is NOT a meritocracy and you are NOT “gender-neutral.”

No one wants to think of themselves as sexist. However, several studies show that identical resumes are viewed differently depending on whether they are labeled male or female. When a man and a woman read the same text of a business pitch or a request for a raise, they are evaluated differently. Both men and women are prone to this kind of bias. The bias arises subconsciously without malice.

Here are just a few studies on subconscious gender bias:

• Investors prefer entrepreneurial pitches by men to identical pitches by women by a ratio of 68% to 32% in a Harvard, Wharton and MIT School of Management study. “Pitches delivered by a male voice were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based compared to the same pitches delivered by a female voice.”
• In a randomized, double-blind study from Yale University, science departments at 6 major institutions evaluated candidates for lab manager. Candidates with randomly assigned male names were rated as more competent and employable, and were offered a larger starting salary and career mentorship compared to identical candidates with female names.
• When men and women negotiated hires by reading the same text, the Harvard and Carnegie-Mellon study rated women who asked for a larger salary as difficult to work with and less pleasant, but men were not perceived negatively for bargaining.
• Psychology faculty were sent resumes of candidates (with randomly assigned male and female names), and men and women were significantly more likely to hire a man rather than a woman with the same track record.
• In 248 performance reviews of the best employees in IT, negative personality criticism (harshness, shrillness, irrationality) was present in 85% of women and only 2% of men in the reviews. It would be ridiculous to assume that 85% of women and only 2% of men have problems.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The post If you think the number of women in IT is just a problem with the hiring funnel, you haven’t looked carefully appeared first on G-IT Paris.

According to a recent study by scientists from the University of North Carolina, it was found that women are better at writing code than men.

They came to this conclusion after studying the information on 1.4 million users, which equals 35% of the GitHub platform, the largest web service for hosting IT projects and their collaborative development. The researchers took as a basis the information specified in the profile of users, and with the help of social networks, a search engine and a special program determined their gender identity.

The main indicator of success the scientists considered accepted requests for code editing, as well as approved edits. It turned out that the share of approved edits for women is 78.6%, while for men it is 74.6%. At the same time they noticed that edits made by women, whose gender could be determined by their name in the profile, were rejected more often than those made by men.

The post Minimum Program: Women in the IT Sector appeared first on G-IT Paris.

Ten years later the DOU 2021 showed that the percentage of IT-girls had increased to 22.3%. A study by WonderWoman 2021 showed that 43% of girls have moved into IT from other professions. 73% of women in IT see a future only in this area and want to become a specialist of senior level and above.

On the one hand there is an obvious change of trend and we cannot speak about direct gender discrimination in IT today. On the other hand, the percentage of women working in IT is still small compared to other areas. According to a Stack Overflow survey published in 2020, only 7.7% of women in Russia are employed in software development. If we talk about the global IT industry as a whole, the proportion of female developers is slightly higher, at 15%.

There are cases when during meetings the client addresses all questions to a man. Our analyst sometimes encounters a situation when she has to win over a client before he sees her as a specialist. A project manager says the same problem: they might not pay attention to her words until the same thing is repeated by a male colleague.

In conclusion, I would like to dispel the main outdated stereotype that a female programmer is like a guinea pig. The guinea pig has nothing to do with the sea or pigs, and a girl programmer has nothing to do with programming or girls.

GitHub cited statistics based on gender-neutral profiles. It turns out that code written by girls is accepted 3% more often (in a situation where the gender of the developer is unknown). This can be attributed to statistical error, but in any case it turns out that female and male code are equally good. So programming skill does not depend on gender. The second part of the stereotype, about looks, is also wrong.

Ten years ago we saw informal female programmers. But back then, guys were caricatured IT guys in thick glasses and sweaters, too. “Now IT professionals are the most enviable suitors. They go to the gym and barbershop and are dressed in the latest fashion. Girls in the field are very feminine, well-groomed and look great,” says the founder of #ITGIRLS.

Progressive companies, and there is a majority of such in IT, have overcome inequality and stopped evaluating specialists by gender. HR-director of Extyl points out that we do not have prejudices against gender, age and nationality of applicants. Certain soft and hard skills are important.

Nor should we forget that discrimination can be directed not only outwardly. Misogyny, self-prejudice, surprisingly enough, is often in the minds of women themselves and their inner circle. And this, too, must be combated.

Compare: when the fork for a job is 100-120k, it’s typical for a girl to ask for 100 and a guy to ask for 120. Employers are more likely to agree to these requirements, hence the difference in income. According to an Instagram poll by the founder of the #ITGIRLS school, girls dream of earning 300,000, and guys – 3 million. It’s time to learn to dream more freely and ambitiously.

The post Is discrimination a thing of the past? appeared first on G-IT Paris.