Candice TillmanDevelopers and IT directors at many companies would like to see gender diversity in their departments. Businesses today are willing to hire more female programmers, analysts, designers, and technical writers, but cannot find them. Let’s figure out who they are – the “specialists” in IT, why there are still few of them in this industry, and whether it’s true that they still have a hard time building a career.
Boys to the left, girls to the right. Toys and career choice
Boy – a robot and a gun, girl – Barbie and toy dishes. To a boy, a console; to a girl, cosmetics. A study by Clive Thompson, “The Secret History of Women in IT,” cites statistics: parents were twice as likely to give computers to their sons as to their daughters. If they bought computers for the whole family, they were more likely to put them in the boys’ room.
From an early age we are all in one way or another implanted with the notion of “female” and “male” professions. For example, code is a thing built on logic and neatness, and here gender stereotypes about female logic come into play. Even a child can draw the same conclusion.
Our backend developer had dreamed of a career in the technical field since high school, but she doubted that she would be able to develop in it. Girls were intimidated by stereotypes that such jobs were only for men and that there would be problems with maternity leave. Then she transferred to a physics lyceum, graduated from the Department of Applied Computer Science in Economics, and now she is glad that everyone in the professional environment is enthusiastic about the idea and does not think about who is what gender.
Social pressure, especially at the beginning of life, is a hard thing to overcome. Against this background, it is not surprising that programming has gained the status of a “male” profession. A girl’s desire to write code is often perceived by people around her as a bliss, which will pass with age.
Another one of our developers in the university encountered a professor who told the students that in the end they would cook borscht at home anyway, and not work in their specialty. He treated everyone equally on exams, but the frequent references to homemaking were demotivating.
To summarize: from an early age, girls are convinced that programming is not for them. As a consequence, the number of women’s resumes for development jobs is ten times less than men’s. In life we meet positive examples of specialists, because of this it seems that there is no problem – those who want to, get into IT. This is nothing but a survivor’s mistake, because we never learn about those girls who could not overcome stereotypes and insecurity.
