Why are Software Developers Predominantly Male

If your mental image of a computer programmer is young, male and often bespectacled, you’d be pretty close to the money. Google recently revealed that only17% of its technical workforce are female.

How come the software development space is so often almost completely male and is there more we could be doing to encourage female engineers?

Programming Wasn’t Always Completely Male-Dominated

Programming and early computing weren’t even nearly as male-dominated as it is today. Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron, was relentlessly encouraged by her mother throughout her youth to reject romantic subjects like poetry and tutored almost exclusively in mathematics and the sciences, in which she excelled.

When she was 17 in 1832, Lovelace went to London where she met the inventor and polymath, Charles Babbage and together they wrote up and defined one of the earliest explorations of what would become the modern computer. Her notes were read by the individuals who designed and built the first computers a century later. The programming language, ADA is named in her honor.

How did an industry with roots so egalitarian become so completely male just a couple of centuries later?

Working in a Male-Dominated Space

With many women experiencing stereotypical gender-based expectations
and challenges in male-dominated workplaces, working in male-dominated spaces is absolutely a challenging element of being a female programmer. Here is a random example, Elinext – a software development company with 400 people in staff – employs only 14% female experts (preferably
QA, Design and Marketing / Sales departments), while the other 86% are males.

Studies have also found that by encouraging mentor-ship by women in senior positions, companies can encourage a more female-friendly
work-space. However, this isn’t happening as much as it could be for a whole-range of reasons, and following the Me Too movement, men in senior positions are less-likely than ever to mentor junior women.

Greater Egalitarianism Equals More Traditional Gender Roles?

In countries that rate higher for gender equality, women are actually less likely to pursue a STEM-based degree. This is known by researchers as the “Gender Equality Paradox”. While the imbalance of fewer women in STEM subjects is global, in countries like Norway Sweden and New Zealand, women were more likely to be underrepresented in STEM degree course.

Contrastingly,more socially conservative countries like Turkey and Algeria have higher female student percentage in their STEM subjects. This has been explained with the idea that female students who test as equal or better than male students in mathematics and sciences are more likely to have better literacy skills, making them more likely to pursue subjects other than STEM.

STEM subjects often are the focus because they’re among the most lucrative degree subjects to pursue, although there is evidence that other subjects catch up in the first decade of graduate’s careers.

As well as this, women are more likely to attend the university than men in the UK. UCAS has released figures stating that women are as much as a third more likely to attend university versus their male counterparts. There
are many completely female-dominated industries as well, with women rising up the ranks to command higher salaries and positions. These overwhelmingly tend to be in more humanities, arts and health based industries.

When it comes to women in software development roles, it quickly becomes apparent that the issue is much more complex than kneejerk “liberal” or “conservative” ideologues would have you think. Women are likely to face gender-based challenges in the male-dominated workplace, but they’re also, when given the option throughout education and societal gender egalitarianism, more likely to reject STEM subjects in favour of arts and humanitarian subjects.