Gender Diversity in Software Development

According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), women held 57% of all professional occupations in the United States in 2018, but just 26% of computer employment. Another recent poll discovered an even more pronounced lack of diversity among developers, with only 11% identifying as female. Because of this underrepresentation and a lack of role models, younger females have generally been discouraged from learning how to program, perpetuating the imbalance.

With 120+ workers working in three offices in the United States, Ecuador, and Colombia, we know firsthand the value of a varied workforce. Currently, 20% of our employees are female, with that proportion expected to climb as we grow. There are however some positive signals of progress in the industry: more females

Breaking the Gender Bias Vicious Cycle

Gender bias is likely to be reflected in the technical goods and services produced by a software development team. Any program that is developed with just half of the population's needs and viewpoints in mind is likely to have 'built-in' bias, which can lead to incorrect outcomes for the other half. Consider LinkedIn's search engine, which until a 2016 update asked users who searched for common female names if they meant to input a male name instead - Stephanie? Were you referring to Stephen? Or Amazon's AI hiring tool, which learned to favour male candidates.

These flaws were fixed, but the lesson is that real-world gender prejudices may exist.

Women may be superior coders.

In 2016, a large study of the open-source software development site GitHub discovered that contributions from women received greater approval ratings than contributions from males, but only if their gender was not detectable. According to the peer-reviewed study, "while female coders on GitHub may be more skilled overall, bias against them occurs nonetheless." The primary message is that both men and women are capable of being effective software engineers and should be assessed on merit rather than gender stereotypes.

Diversity is Beneficial to Business

Several studies have found that diverse work teams are more creative and inventive. It makes sense to bring together people with diverse origins, personalities, experiences, and knowledge.

Furthermore, a clear majority of job seekers perceive workplace diversity to be an important aspect when assessing career options. In other words, if you already have a track record of encouraging gender diversity and inclusion, you are more likely to recruit the greatest female tech talent.