The past couple of years have seen a rise in the movements to increase participation of women in technology. Global movements such as Girls In Tech, Grace Hopper Celebration, Girls Make Games, Women in Data Science and many others have launched programs and campaigns to increase gender diversity in technology fields. For these programs and campaigns to work, it is essential to have the background information and data to back the claims.
To study the growing trends of women participation in technology, HackerRank launched an online survey to study the trends in developer skills, education and hiring practices. The number of respondents amounted to 14,616 professional developers that included 1,981 women and 12,635 men. The report observes the following:
Education
Previously, a majority of female software developers were coming from different majors other than computer science and STEM as compared to men. However, today computer science is seeing a healthy growth in popularity amongst young women. The specialization degrees of the survey respondents suggest, young women today are 33% more likely to study computer science compared with women born before 1983.
Learning
The report observed the trend of a reduced gender gap in age of learning to code. The survey results tell, there was a 20 percentage point gap between men and women over 35 who began coding before 16 years old. Today that gap has shrunk down to just 7 percentage.
In parallel to this, another trend has been observed that young students are likely to start on equal footing as older generations when enrolling in courses that teach programming fundamentals.
Tools
For roles across front-end and back-end, few of the most in-demand languages are Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and Python. According to the survey, over 60% of the female developers are proficient in Java, JavaScript, and C, while over 40% can develop in C++ and Python.
The complete research can be viewed here.
About HackerRank
HackerRank is a Y Combinator accelerated startup initiated by two software engineers hailing from Amazon and IBM. The duo realized they were spending a major chunk of their time on engineering interviews than focusing on building innovative products. The traditional recruitment methods make it difficult to spot competent programmers. Thus they built a system that had automatic code challenges, cutting thousands of recruiting hours and inforcing meritocracy. The team is now on a mission to match developers to the right job by revolutionizing the method through which companies discover and evaluate developers.
