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Let’s get one thing straight: Women have been coding for decades. They may be rare breeds, but they have always been around. In 1972, when video games were slowly being released, Atari, an arcade game developer, had its office in California supervised by Carol Shaw, the first woman they ever hired.
In an article on Polygon entitled, “No Girls Allowed,” Tracy Lein says, “[Carol] is best known for designing and programming River Raid for the Atari 2600 at Activision. She says she never got the sense that the games she made were for one gender or another and there was never a mandate from higher-ups to target a certain audience.”
It wasn’t until the video game crash of 1983 that game developers became desperate to get back into the market. Instead of advertising games to adults, they had the idea to advertise games as toys. Then, they had to decide whether to advertise these toys to girls or boys. After doing their research, they concluded that boys were playing video games more than girls, so they picked boys. It was then that the split between men and women in computers occurred.
Despite this trend, women have still made their way into the tech industry, though not to as great an extent as men. SXX project writer for CNET, Robert Cheng, writes, “In October, [Microsoft] reported that women comprise 29.1 percent of its workforce, but only 16.6 percent work in technical positions and just 23 percent hold leadership roles.”
Study after study has been conducted on why this occurs so frequently, not just at Microsoft, but in tech businesses in general. Many theories for this phenomenon have been weighed and tested, but it seems the main problems are how girls are raised to think about themselves in relation to the tech industry and the treatment women receive once they are in it.
Ariane Hegewisch, a study director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research tells CNET, “Girls don’t get as much opportunity to use computers. They also get fewer chances to explore subjects like mathematics or science, in part because of lack of encouragement, curricula that appeal more to boys than girls, and a negative stereotype about girls’ technical abilities.” This way of thinking could be responsible for the small percentage of women who major in computer sciences.
The second and most prominent reason as to why there are so few women in tech industries is the way women are treated within these industries. From the very first day, women are put on an unequal ground with their male counterparts. Catalyst, a nonprofit organization focused on expanding opportunities for women reports that, “Despite having the same education as their male counterparts, women in business roles in tech-intensive industries were more likely than men to start in entry-level positions (women, 55%; men, 39%) and to be paid less.” That is a significant difference of almost 20 percent.
In addition, women get hazed for much longer periods of time than men do. In a Tumblr post entitled, “Games! Girls! Onions!” coder Whitney Hills writes, “Let’s say you’re a guy who’s just entered the game industry right out of college. People joke about you being all young and fresh-faced, but then after a couple of months, they get tired of the joke, or some new blood moves in and you’re not the ‘young guy’ anymore. Now let’s say you’re a woman who’s entered the game industry right out of college. People joke about you being all young and fresh-faced, and after a couple of months they still haven’t tired of the joke, and no other young women have been hired, so you’re still the ‘young girl.'”
Hills also recalls being left out of business meetings, not being allowed to go on business trips because she was “too young,” and a plethora of other excuses because of the simple fact that she was a woman. She was just as qualified, educated, and ambitious as any of her male counterparts but she was still singled out. Hills goes on to explain, “You feel lonely, you feel like a novelty, you feel like a fraud. You feel like you don’t deserve a seat at the table.”
This behavior is potentially the reason most women change industries although they graduated with an MBA in computer sciences. According to the study by Catalyst, “Few women with MBAs are likely to enter tech-intensive industries, and 53 percent of those who do switch industries (compared with 31 percent for men).”
This is a serious problem that hurts the tech industry in a significant way. Men marvel at women who code, but simultaneously don’t take them seriously. If women are both interested in the tech industry and getting degrees in it but are still being shut out, how is any real change supposed to happen?
There’s one organization that’s giving it a try. Girls Who Code is an organization that aims to educate young girls and encourage them to pursue technological studies and to flood the tech world with more females. Reshma Saujani, one of the founders of Girls Who Code says, “Girls Who Code has gone from 20 girls in New York to 10,000 girls in 42 states. That’s the same number of girls who graduate each year with a degree in computer science. That’s progress! I’m proud to say we’re not just aiming to close the gender gap in tech — we’re actually doing it.”
It has already made a significant difference and continues to do so. The organization has several educational programs and mentorships that are designed to expose girls to computer sciences at a young age and foster their interests in technology. Girls Who Code has both a Club Program and a Summer Immersion Program.
Sixty-five percent of the Club Program participants considered majoring or minoring in Computer Sciences while 90 percent of Summer Immersion Program participants considered the same. Ninety percent of 10,000 girls is a wonderful step in the right direction for all involved. With these efforts to close the gender gap in STEM fields and all the women whose potential hasn’t been met, maybe girls will start to feel less like Whitney Hills did and more like the smart, code-cracking, capable women they are and were meant to be.
“Over the years, other people’s words and actions pile onto your shoulders. You feel enormous pressure to pretend that nothing bothers you because you don’t want to give others more power to hurt you, or upset people you care about or make them feel uncomfortable. So you don’t say anything; you try to ignore it, and the result is an ever-present sense of isolation that chills your enthusiasm and makes you defensive.”
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