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Where Girls Code.


Photo by Brooke Lark

“Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.”
—Hillary Clinton
So, It all started with a girl. She's a colleague, and she asked me a question which lead me to write this post. Let me first tell you a little about her and her question.
Yesterday, while I was hanging out with one of my female friends(just friend people nothing more and by the way I am single ♥) and we were talking about programming culture and code (see this is why I am single). And suddenly she hustled and came in front of me and asked, “What do you think the main reason behind lesser number of female programmers than male programmers”. I said,“Simple, because, We men are much smarter than you guys”(I am sexist baby..... Uh! Okay jokes apart). And she hit me in stomach (man that girl hits very hard) and yelled,“I am serious Dav”. Anyway, soon she got distracted because there was a guy selling some girly pinky shoes(ew pinkish). But, her question, It started haunting me. It started repeating inside my head and when we left I said to her,“You know what, I will dig deep into it and tell you the reason”(and she was like What the fu*k! He is talking about? because she already had forgotten that talk).
After I came home I sat down and hit Google (not with a baseball but with Enter key). And launched a search for “Trends in gender ratio in Programming”. Let me line up some results.
So, it turns out Women in old good days(ENIAC and UNIAC time) were very much interested in Programming and Mathematics(both terms were used interchangeably during those days as programmers were considered Mathematician at that time). There were more female programmers and most males were in hardware industry. But all this changed after commercialization of computers.As you know(or don't know) behind every big change there's a series of events and those were
The “Rise” in average salary of programmer
In early era of programming, Women were paid very low salaries.Because programming was much easier back then. It was all just plugging bunch of wires here and there to get the job done(please don't get me wrong here, Women programmer I personally think did some awesome jobs). But as computer got commercialized people started giving much more importance to programmers and their work. Universities started offering courses specifically on Computers and Computer programming. Which increased interest of Men towards the field and hence more number of male started taking programming rather than electronics and circuit design.
Programming a skill of Antisocial
Have you heard about personality tests?, No, anyway it's simple you have to answer few questions and based on your answers psychologist or an automated system gives you information about your personality traits(apparently I participated in a lot of them and mine always came out to be Ambivert, Leader and Scanner). So, One of the key takeaways of the personality tests was the best programmers were antisocial, and that that was a male trait(with few exceptions). This Idea was very much in media back then and quotes like “Smart girl don't get the guy” or “Intelligent and Analytical girls are least liked by society” added butter to the fire resulting in parents hating their daughters going in programming and girls into thinking being a geek might make her left out as single and alone(girls hate being alone).
Computer as toy for boys
Last but not the least is the fact that Computer were being marketed as boy only toy. All those action pack games were marketed as if they were only made for boys (although girls liked them too but no one cared). With emergence of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and the Google duo Larry Page and Sergey Brin(boys were shaking the ground of computing world), the idea of computers being boy only thing only became firmer.

The Solution

Let's first ask ourselves is it really a problem? I personally think it's just a trend and sooner or latter like every other trend this one will get vanish too. But how much time it will take cannot be predicted just yet(I'm not octopus Paul duh!).However,if you really care about this here's few points.
  • Spark that interest in girls at early age.There's alot of cool programming langugaes that are easy to learn and fun to play with(see Kid's programminmg languages).
  • This one is serious,Trust me from bottom of my heart I am saying this Programming is not at all Antisocial people's play.It's a lot fun; it makes you god of that 17 inch screen where you can create your own world.And it sharpened your mind and problem solving skills.
  • Lastly,I want to introduce you about a field of coding that really sparks that artist in females(and males as well),It's called Creative Coding and It's where you make art by Algorithms(visualization of data,algorithm etc).
Attractor and Repeller(Creative Coding).

That's all for this. Do comment and share your thoughts.Follow, Like and Share(show some love naa ❣). Have a nice time.


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