Good news is emerging in the struggle to have more women engaged in computer science. HackerRank, a technical hiring platform, just released a report revealing that the gender gap in computer science is narrowing as more young women are pursuing computer science degrees. This offers some optimism that a long term negative trend may be reversing.
While the recent results are encouraging, the report also revealed that female developers over 35 years old are 3.5x are more likely to be in junior roles and in all age groups females are still more likely to hold the lower positions.
HackerRank tapped into its community of 3.4 million developers to conduct a study of 14,000 professional software developers that included 2,000 women, exploring key trends in education, training and technical focus for women in software engineering. It revealed the following about the gender gap, as stated in their press announcement:
- The gender gap for when developers learn to code is shrinking.
- By the time students enroll in Computer Science 101 today, young men and women are more likely to start on equal footing than older generations.
- More specifically, there was a 20 percentage point gap between men and women over the age of 35 who started coding before 16 years old. Today that gap has shrunk down to just seven percentage points.
- Women under the age of 25 today are 33 percent more likely to study computer science compared with women born before 1983.
- Today, women represent the highest number of new CS grads and junior developers (53 percent) entering the workforce
- On average, women report they most commonly know Java (69 percent), JavaScript (63 percent), C (61 percent), C++ (53 percent), and Python (45 percent).
- Across front-end and back-end, women are developing expertise in the top programming languages that employers need. They are also working in the same industries as men, which are predominantly technology and finance (53.2 percent and 10.7 percent, respectively).
“Managers have a clear-cut opportunity to drive change for future generations of developers,” says Gayle Laakmann McDowell, founder and CEO of CareerCup. “It starts with raising awareness around the unconscious biases that impact hiring decisions. But it’s also about creating workplaces and implementing policies that are inclusive and give women clear pathways to grow in their careers and become leaders.”
