Developing Girls

This post was going to be about how junior developers can learn from the senior devs on the team. However, as I was mentally composing the first few sentences, I realised I was using exclusively male pronouns to refer to said senior developers. A moment's thought on why I was doing this revealed that we have no senior female developers.

In fact, there are a grand total of four female developers in our entire development team, three of whom started working for us as new graduates in the last three years. The fourth, admittedly is recognised as a senior developer, but our group of top senior devs/architects (the 'Development Steering Group') who I was going to talk about learning from are entirely male. To give you an idea of just how shocking these numbers are, our development team in Wellington probably includes upwards of 60 people. Once you add the other offices into the mix the number tops 100 and, from memory, I don't think there are any more women. 4% is a pretty dismal figure!

Don't get me wrong here - I do not for a moment believe that the company is discriminating at all. There just aren't many female developers out there to be hired! The situation was the same studying at university - it wasn't unusual for me to be one of two or three females in a class of more than 60. Female devs have sometimes gone to some fairly extraordinary lengths to assert their presence but nothing seems to be changing.

This reminded me of a blog post I read earlier this year about an article on cnn (unfortunately the link to the original article is now dead) about why women don't get into engineering. Apparently women aim for careers where they feel they can help people, hence the traditional female domination of roles such as nursing or teaching. I had a very close to home example of this recently when a younger friend who'd always aimed to be an accountant decided she never wanted to work for an accounting firm because it couldn't possibly be fun. "I'm a people person, I need to be working with people not with numbers." No amount of explanations could convince her that the numbers would be helping people, that she'd be part of a team, that any job was a 'people job'.

Now, I have nothing against wanting a career where you feel you're helping people - that was, and is, my aim for the work I do. I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the mornings if I didn't feel that something I was going to do that day would help someone. My actions are focused around helping my clients get software that will make their lives easier and helping my workmates to be happier and less stressed. Yes, I spend most of my day staring at a computer screen; but my job is definitely a 'people job'. I originally got into IT after spending some time working as an admin/helpdesk person and seeing how upset and frustrated computers made people. I got to thinking that maybe if I could help create computer programs that were easier to use the world might be a happier place...

A lecturer in one of my university software engineering papers spent one of our ethics lectures discussing the lack of female developers. Her theory was that most guys get into IT through being interested in computer gaming. The problem is that most computer games, having being designed by men, don't appeal to girls; so the major entry point doesn't apply. Please note I said 'most' - there are exceptions (I'm a big fan of Myst and I have a friend who loves The Sims) but as a general rule gaming is considered to be a male activity.

So what do we need then? For games that appeal to girls we need game developers who understand what girls want to play and are willing to take the risk of trying to develop a new market. But, more crucially I think, we need to educate young women about all jobs being 'people jobs' and the opportunities there are to make a difference in the IT sector. I was talking to my high school computing teacher some time ago and we discussed the possibility of me talking to her classes. Maybe I need to get in touch with her again...