Monday, December 14, 2015

Why are there only few female software developers?


When I was still on my first year in college, the very first thing I noticed was that I only had 12 fellow female computer science students out of 40 in my batch. The number decreased each year and by the time I graduated there were only last 5 women standing proud for surviving long hours of solving brain crunching programming problems. When I started with my first job, I was the sole female software developer in the company. With my second job, there were only two of us. For my current job, there were five of us in our department. I was already so used to a work environment where most of my colleagues are male. If you are like me who wonder why there are so few female software developers, then I came up with the following probable reasons.

  1. Most women don't like studying Math. Since Computer Science is a course that has lot of Math in the curriculum, it is a big turn off to female college students. I myself needed to put extra effort just to pass all of my Math and Physics subjects in college. Most of my female classmates simply gave up the course after failing their Math subjects.
  2. Most female software developers can't stand the stressful nature of the job. Seriously, every single day of my life as a software developer involves STRESS. Stress from tight deadlines, lots of sleepless nights trying to figure out how to solve bugs, the need to learn new programming language/framework, etc. I can't blame why most female software developers shifted to QA Engineers or management positions after a few years.
  3. Since the IT (Information Technology) is a male-dominated industry, there are some female software developers who feel awkward and lonely to be surrounded by male colleagues. I remembered on my first job, during lunch breaks all of my male colleagues are busy discussing stuffs like NBA, Dota and every single sports and computer games you could think of, while I was left alone on my cubicle reading Hollywood Gossip websites. Every time there is a job opening for software developer on my work, I always wish that the company will hire a female software developer so I will have someone to share girly talks with.
Those are some of my observations and opinions of why there are only few female software developers. If you have other opinions to share about this matter, let me know in the comment section below.

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