Why Aren’t More Girls Learning to Code?

Coding is a male-dominated industry. If you’ve ever seen the show Silicon Valley on HBO, you’ve gotten a glimpse into what the gender-breakdown is among tech companies. It’s a bunch of nerdy guys in hoodies coding, with the exception of the brilliant, lone female coder whose talents exceed those of all the men. When you look at the actual statistics, this representation isn’t far off.

A 2017 study by Accenture and Girls Who Code (a non-profit committed to closing the gender gap) found that women in computer science majors (in the US) has dropped from 34% in 1984 down to 18% in 2016. This decline in female coding talent has severe consequences. As Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y-Combinator, the top Silicon Valley seed accelerator) puts it,

“With female founders, I’ve seen a lot of cases where the woman is an a**-kicking domain expert in some field and has a clever idea but she’s completely hamstrung because she can’t program. Specifically, she can’t build the first version of her product and is forced to find a cofounder who can. Because she can't judge technical ability, she'll often choose the wrong person for the job. And in a startup, if you choose the wrong programmer or cofounder and have to replace them, the delay alone can be enough to kill the company.”

So lack of coding knowledge can put females at a disadvantage when starting a company, but what we’re seeing is that coding is not just necessary for starting a tech company, coding is more and more becoming an important skill in the general workplace. There are 500,000 open computing jobs in the US right now, and these coding jobs are being created at 4x the rate of jobs in other fields. However, the real kicker is that these new coding jobs are paying 2x the salary of other new jobs being created.

So how do we get girls more involved in coding? How do we show them they can unleash their creativity through code? How do we ensure these girls’ future companies can survive? And how do we make sure these girls are positioned well for the ever-changing workforce?

They need to spend more time with women who code. Some advocates call for more female representation in movies and TV shows (like Silicon Valley), but that takes time and won’t happen overnight. What about those girls in middle and high school right now? They need to be surrounded by female role models, who know how to code. They need someone they can see themselves in, someone to look up to, someone to prove that they can be the tech leaders of tomorrow, and someone to show them they can overcome whatever gets in their way. Once we start getting more girls in a room with fearless female coders, the gender gap will close itself.

Know any girls you think would make great coders? Check out the summer courses offered by Codebug!