I was recently talking to a friend about CodeDoor's scholarships and our focus on females. We talked about the importance of a higher ratio of female developers, in particular as startup founders.
It seems that no one disagrees openly with the notion of diversity in a startup, a workforce or student body. No one says: „I don’t want to hire females.“ At least no one in his right mind disagrees openly. Why are female developers then still underrepresented?
The lack of diversity has yet not been solved. It is a persistent problem. We, that is most humans, are certainly interested in asking the right questions. We know that the equality of women and men is a fundamental truth of human society. Why then do we not take some of these questions serious enough to put all of our energy into changing how things work?
At the end of the day, we humans have to be smarter than putting one part of our race into a disadvantage. The human race is inefficient because it is still incomplete in capacity.
Newton's Law of Motion, Gerald Zaltman's Neuroscience and Alan Kay might give us hints to ask the right questions that can be acted on rigorously.
Why then are female developers still underrepresented?
Did you know that females make up only 21% of hired computer programmers in the US? And they earn 10% less than men who do the exact same work? The numbers don’t look much different in other parts of the world. Of course, this does not come at a total surprise. There are tons of articles and studies mentioning the low numbers of female developers. Also by mere observation you find less female programmers around you. If you sit in a tech company right now, just look.
Is it a bad thing? Boy, it is.
Why should we be concerned? Simply speaking because companies with a deeply rooted diversity culture will win. The others will lose.
The damage done to society and the individual by the lack of diversity is significant. It is so strong that the mere thought of solving the diversity issue scares the most of us. Ha! You might say. I am not scared. It’s simple: Just hire female coders. But if the answer would be so simple, why is it not happening? This shows raising the number of female coders is hard. It is harder to solve than our intuition indicates.
The problem is persistent, which is a very bad sign. After all, persistence is an indicator of the depth of the problem. It is not a ditch but a steep well.
We intuitively feel that sustainable diversity is only reachable by working on the very foundations of our social order. It’s like working with our social DNA. As it is with many hard problems, we tend to work on other things than play around with our DNA. It scares us because it seems too hard to be solved.
How do we solve a problem so persistent? Obviously, there cannot be a simple answer to a complex problem. The mountain to climb gets even higher if you look at the following positive force that is in favor of diversity, but is not enough to increase the number of hired female developers.
Educational Environment
I went to high school in the US and Germany and attended two universities, one in the UK and one in Germany. Never have I witnessed male teachers, professors, parents, school kids or students who openly spoke about girls being less capable. Gender was not an openly mentioned variable in the verbally expressed equation for capability.
I agree that this sounds like a generalization based on a subjective observation from a guy who lived all of his life in the political western world. Let me try to find grounds for a more objective perspective:
It’s no secret that female students have on average better grades than male students.
In the EU, the annual number of female high school graduates surpasses the number of male graduates on average by 8% per year since the last 3 years. This gap continues at university. There are on average 5% more females studying for a bachelor’s degree, 8% more females studying for a master’s degree.
At first sight, this does not look like an educational environment where females would have a disadvantage. So all is good, right? This triggers at least two trains of thought. First, we know that this can’t be true. We know there is an asymmetry in the ratio of hired female and male coders. We also intuitively feel something is not quite right yet. Something seems to be off. And if we have to think about it there must be something bothering us. We are not in the zone yet.
Thus naturally I should keep looking for an educational drawback that shows what to work on. And voila here is one of those obviously seeming drawbacks: In the EU males make up 61,3% of university students in the STEM field.
Heureka! That’s it. Let’s just increase the number of females students in the STEM field and problem solved. But how do we reach this? What questions do we need to ask?
A force
Can another discipline help us find an answer here? For this, we need to find the right question, again. If education, as one of the strongest forces in our society, is not able to solve the problem alone, where or what should we look for?
Here is a cool way to find a great question: For a matter, you are curious about. Look for an established, fundamental truth (first principle) and apply it to the matter at hand.
One of these first principles is Newton's law of motion. The third law states that for every action (force) there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can use this law to explain the generation of lift by a wing and the production of thrust by a jet engine.
Let's say a basketball player throws a ball, the ball exerts an equal force to the player. We just don’t see how the ball is exerting its force on the player because the force of the ball is being absorbed by the body of the player, who stands on the ground, runs or jumps up in the air. If the player would stand on a skateboard you would see how the force of the ball would move the player and the skateboard.
Where is the connection here? The question is if only 39% of all STEM students are females, what force is causing this? There must be either a strong force that keeps a massive group of young, strong and intelligent females from studying a STEM field. Or there must be a strong force missing that empowers females.
Decisions are made by the subconscious mind
In the western world, females are not openly hindered to enroll in STEM courses.
So what force causes bright students to not select computer science in a time where software engineering is at the core of nearly every product we use? Be it smartphones, social networks, cars or Netflix. What is driving their decisions?
Neuroscience, or more precisely the science behind our decision-making process gives a reasonable explanation. Gerald Zaltman (a Harvard Business School professor) found out that 95% of purchase decisions take place in the subconscious mind.
Very generally speaking he found out that emotions trigger our decisions. Precisely he states: „No matter how radical a new product is, it will always be perceived initially in terms of some frame of reference.“ These references are part of the subconsciousness we connect with the product.
Not a lot of life’s decisions will be so deeply rooted in a person’s subconsciousness than the decision what to study and what occupation to pursue. It is no coincidence that in a family where a parent is a doctor the kids will at least consider to also study medicine. Students will certainly look for something that feels right when it comes to the question how to spend the rest of their lives. They do not actively decide what not to study. They decide subconsciously what to study.
So let’s look at the frame of reference a bit closer. We must look at everything that happens before college. And here we are talking about an environment that is mostly controlled by adults. Kids and teenagers are bound to the environment adults build. The subconsciousness is formed on a daily basis. Layers over layers are build by the adult architects throughout childhood and some of the time being a teenager.
It should suffice to say that, of course, parents should try to provide an environment that stirs the interest of girls and boys in technology. This is almost redundant to mention.
Looking at the adult architects helps us to understand the frame of reference young people derive their decisions from. It implies that we must not look at the pre-college times only. In particular, we have to focus on what happens in the world adults create after college: the job world.
A huge flaw in design
Although software driven innovations changed the way we work. We should not be fooled to believe that it also has changed the way we think about our work environments. Our understanding of a role of an employee has not changed in the same speed technology evolved.
The complex eco-system in the job-world is still dominated by a design in favor of a particular persona. The design favors a persona who works full time, starting the day very early and ending it very late. The employee is expected to work full speed with no day off. Of course, the person must avoid absences from work at all costs.
It is not hard to see that in an ever-changing world, it cannot be healthy for human society to pivot around a work schedule that has not changed much since the last 150 years.
The schedule is fitting for humans without children or humans who have children but someone else is taking care of them. In the past, this person was predominantly a man or a man in a relationship. As the child bearer, naturally women have been put into a position where they just could not fit the above-mentioned design.
Even worse, the design could persist because many men banked on women who took on social responsibility for their family at home.
Curiosity for design
As mentioned, we humans have to be smarter than putting one part of our race into a disadvantage. The human race is inefficient because it is still incomplete in capacity.
When you translate design into „how things work.“, change is possible. This is good news.
If you expect me to tell you how to change the design I must apologize right away. I am not in the position to say. But I don’t want to steal my way out of it intellectually. I will suggest some thoughts on how to set up the groundwork for a new design.
I chose the word groundwork on purpose. It’s almost impossible to fundamentally change an established work environment. It’s easier building one from scratch. Renovating an old house can be charming but there will always be limitations.
This is an unprecedented chance for startups. If started by the right team, they are able to stir interest for technology in females. Who then will develop an interest in being part of the world of innovation.
Those who start a company must develop a deep willingness to change the status quo. With deep, I mean a trustworthy effort. Only if the effort is trustworthy it will attract humans on a sustainable base.
Trustworthiness is incumbent to design at an environment so powerful that your gut feeling tells you to work for the company. You should be naturally attracted to the beauty of the work environment.
This requires an honest curiosity for designing a work environment where women want to work at. And this should be your test. Measure the success of how you implement living diversity by the number of job applications of females. Of course you should measure this for a job role that historically has a higher ratio of male applications.
Let female developers design the process
Startups per se are no guarantee to establish diversity. The founders and the people they hire need to wholeheartedly want a new work environment adapted to the personal life circumstances of the female developers.
You might grinch on the thought that a work environment should be adaptable to each individual. How should this be possible, you might ask? This thought is only natural, since we all are still used to the old world and our perspectives are limited by the look out of the window of the old house we sit in. We can't see the solution yet.
Again Alan Kay's famous quote comes in handy. I'm sure he would not agree on using his quote as a first principle, but the quote delivers so much substance that it's hard not to see it as a fundamental truth.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. (Alan Kay)
What derives from the quote is: Don't worry too much about how the work environment should be designed. Worry about who designs the work environment.
What you have to do is give the design process room. This requires putting empathic people in charge. You thus should let women design the work environment. And you have to let women design it who are developers themselves. Indeed, I mean that you should let female developers not only work on software development but to also put them in charge to set the design of a work environment fitting their lives’ circumstances.
It’s an approach that puts the female developers in the center of the design and to go from there. This is contrary to the approach we mostly see today where everything pivots around work results. However, work results are -just like profits- the results of everything that comes before: If you need sales, you need a great product and this great product is designed and built by humans. If companies are built around humans who design, everything else will follow.
What female developers should look for
Excellent developers can work wherever they want and usually they choose very carefully whom they work for.
Female developers currently often remind me of the first female participant of the Boston marathon runner Kathrine Switzer as a numbered entry. During her run, a race official named Jock Semple attempted to stop her. He was stopped by Switzer's boyfriend, Thomas Miller, who was running with her, and she completed the race.
(Photo: Boston Herald)
Of course, company officials will not stop females from coding, but in total the world created by adults still does so indirectly.
Like Switzer, female coders should pick a company or startup to work for that shows humans who pro-actively design a work environment which is almost aggressively pursuing diversity. I say almost because it should be at the edge of being aggressive. A certain sense of moderation is needed or will sooner or later be the cause of trouble. What you want to see is a stretch, not a burst.
How do you detect a company and humans who are actively designing a female-friendly work environment? All lot of companies claim to increase the ratio of female workers. What they don’t say is more important than what they say. There are some outstanding thought leaders who work on the design of diversity. Thus the easiest way to find them is by looking at their deeds, not words.
For instance, in the US, Y Combinator, has the highest number of investments in female founded startups in the first quarter of 2018. If I would be a female developer I would apply there for funding or work. (Please note other than being an Alumni of the Founder Track of the Startup School of Y Combinator I am not affiliated with the company).
Outlook
At CodeDoor we help underrepresented females to learn how to code, build amazing products, find a fulfilling job or start a company. We and the partners we work with want to see female coders succeed. In the next months we are offering scholarships in particular to females who want to learn how to code and build great products. Please apply at CodeDoor.org.
Happy to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to reach out: karan@codedoor.org
Photo credits mentioned below the images. Thanks to Burst and to for the header image and New Old Stock for the Basketball image.