Originally published in The New Stack Update.
No matter how you look at gender, the percentage of women in IT varies depending on the study. Yet, in some ways, it doesn’t matter if the figure is 5 percent or 25 percent, the statistic still obscure hard truths. For example, when women join a programming team, they often end up taking on project management responsibilities. While important, these roles keep a developer from focusing on more tech-specific expertise that will help them get promoted. Stack Overflow’s analysis of its users goes beyond specific job role and looks at what languages and skills men and woman are using. Men are more than 50 percent more likely to be using cutting edge languages like Rust and F#. Women are more than 50 percent more likely to use Salesforce. This tidbit may indicate that some women are coming to programming from a non-traditional background — in other words, they were using the CRM and learned to code to solve specific problems. Interestingly, women are also more likely to use Matlab, R and Hadoop. These languages are more likely to be used for data science, which should be positive – that’s a growing field, which many women get exposed to in graduate programs not associated with computer science. Yet, the glass is not half full even here. Python, not R, pays more, and O’Reilly’s 2016 Data Science Salary Survey reports that men on average get paid more than women.
