Why women are better at coding than men

Research has found that code written by women has a higher approval rating than that written by men – but only if their gender is not identifiable. US researchers analysed almost 1.4 million users of the online code-sharing service GitHub, and found that pull requests – or suggested code changes – made by women on the service were more likely to be accepted than those by men. Despite these findings, the lack of gender diversity within the web and tech industry is still a huge problem; in 2015, it was revealed that just 16% of Facebook’s tech staff were women, and only 30% of Google’s tech staff. By 2017 this had jumped to 35% at Facebook but only crept up to 31% at Google.

In this small percentage of females, there are a select few who use their platform for change, encouraging the next generation of female coders and helping other organisations to understand the importance of diversity within the workplace. Anne-Marie Imafidon is the co-founder of Stemettes – an award-winning social enterprise that’s inspiring the next generation of females to take on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) roles via a series of events and opportunities. She argues that girls need to be encouraged to explore these male-dominated subjects even before school begins.

“Look at the toys we get for boys and the toys we get for girls – girls are told to play house or play with Barbie, whereas boys are taught to build stuff and create… bigger, better, faster,” she explains. “It’s also in the media that they’re consuming and the characters that are portrayed in films. There are so many places where you can lay the blame that it’s hard to know where to start.”

Noticing a lack of gender diversity during a US conference, Imafidon learnt that the number of women embarking on computer science study had been in steady decline for almost 30 years. “I initially thought it was just a problem in the US, but once I got back to the UK and did some more reading, I realised that it has been shrinking year on year,” she continues. “I don’t want to be in a shrinking minority; it’s the 21st century, technology is everywhere – that fact that it is how it is, is criminal.”

For every male studying computing at AS-level in 2013/2014, there were just 0.09 females. And recent UCAS figures show that only 3,560 female students started computer science university courses in 2015, compared to 22,380 male students, meaning that for every one woman studying computing, there are more than six men.

Once women embark on their tech-focused courses, it doesn’t mean the end of gender discrimination. Fellow Stemette Emma-Ashley Liles is a software developer, currently penning a book entitled A Teenager’s Guide to Software Development. During her time at university, she found she had to change the way she put herself across in order to fit in with her fellow students. “I noticed the lack of diversity the second I walked into my first lecture. I was wearing a little pink dress and it was like 200 eyes just staring at me,” she says. “The other girls were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, so I did have to change myself a little bit. Less make-up. Less pink. I definitely felt the pressure to do that.”

Commenting on this recent research of women writing better-quality code, Liles argues that it still stems from gender discrimination and the pressure on women to prove themselves among the men. “I know that I’m usually a little more nervous of submitting poor requests, so I’ll spend a lot more time on it. I imagine [that] some of that percentage is made up of women who have spent more time on it – they’re a little bit more nervous; they know that it has to be good. They’re a bearer of the gender bias,” she says. “It’s sort of survival of the fittest; we’re probably as good as each other. It’s just the gender biases themselves that are causing a result like that.”

This research should make employers realise they’re missing out on potential talent, but Imafidon argues that making coding unidentifiable by gender in the workplace is an almost impossible task. “We’re really lucky that we’re able to look at code and de-gender it, let’s say in analysing it, but you’re not able to do that in real life, in meetings, and when people are making big decisions,” she says. “It’s one thing to remove gender from that codebase, but you can’t remove gender from everything else. You have to go to the root of the problem, which is those assumptions and those biases. It’s a proxy for a bigger issue, and there’s a lot more that we need to do.”

While there’s a long way to go in the way companies address their lack of gender diversity, there’s an encouraging agenda for the UK economy. In February of last year, the Lords select committee on digital skills – chaired by Baroness Morgan – urged the incoming government to secure the UK’s place as a global digital leader. The committee states that increasing the number of women working in IT could generate an extra £2.6 billion each year for the UK economy. Currently, women make up less than 30% of the ICT workforce, comprising around 20% of computer graduates and less than 10% of app developers.

“Companies have two roles to play – the low number is for two reasons,” continues Imafidon. “The crux of it is, there’s a problem attracting women and a diverse set of people to the industry. There’s also a problem with retention. Companies need to be attractive, but they also need to be focused on how they retain the women they already have, and the kind of environments and workplaces that allow these women to thrive.”

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Lead image copyright: Studiostoks

Digital designer, developer and founder of The Human Project, Nick Hurley, agrees, stating that the lack of diversity is a self-perpetuating cycle. He argues that it only gets worse as the next generation of venture capitalists – “the people who capitalism has appointed as the gatekeepers to the direction of the human race” – are created from a tiny privileged subset of society, sharing and perpetuating the same values as the generation of venture capitalists that went before. “This cycle will only continue unless we take an active role in encouraging diversity,” he urges. “We must provide more opportunities for women; we must actively listen and consider other people’s points of view; and we must stand by their side, understanding that our position of authority was not afforded to us by meritocracy, but by privilege.”

Thankfully, there are some companies already implementing initiatives to improve diversity in the workplace. Kathryn Finney is the founder and managing director of digitalundivided (DID), a social enterprise that finds, supports, and trains urban tech entrepreneurs. In 2013, she received the Champion of Change Award from the White House for her work increasing inclusion in the tech industry. In the early 2000s, she participated in one of the first accelerator programmes in New York, and found herself as the only black person and one of only four women in the room.

“I was never invited to pitch my idea,” she remembers. “A famous investor even told me (in front of everyone else) that my business model for a beauty box service ‘was excellent’ but he wouldn’t invest because he ‘didn’t do black women’. It made me wonder how many other diverse women founders had been rejected and actively discouraged from tech entrepreneurship. Shortly after that, I founded DID.” Finney offers some hopeful statistics, explaining that by increasing the transparency in demographics in respective companies, there’s more awareness around diversity.

“Pinterest hired its first head of diversity; Investor Jonathan Sposato committed to investing only in startups with women founders; and Kapor Capital asked over 50 of its funded companies to sign a diversity pledge called ‘Founders’ Commitment’. These are actions that would have been unthinkable a decade ago,” she enthuses. “However, we need to get more stakeholders involved. We can’t just wait for the Silicon Valley executives to decide on this; we have to look into other resources such as foundations, government-funded organisations, and even ourselves in order to keep the momentum going.”

Liles is also working with her company towards diversity improvement, implementing a code of conduct at its developer events, ensuring job adverts aren’t gender-biased and taking on junior developers to train them from the ground up. “Another thing is just talking about it and educating ourselves – calling out the unconscious biases. After a year or two, those who had those biases in the first place start calling it out themselves,” she says. “It’s kind of training them, which in turn creates a culture where you can actively talk about it.”

As encouraging as this seems, Finney argues that a lot of companies tend to be all talk and no action. “Many are happy to talk about diversity in the press, but few are willing to put their money where their mouths are,” she explains. “If more people actually translated their good words into tangible action, then we could have made even more strides in solving our problems in tech inclusion.”

While this call to action could see an increase in gender diversity in the coming years, it’s these startups – and women such as Liles, Finney and Imafidon – that are inspiring the next generation of coders, leaving the bigger companies in their wake. “It’s really easy to underestimate what young people can do,” Imafidon explains. “The girls just blow me completely out of the water at every event.”

“For me, one of my biggest [Stemettes] highlights was the outbox incubator project that we ran last summer. We took 115 girls from across Europe and brought them in 45 at a time, under one roof in south London,” she explains. “They were all working there and eating there and sleeping there. We had loads of different people coming in doing sessions on running their own tech startups; teaching them about money and fundraising and accounting, teaching them about marketing and product development.

“We did a demo day halfway through [where] 29 startups pitched, and the quality of the ideas and how much thought had gone into it… completely blew me away.” Concluding, she enthuses: “There’s so much we do to inspire these girls, when actually it’s them that are the inspirational ones – it just goes to show what happens when they’re given a platform.”

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