Why are there so many boys and so few girls in the faculties of programming?

Do you know that today, among graduates of technical universities, according to one version, 40% are female students, and according to another, 25%.

According to annual surveys in IT, 16% of girls work as ordinary professionals. Only 2% of IT girls work as engineers: DevOps, system administrator, software engineer.

Imagine! For example, a typical group of the Applied Mathematics Faculty consists of 20 students. According to the most pessimistic data, there are 5 girls in the group, and 5 such groups in the faculty. Only one (!) of them will work in the specialty. The rest will go to manage projects, test, and even engage in sales.

If we analyze the columns from women in IT forums, it becomes obvious that only those who are passionate about engineering and are ready to fight for their right to do what they want can build a career under the pressure of stereotypes. Those for whom work is only work, and not the most important thing in life, follow the path of least resistance and do what is easier. For example, why should you hang out and communicate with male engineers who for some time actively “check” your knowledge, which you are not comfortable working with?

However, whether this is the case or not and what are the causes of this phenomenon? Pro-Papers experts took it upon themselves to discover and here is what they learned.

Men’s intellectual superiority was not disputed until the beginning of the 20th century, when psychologist Lewis Terman experimentally proved that average IQ does not differ significantly between boys and girls. However, with intelligence, not everything is so simple, because it is not a one-dimensional characteristic. Terman noted that the boys were much better at solving tasks in arithmetic, and the girls were better at understanding text. It is difficult to say which type of intellectual abilities is most important for programmers.

It is also possible that the difference which is biologically determined is not in abilities, but in inclinations. Given the proven biologically determined differences in many other aspects of the behavior of men and women, this is not so incredible. In any case, among those women activists with whose opinions we are familiar, this version is not popular. Relying on their opinion, the small number of women in information technology is caused by indoctrination and discrimination.

The fact that there still exist traditionally male and female professions, even in developed societies is no secret to anyone. Although the profession of a programmer has no centuries-old history, stereotypes common to all engineers may well apply to it. However, it is impossible to explain by indoctrination, why the proportion of women in the adjacent profession of tester is much higher than in programming.

As for discrimination, polls show that the reason for the absence of a large number of girls in the IT field is not a discrimination at all.

The reason is most likely a greater level of girls socialization. The reclusive-botan lifestyle is just intuitive to them. Girls are more interested in ceremonies, uniforms, travel, social connections, status, welfare, culture and similar subjects, and not in some kind of framework for which version does not work or at what speed two black holes rotated before the merge. That is, girls have a more practical, mundane view of life, and do not live anywhere in the abstract-virtual world of ideologies, dreams, and fantasies. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions and there are as many talented and capable individual girls working in IT as men.

However, often girls argue the rejection of the idea of learning in the faculty of programming, citing certain external factors. For example, immersion in a profession can lead to isolation and divergence of interests with relatives, as a result, problems in communication. Many relatives consider it not a female profession and therefore that a girl bites off more than she can chew, and the character undergoes a deformation - the behavior is more similar to the behaviour of a man. Moreover, taking into account such social pressure, parents often disapprove of such a choice of profession, they want their girl to go to school as a teacher. At university, some teachers afford themselves to expressly say that even a bear can be taught programming, but not a woman.

All this provokes internal resistance for girls and as a result, it is difficult for them to make a decision on choosing this path, since this is the male profession (as everyone thinks). As a result, even if everything is easy, girls always have doubts that programming is not for them.

What needs to be done to change the situation?

Probably, it may be worth stopping to impose on girls the idea that girls don't understand math and computers. Perhaps this is what will increase the number of girls who initially want to learn to be a programmer, then the percentage of girls programmers will increase. This is partly the reason for the difference in salary for the same skills. The better you assess yourself, the bigger reward you get.

A girl programmer is not a sensation, it is a phenomenon that has not yet become the norm. A programmer is a profession in which there is indeed some kind of gender discrimination. This must be fought. A skeptical society can interfere with the fulfillment of a dream. Just imagine how many talents die because of other people's prejudices!

And finally, we would like to remind you that the first programmer in the world was a woman, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the great English poet James Byron. She gained fame thanks to the description of the computer, the project of which was developed by Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace compiled the world's first program (for this device). The terms "Cycle" and "Working Cell" were introduced by her.