Yes, there are at least two developers who are women.
No, I don’t think the amount of female users has anything to do with that.
I’ve attended a fair share of CG conferences in my country (Russia). I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 of the attendees are women. In fact, women make the majority of participants in digital painting contests organized by Wacom there.
I really don’t know how people arrived at that number (25%) in the article. I’d say it’s an underestimation.
While at that, I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing, but it’s entirely normal here to be a female designer or photographer or animator and make a decent living. I mean, I live in a country that is traditionally associated with patriarchy, and yet there you are. When I hear how women are underrepresented in the industry in the West, it just blows my mind.
Reality is often shocking.
It’s a fact that teenage girls usually do not dream about being a developers whereas boys often do even if they have no idea what programming or source code actually is. In my country, if a kid does not go to a technical high school or the realistic branch of high school she/he probably does not learn what programming really is. In computer science class, they mainly learn how to use Excel etc.
I am a woman. I think I know what coding is. I whish I could fix this or that bug form time to time but I’d rather kill myself than code all day every day.
I am so glad that there so many women now that don’t let themself stop from becoming a developer. because there are plenty of women who enjoy that. even if you don’t.
At least here in the US, the youth do not seem at all bound by the ideas of gender roles or gender norms. Good for them!
I started coding, or rather, programming, when I was 12 years old. My mother came home with a 16kb Sinclair ZX-Spectrum one day, provided by the school where she worked. All teachers had to become familiar with computers. Within an hour I had typed in my first program and started hacking it to make prettier pictures.
Since then, I’ve always loved programming: in contrast with my parents and sister, if I told the computer to do something, it did something! Sometimes not what I thought I had told it, but that was fixable. Usually.
I never thought of studying computer science because it needs a passing grade in maths at high school, and didn’t even take maths (that was still possible back then, it isn’t anymore).
But when I graduated in comparative linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman language family, jobs were scarce, and I still liked coding, so I did a training for graduates without a good chance at a job (this was 1993), and after that I got a job as a software developer. Coding is lots of fun, and even after 38 years of programming, I still find it fun.
I know a lady who has a degree in computer science. She works in user support. I think I (a humanist) am better at using computers than her. She is interested in computer science but there are things that she is more interested in. She studied computer science because she wanted to get a good job easily. She told me that studying computer science was very difficult for her, and she thinks that developing software is very stressful, especially fixing bugs.
I studied humanities because I wanted to study something that I am really good at but I totally respect my friend’s choice.
From other people I heard that women are often software testers. A developer once told me that he never met a lady developer.
What about exceptions that confirm the rule?
In the companies I worked we had around 1 of 10 developers female. From my point of view they are not very different then male developers. By the way, I have never seen a developer that fits into the typical developer image. (Fat, pizza eating, coffee drinking and smoking.) What I can say, they all love fixing problems, creating stuff and hate bullshit talking or small talk.
Now too the female developers I know:
And from my personal view all of them are good looking and communicative and afaik like the job.
Why the facepalm? We are talking about preconceptions and one is that developer are fat and ugly and that’s some thing I can’t confirm.
This is getting a little off the rails. Perceived traits about the perceived sex of developers you know amounts to anicidotal evidence.
Can we stop please?
I suppose that I should have written something more complete. It is not about the argument about preconceptions, but women tend to be judged by their appearance much more than men, so talking about a diversity of developers to then end making a comment on how their are good looking to you, kinda defeats the whole point.
I second @paperdigits suggestion to stop this line of discussion, as the misinformationamd personal biases are piling up too quickly.
Well I am probably just too old. Maybe the young chicks are all into coding nowadays. Maybe if I were 10 years younger I would have considered studying computer science or something similar. We did not even have a computer at home when I went to school.
I bet you’re younger than I am 