| |


Contact Alex Konrad
Tech 28,476 views

These Programming Languages Have The Most (And Fewest) Female Coders

The tech industry has a massive shortage of qualified computer programmers–to the degree that some argue a college degree isn’t even necessary to get a top job in the field anymore. The shortage is even worse when you look past the stereotypical coder, a white male. But as tech companies disclose their diversity–or lack thereof–in an effort to hire a more diverse workforce by gender and race, they face an additional difficulty–newer programming languages may shrink the talent pool pool even more.

The need for a more diverse workforce has led to some important discussion at almost every tech company, but for this post, let’s only look at the relative scarcity of women in technical roles.

At Google Google, 17% of technical jobs are held by women. At Facebook and Yahoo Yahoo, it’s just 15%. Salesforce.com's Salesforce.com's and Tuesday’s new stats from Apple put both companies at 20%. At eBay, the percentage of women in tech roles is 24%.

If those percentages look low, the reality is that the talent pool appears to be even lower. Based on recruitment data from startup Entelo, the companies appear to be actually hiring proportionally more women per qualified candidate than men. For popular programming languages like Javascript, less than 10% of the prospective job candidates Entelo is able to pick up on the Internet are women, below those company-wide rates.

Entelo works with companies like Box, ESPN, Facebook and GitHub on recruitment, using an algorithm to help find qualified candidates who also can contribute to a more diverse workplace. The company does that by picking up on signifiers like sorority affiliations, historically black college alma maters and other data points that can help build an anonymous profile of the applicant, says CEO Jon Bischke. (The company told my colleague George Anders in April that other filters for skill sets mean that it doesn’t violate hiring discrimination laws by favoring certain applicants.)

Entelo checked the 10 most in-demand programming languages and skills in its database for their gender proportion and the size of each talent pool overall. Here’s what it found:

Top 10 Searched Skills By Gender

  Search Rank   Skill   % Male   % Female   Pool Size Rank
1 Javascript 92.4 7.6 3
2 Ruby 94.0 6.0 9
3 Java 91.0 9.0 2
4 Python 94.0 6.0 8
5 Cloud computing 92.2 7.8 10
6 MySQL 85.6 14.4 1
7 Linux 92.5 7.5 4
8 XML 89.6 10.4 7
9 PHP 92.9 7.1 6
10 Project Management   76.4 23.6 5


The data suggests that newer programming languages like Ruby on Rails and Python are matched to a more overwhelmingly male job candidate base. Javascript and Java, two of the most popular languages for any development work, aren’t much more balanced, with female candidates qualifying at less than 10% for each.

The percentage of women candidates is highest for open-source database system MySQL and for project management, which isn’t a language so much as it is software to manage the planning and execution of development projects. Only within project management do women approach even 1/4 of the available hires in Entelo’s searches.

And where there are the most women per candidate, there are also a lot of applicants. MySQL has the largest pool of qualified programmers of any skill overall; project management is fifth. So while there are more women to men in those areas, there are also a lot of people to consider.

A few cautions on the data: first, many developers are proficient in multiple languages, notes Entelo’s VP of Marketing Kyle Paice, meaning that some overlap in the numbers is inevitable, though the overlap’s potentially more visible in the more common languages like MySQL also including one with fewer women. And the jobs that these applicants ultimately apply for and accept seldom are broken down just by language. They may require certain skills like Ruby, but the titles are often more like “Senior Engineer” or “Systems Engineer.”

Entelo’s confident that its data shows that there’s an even greater need for women with knowledge of new code programs. “There are tons of companies out there wh oare looking to hire engineers skilled in Python. They’re also looking to hire women,” says Paice. “There aren’t nearly enough Python and Ruby devs to fill all these spots, let alone females with those skills. If a woman fits both qualifications, her salary would be through the roof (hypothetically) based on the simple laws of supply and demand.”

The companies who’ve released their workforce diversity numbers above are working on the problem of that limited supply, of course–they can see the issue just walking through their development teams. But initiatives like Facebook’s in education and Google’s Made With Code project will take years to nurture the right talent. In a recent conversation with Suzanne DiBianca, executive director of the Salesforce Foundation, I asked what multi-year projects the foundation was focusing on with Salesforce’s philanthropic money, time and products. ”Our multi-year initiatives are focused around education, and they most have been,” she said.

There are a slew of non-profits looking to improve these numbers as well, starting at the beginning of the pipeline by encouraging girls and ethnic minority students to pursue their education in STEM, such as Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code. DonorsChoose.org is partnering with Google on Made With Code to also include rewards for classroom teachers who work to train their students to code through Khan Academy and Codecademy.

The push to get girls to code is widespread. But it could perhaps be more focused on where coding trends are going, instead of just the tried and true. One Silicon Valley executive I spoke to recently made the argument that older programming languages may have more diverse practitioners across genders and ethnicity because the big training grounds at giants like Microsoft or Yahoo produce large numbers of technical alumni who’ve been brought up on older, more established languages in those large environments, instead of through small teams working with newer languages like Ruby. Entelo’s data suggests that efforts to train more women to code should focus on the newer, more in-demand skills where the gap is at its most severe.

Improving the numbers won’t happen overnight, but it may help the tech community to know where to direct its training.



Post Your Comment

Please or sign up to comment.


  • Pamela Fox Pamela Fox 4 months ago

    I’m Pamela, and I teach programming on Khan Academy. We teach JavaScript, one of the top languages you mentioned, and thanks to the DonorsChoose.org program that you mentioned, we had 2000 female high schoolers go through our entire JS 101 curriculum in the course of a few months.

    I also teach for GirlDevelopIt SF, which trains adult women, and our curriculum is very much focused on JavaScript. You can see it here: http://www.teaching-materials.org/
    We’ve had several students go on to full-time frontend engineering roles.

    A lot of the alternative learning techniques are teaching these newer languages- both the online like KA, Codecademy, Treehouse, and the in-person academies like Hackbright, HackReactor, App Academy. It’s often the high schools and colleges that are teaching the older languages, either because they have to (the AP CS exam is still in Java) or because they’re using older curriculum. Things are changing there (Python is now the #1 language choice of CS1, and there are 2 new AP CS syllabi), but much more needs to change, so that the people graduating from there are more equipped for modern engineering jobs.