If you’ve been laboring under the misapprehension that 2014 is Year of the Horse, you’re wrong. It’s actually Year of the Code. The government are putting £500,000 into plans to train teachers to show children how to build apps and websites (aided by an extra £120,000 from Google), and a couple of weeks ago, Prince Andrew became the first member of the royal family to write some code.
But why should you care? Coding is an almost exclusively male industry (just 17% of tech jobs in the UK are held by women), so it’s probably not for you - right? Well, obviously we’re going to say wrong. We don’t know why there are no female coders (although we could hazard a guess that the perception that tech roles, and science-based degrees are ‘not for girls’ doesn’t help), but we do know that there’s no good reason why such a lucrative, booming industry should be the preserve of all the menfolk.
The government and industry bosses have started to work out that encouraging more young women to get involved in the tech industry is a win/win situation. More women will develop invaluable skills and become part of one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, and the UK will develop more home-grown girl talent (starting last week with a beginner’s coding session for women run by digital training company Decoded and attended by Lily Cole). But what’s it really like to be a girl coder?
Renata Jegereva is a coder at asos.com. She started studying computing as soon as she moved to the UK aged from Lithuania in her early 20s. ‘I absolutely love what I do, it’s the perfect balance of communicating with people and being quiet, a balance of working independently, while still being part of a team effort.’
But being one of a few girls on generally all-male teams has its challenges. ‘In the past when starting a new contract other developers are always a bit cautious, often repeating things twice, trying to go into explaining functional requirements a bit deeper than necessary, sometimes I get a bit easier less important work to “test” me on some contracts and people watching me carefully double-checking my work for a couple of days. In the end, I always end up being everyone’s “girl mate,” when all the men in the office tell me who they fancy over a pint, or what they’re planning to buy their wife for their wedding anniversary.’
Despite her enthusiasm for her work, Renata doesn’t know many other female coders – ‘I’ve only ever met four. One of them was a trader on the Stock Exchange before and found coding a lot less stressful. It’s not a very popular profession for women because people tend to think it’s a little boring and excluded. I’ve even heard women say they wouldn’t be able to type fast enough because their nails are too long. For the record, I had nail extensions for years when coding, and it’s never stood in my way.
Tellingly, as a contractor, Renata has never struggled to find work, and in fact, in such a male-dominated industry, being a female coder can offer you a unique USP.
Eve Lee, 25, set up her web development agency Digital Fairy two years ago, after she realised how old-fashioned a lot of communication and PR had become. She develops websites, apps and consults on social media strategy for brands including Miss Vogue, Bleach and Dominic Jones. As she explains, female web developers are a sought-after rarity (much like unicorns).
Our team tends to be mostly women – we’re quite a feminine agency, and we work with quite female-focused fashion brands, so it makes sense that our team are mostly women, but I’ve only ever come across one female coder. With her, I can explain how I want something to look without a mock up, and she just gets it, because she understands the brand – that’s not always the case with male coders I’ve worked with, who don’t necessarily get the brand as well.
The coder in question is Emma Winston, also 25, who got into web development after studying music at university. ‘I actually started learning HTML and CSS more than a decade ago, when I was a young teenager and web standards were very different to how they are now. I built a lot of hideous webpages with tiled sparkly backgrounds and scrolling marquee text.
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I had no idea what to do when I graduated and I knew I didn't want to be a music teacher, but I wanted to do something creative and not soulless. I enrolled on a diploma course in web design and web standards and immediately remembered why I'd loved building websites so much as a teen. Right now I'm working with Eve, building an online shop for a fashion label and it's really enjoyable work.
‘I am a designer as well as a front-end developer and I refuse to specialise in one over the other because for me they're inextricably linked; good design needs to be implemented well, and a well-constructed and accessible design needs to be built in an equally well-organised and accessible way. I like that I get to be both creative and logical, and that I get to make things that are useful to people.’
Like Renata, Emma hasn’t been on the receiving end off much overt sexism – but she does get faced with a fair amount of bemusement. ‘I work on my own a lot, often remotely, so the reality of it isn't always clear to me. At conferences and hackathons I am sometimes just plain surprised when I remember how few of us there are (it's kind of a jolt when you realise you're the only woman in the room!) though I think that is changing.
‘I have occasionally found that male developers automatically assume I'm just a designer and that I won't know how to implement stuff in the front-end of a site. That can be frustrating - just ask!’
For more information on the Year of the Code, and how to get into coding, visit Codeyear.com.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebecca_hol
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.