Women in Coding - We need YOU!!

Hey again, parents and coders!

This week at The Code Zone we’ve been celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science which was on Tuesday. There are so many women and girls in The Code Zone who help keep our clubs running, or are members themselves making amazing games! We’re always super proud of them, and so we figured it was our duty this week to have a deeper dive into women in the coding industry, to see both how important they are and how we can encourage more women and girls to GET CODING!

The Numbers

To get an understanding of how important women are in the coding industry, the best place to start is by looking at the numbers of women in both coding and STEM fields. Typically, these areas have been considered male-dominated fields, and many women and girls feel quite frightened to enter into such an unfamiliar, and sadly sometimes unwelcoming environment. However, thankfully over recent years we’ve seen a steady increase in women pushing past stereotypes and showing the world just how clever, efficient, and valuable they are in these industries!

• In 2022, the ONS (Office for National Statistics) determined that approximately 18.17% of people working as programmers, data analysts, and software developers are women. The organisation STEM Women, dedicated to encouraging more women into the STEM workforce, found that in 2023 the percentage of women in the STEM workforce was 26%, and in 2022 around 24% of computer science graduates were women.

Of course, these percentages can feel quite disappointing – they’re perhaps nowhere near as high as you might expect, and they’re certainly lower than we’d like! However, as always, it’s important to appreciate the progress we’ve made in recent years. In fact, these percentages (while we’ll keep driving to increase them) are reason to celebrate – we’re happy to say that the overall rate of women in the STEM and computer science workforce and education has increased steadily over the past decades, and as time goes on, we expect it will grow even more. Here's some stats from almost ten years ago to show how far women and girls in coding have come:

• In 2015, only 15% of computer science graduates were women, and the percentage of women in the STEM workforce was 21% in 2016, according to STEM Women.

Crikey! Thank goodness we’ve seen a steady increase since then, eh? But sadly, the statistics do overall show that we still have a long way to go with getting more women into coding and STEM in general – hopefully we can be inspired by the increases we’ve seen, and keep pushing for more!

How can we get more women and girls into Coding?

Now, you might be thinking to yourself – well, it’s all well and good saying we need more women in coding, but how are we actually going to do anything to achieve it?

And to that I say – I like your style! That’s exactly what others are thinking too, and thankfully many organisations have made efforts to increase those numbers across the board. It doesn’t take much to make at least a little difference, though there are some very committed folks who are making big strides.

For instance, the UK-based organisation ‘Code First Girls’ offers entirely FREE coding courses to women globally, to date having delivered a whopping £75 MILLION worth of tech education, and overall having taught more women to code than all the UK university undergraduate courses… multiplied by THREE! Talk about a job well done! It’s a fantastic service to women and girls everywhere, and it makes it far easier for them to transfer into STEM jobs and break the stereotypical barriers in their way. Code First Girls even helps the women connect with employers to smooth the process.

Other organisations of note include the Stemettes, who are a non-profit that host events and workshops as well as offering plentiful advice to guide women to the STEM roles of their dreams – they do a fantastic job partnering with companies too, to help educate and encourage everyone in the industry on the importance of women in their workplace.

These are obviously just a few specific examples, but thankfully all over the industry people are making efforts to be more inclusive towards women and girls. While there’s still a lot of work to do, we’re going in the right direction.

What about The Code Zone?

Here at The Code Zone, we are absolutely committed to helping ensure women and girls are equally represented in coding. After all, so many of our mentors and staff are women – we’d be completely lost without them! In fact, that’s one of the ways we love to make a difference towards that goal – by demonstrating to children through our mentors that women and girls can code (and not only that, but code amazingly!), we help educate young people of all genders that there are no barriers or advantages that should stand in their way – clearly, we all have a part to play! Not only that, but we are also acutely aware of how important it is to encourage people to break stereotypes and become accepting to women in STEM from a young age, before it becomes trickier to break the anxieties and intolerance that often prevent equal opportunities in the workplace. When both young boys and girls recognise that girls are just as capable and welcome in our clubs, it makes a real grassroots difference.

We’re always striving to get more girls involved with our clubs and making awesome games – we’ve got some amazing members of all genders, and they all deserve the same chance to learn code, show off their games, and of course earn some sweet XP points. And so, consider this blog a broadcast to all the girls of the world – we need YOU!