Column by Rafael Varela @Le Miroir des sciencesRadio RKS]I’d like to take advantage of our guests being here to reflect on his mission and talk about gender equality, particularly in a very technical profession: computer programming.
And why in this sector?
Information technology is of particular interest to me because the proportion of female “software developers” has fallen sharply in recent years…despite an outpouring of public policies in favor of gender equality in the digital professions.
According to Women @ Numerical, the share of women in programming professions is only 15% in France… and it has halved for 30 years!
If we look at this percentage at the student level, the percentage of women who are currently pursuing studies in computer science, this number is lower: only 10% of women.
This disparity, of course, depends on the country. And it is still very surprising to see that in India, for example, the proportion of females in computer science is around 40%, which is higher than in Western countries. In Saudi Arabia, women made up nearly 60% of computer science students in public universities in 2014. It is curious because these countries are traditionally very conservative and discriminatory against women.
Are these differences historical in Western countries?
It is important to note that it was not always this way. In fact, women were the origin of programming: more than 200 years ago, in 1843, the British Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program on one of the computer’s predecessors. In the 1950s, American Grace Hopper developed the first computer cipher interpreter (…).
Moreover, in the 1950s, half of the workforce in the IT sector was women. And in the 1980s, 40% of computer science degrees were awarded to women in Europe and the United States.
The reasons for this decline?
Several theories attempt to explain this phenomenon.
Some make no sense: For example, in 2017, a Google employee circulated a letter in which he attributed these discrepancies to the biological differences inherent in male and female brains. But if that were the case, we would meet the same percentages everywhere in the world. The numbers just announced show otherwise.
Other theories are more serious and question the societal aspects of Western countries, for example (, geek stereotype, weird type, introverted and extra-group… characteristics that men more easily tolerate). There is also talk of the transformative role of the personal computer, which emerged in the mid-1980s as the personal computer markedly changed the way and time children learned programming. In homes, whether as a toy or as a tool, boys were more exposed to computers than girls (…) Before that, all students who entered college were generally new to programming (equally).
Today, it is estimated that it will take us more than 12 years to restore gender parity in digital technology, while employment in this sector is growing 2.5 times faster than other sectors.
to conclude
The message I would like to leave with you on Saturday morning is that this underrepresentation of women in the digital professions is fairly recent and not the result of male merit, but rather the result of a combination of behavioral factors that alienate women in the IT field. And behavioral aspects we can change!
I’d like to finish by talking about the famous Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr. An inventor in her spare time, she developed in 1941 a secure encryption system whose concept is used today in GPS, WIFI, mobile communications, etc. She was also voted as the most beautiful woman in the world.
She said that Any woman can look glamorous. Just stand still and look like an idiot‘It was definitely nothing Foolish and glamorous… he was his genius!
