A man's world

Software development, at least coding, seems to be a man’s world. In all the years I am in this playing field, I met just one female colleague on a project, and that was back in 1999. Now I am in this community for one year and I ask myself the question if there are any female Xojo programmers among us. Just for the statistics ?

There are
A quick scan of the member list would show you

Beatrix
Julia
Julie

Don’t remember a Julie. Sometimes we got dubious names for my culture here. For example, Ilya seems a female name for us (as almost all finished in “a” and males finished in “o”) but its a male Russian name.

scan the user list and I think you’ll find a lot of names that are identifiable as “usually female names”

but it is definitely a male dominated profession

some professions are that way
some self select because they seek certain personality traits & they tend to be more pronounced or more common in one gender than the other

There ARE women in the Xojo community. I can think of a handful that have been to conferences recently and there are a few active female developers in these forums.

But like many STEM areas, it is overwhelmingly male. My wife (who is doing Xojo development, btw) has been working with local groups to get more women interested in STEM jobs. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (if you didn’t know).

if you would go to certain UG meetings (user group), like ATL Ruby (Atlanta Ruby users group), the room is packed every month (30+) and a good 40% are women. Some months it is a higher percentage. Go to Python or PHP UGs and the percentage is much lower. So there are women in STEM but they are selective on which groups they join.

I have a good friend who’s a math professor at the University of Georgia; his daughter is part of a organization called Girls Who Code, which encourages females to get into computer science and programming fields.

I think overall coding is dominated by males and I think Norman is right; however, there are many females who are historic coders. Not because they are male-females, but there are female traits that lend themselves to coding and infrequently (but still commonly) and woman grabs onto that and runs with it. It’s a a great thing.

One of my favorites on this is women doing crypto-analysis during WW II; see here: http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/wwii/sharing_the_burden.pdf

This is interesting because at times I managed programmers and QA teams for various companies. The programmers were, as observed, generally male while the QA engineers, including those developing test suites and harnesses, were predominately female.

And don’t forget we owe much to Ada Lovelace.

I think so… :wink:

I wouldnt claim anyone that works at UGA as a good friend… (I am a GaTech person :slight_smile: )

there is that one and several of organizations that promote females in the geek communities. Atlanta has a Geek Girls meetup (dont remember the actual name) that female geeks get together and social/help each other.

As a geek manager (as-in geeky manager and manager of geeks), over the years I have had the luck/honor of having a higher than average number of female employees. Personally I dont care about the gender, I care about the person. Now some organizations might not be as open minded.

Don’t forget me… this is Trisha on the forum using Richard, my hubby name.

I’m not your husband??

no… Richard Duke… Xojo license is to his name but i am using the Forum…

so many richard on the forum… have to be careful.

Not sure I’d rave about something called “Gaaaaa Tech!”
Sound more like something to run away from :stuck_out_tongue:

One of my clients has over 150 in-house software developers. At least a third of them are women. Most of those women are from Russia or India with the majority from Russia. They speak, read and write English as well as, if not better than, many natural born citizens of the U.S.

There are female developers at other client sites but the percentages are much lower. Software development in the U.S. is indeed a man’s world.

To be even more specific, it is a white man’s world. Of the many software developers I’ve met in the U.S., almost all are white males.

It would be nice to have much greater diversity in the U.S. software developer community. :slight_smile:

and we of course must mention Admiral Grace Hopper (US Navy Ret.)

Margaret Thatcher.

Florence Nightingale.