HackerRank Data Reveals Gender Gap for Learning to Code is Shrinking; Hiring Managers Can Accelerate Change

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The stereotype of software developers being men in hoodies is slowly, but surely, changing. New research drawing from HackerRank's community of more than 3.4 million developers, explores the latest trends in education, training, and technical focus for women in software engineering.

The HackerRank Women in Tech report, based on a survey of over 14,000 professional software developers, including nearly 2,000 women, shows a clear opportunity for hiring managers to drive change in creating a more equal field. Key findings include:

• The gender gap for when developers learn to code is shrinking. By the time students enroll in Computer Science 101 today, young men and women are more likely to start on equal footing than older generations. More specifically, there was a 20 percentage point gap between men and women over the age of 35 who started coding before 16 years old. Today that gap has shrunk down to just seven percentage points.
  
  Additionally, women under the age of 25 today are 33 percent more likely to study computer science compared with women born before 1983. In fact, today, women represent the highest number of new CS grads and junior developers (53 percent) entering the workforce.

• Women have the domain knowledge employers want. On average, women report they most commonly know Java (69 percent), JavaScript (63 percent), C (61 percent), C++ (53 percent), and Python (45 percent). Across front-end and back-end, women are developing expertise in the top programming languages that employers need. They are also working in the same industries as men, which are predominantly technology and finance (53.2 percent and 10.7 percent, respectively).

• But women are still more likely to hold junior positions. Despite the above findings, women are still far more likely to hold junior level positions, regardless of age. Today, 20 percent of women over 35 are still in junior roles — put another way, women over 35 years old are 3.5 times more likely to be in junior roles than their male counterparts.

"Managers have a clear-cut opportunity to drive change for future generations of developers," says Gayle Laakmann McDowell, founder and CEO of CareerCup. "It starts with raising awareness around the unconscious biases that impact hiring decisions. But it's also about creating workplaces and implementing policies that are inclusive and give women clear pathways to grow in their careers and become leaders."

The full report detailing these and other findings is available here. Additionally, HackerRank has open sourced its data on Kaggle, which is the largest community of data scientists. Anyone can find the full dataset an discover additional insights here.

About HackerRank
HackerRank is a technical hiring platform that helps businesses evaluate software developers based on skill. Over 1,000 customers across all industries, including 5 out of the top 8 commercial bank institutions in the U.S. and 4 of the top 7 retail companies, rely on HackerRank's automated skills assessments to evaluate and hire technical talent from around the world. More than 3.4 million developers (over 10 percent of the global developer population) trust HackerRank to learn and practice coding. On average, HackerRank powers one challenge every 15 seconds in over 35 programming languages. For more information, visit www.hackerrank.com.

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SOURCE HackerRank

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