Women Who Code has been around for more than a decade, longer than the entirety of my career in software and tech, and certainly longer than DEV has been around. It was an organization that bridged people together, offered opportunities to folks who could not afford otherwise, and had the important mission of empowering women to excel in tech careers.
To me, the organization has been an industry staple, and in learning of its shut down, I’m realizing that the existence of Women Who Code has also been a great mental comfort.
This past International Women’s Month, we ran WeCoded, our annual celebration of gender equity in software development on DEV. Participation has been on an ever-decline since “the early days” when Women’s Marches were taking over headlines across the world. This year, a majority of our WeCoded posts were full of frustration and exhaustion.
The software industry has experienced some pretty intense highs and lows the last couple of years, and with that, it has felt like the dialogue around gender equity and inclusivity have gone out the door. Big companies don’t seem to be allocating budget towards DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) efforts anymore, and the underrepresented groups of people who are impacted are understandably too tired to physically or emotionally rally.
As a founder, I get to operate from a position of power – my ideas and comments are taken seriously by my team, by default. I have the privilege of experiencing equity in the workplace as my norm, and when I don’t, there are no barriers in the way for me to speak up and be heard.
But when I’m not directly working with my team, I have a completely different experience. People assume all sorts of things about me just by looking at me, and even after mentioning that I know how to code, that I work in tech, that I run a community for software developers, etc, etc, oftentimes I’m dismissed and boxed out of conversations between The Men. Even very progressive men who self-identify as feminists have unintentionally boxed me out. Looking at you, Mr. Computer Science Professor…
Whether on the playground or at a tech conference, I have to fight for men to recognize my worth by flaunting and sticking my accomplishments in their face in a very unnatural way. These interactions pain and enrage me, and are reminders of what most women and underrepresented people endure (via microaggressions, glass ceilings, etc) in their daily lives at work.
Women Who Code shutting down really scares me. We’re losing a safe place for camaraderie, for venting, for education, for mentorship, for motivation, for solidarity. I’m not privy to any details but the general concept that this long-time nonprofit that relied on donations from an overall prosperous tech sector, couldn’t make it, is alarming and discouraging. It’s a signal of our industry’s overall lack of desire towards making forward progress. It feels like my fears of stagnancy and going backwards in time is being confirmed, and that we can’t stop this hemorrhaging of women leaving tech. If not for my position of power, I doubt I’d still be in tech myself.
After sitting with this news for a day, I’ve realized that the one thing I can “keep going” on is to continue supporting WeCoded on DEV. I was never a super active member of Women Who Code, yet I was immediately triggered and impacted by their dissolvement. Upon reflection, my only conclusion is that spaces for women and minorities to gather are really important. So despite diversity and inclusion not being ‘hot’ anymore, I’m going to make sure that WeCoded returns to DEV every year. Even if it’s just one brave person shouting into the void, I’ll do my best to make sure we elevate their voice.
If you haven’t already, please check out our collection of stories and advice:
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Thanks for reading <3
Top comments (32)
It is certainly not that there is no longer a need. Women remain as poorly treated in the industry today as ever. Other rather poorly treated groups are the disabled, and minorities. Much of it, in the US, at least in tech, comes from the cruel and hateful social constructs of Silicon Valley culture, from executives on down.
The more I do work elsewhere, removed from hateful people as far as can be, the greater joy I find and see. This includes at least greater diversity and openness to that other 50% of humanity that is so often excluded.
Agreed. I do think this problem comes from the execs who continue to be out of touch with how tech companies are supposed to work, treating them as dynamic networks of talented individuals, rather than rigid corporate hierarchies. We need more execs who have actually "worked the line", creating code, running pipelines, maintaining systems, etc. especially those who have worked with a variety of projects and people.
I really like your takeaway. I am sad to hear that Woman Who Code is shutting down. As a meetup organizer it's a lot of work. All I can say is if there is a group you care about and want to see keep going, please get involved with time or resources.
Oh my God... I am so blown away an saddened by this because I was just following a challenge for 100 Days of Code. It was a great space and I networked with many women that I've become friends with.
I found that Women Who Code was a space where we could learn and vent about our daily interactions we have as programmers. Sucks to see it go.
Really well said, Jess. Last week's announcement set me back on my heels as well. If there is anything we can do at Innovation Women to help, let me know.
My son wanted to be in a coding group so bad, the only coding group offered at his high school was “girls who code” and the school refused to let him start a coding group for boys or even just a coding group for anyone
Maybe let’s just stop dividing people.
This is a really destructive attitude to have.
There's countless structures that push girls and women away from tech hobbies and jobs, and there needs to be a correcting force to counteract this. Dedicating spaces specifically to this group is a good way to signal that women aren't just begrudgingly allowed in tech, that they aren't "girls with boy-hobbies", that it's just perfectly okay and normal.
Boys don't face this sort of discouragement; they don't get asked if they don't want a doll instead when they ask for a car toy, they don't look at the tech industry and see almost only people of the opposite gender, they don't join tech-oriented club/group in school and find themselves in a room full of girls rolling their eyes at them.
Having a boys only coding group is just a pointless idea.
Beyond that, if a school isn't able to provide some sort of coding group for boys and at the same time be inclusive to girls by giving them dedicated spaces, that's the school showing incompetence. It sucks for your son and I absolutely hope he gets the chance to have a coding group in the end to get into this amazing hobby with great job opportunities, but blaming that on girls and by extension women in tech is absurd.
This isn't a competition, and if someone is trying to make it one, they are the ones you need to say "no" to, instead of playing their game and attacking others who have done nothing wrong.
Talk about tone deaf.
It’s hilarious to say “boys don’t face this kind of barrier” as I’m sitting here telling you about a child that’s being denied participation in a coding group specifically because he’s a boy.
They won’t even let him start an all inclusive group.
Tone deaf?! Go take a look in the mirror. You come to a well written, retrospective article that lists several real life problems that very clearly show themselves in statistics, and attempt to discredit it by giving one personal story, which honestly could not be any less believable even if you ended it with "and then everyone clapped", and now you have the audacity to call me tone deaf?
Let's be completely honest here: Your story is made up, if it wasn't it would probably only be half the story, and eve if it was 100% the truth, it'd still be both statistically and logically irrelevant.
I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and addressing your story directly, because even if it isn't true, we can just as well talk about the morality of a hypothetical case, and it's still a problematic scenario. If you really want, we can have a discussion about what could be done in a case like this and how to make everyone's life better in the process.
But you don't seem to have any interest in actually discussing or improving anything. What are you here for? To derail the conversation? And we can go further: What have you even contributed on this platform? How come your profile is completely blank and the majority of your comments are here in this conversation? Are you even here to talk about tech, or did you just realise this platform values inclusivity and decided to start some arguments?
Go troll on a platform that values that kind of time-wasting red herring whataboutism if you can't have a proper conversation. This isn't the place.
I hear what you and @ozzythegiant are saying however, from my conversations with women in tech, especially those in junior roles, having a place where they feel safe and included is critical. Unfortunately, the wider tech ecosystem has not quite caught up yet and there are many places and groups where women and other underrepresented folks do not feel welcome or are actively, or due to unconscious bias, being excluded and ghosted.
In the world I want, we would all respect one another, celebrate our differences, and decide whether a role is fit for a person based on whether they fit the team culture and have the needed skills to contribute effectively. Where you live, how you choose to represent yourself, your age and everything else merely contribute to a richer and more diverse group of people building amazing things.
This also brings up another ongoing issue: the tech industry is heavily leaning in favor of senior devs. Nobody wants to train juniors at all. I don't think I've seen another industry where this type of problem is so noticable.
I get that managers don't want to risk training a junior to become proficient in a few months only for them to jump out when they see a better job offer, but something needs to be done to balance this situation.
This is a real problem, especially at the moment (April 2024) with the market being flooded with seniors due to all of the irresponsible layoffs happening at tech companies.
There is a big misconception about the possible risk of hiring junior developers. Very few developers want to job-hop. The biggest reasons are that there are little or no growth opportunities in the company, your work is not valued, the culture changes significantly, or there is not enough variety of problems to solve and little support for lateral movement within the company.
Suppose you ensure that your company is set up and has a culture where everyone grows together. In that case, where there is mutual support, and people are paid what they are worth irrespective of location, gender, etc., as these junior developers grow professionally, they are less likely to jump ship. There will always be some, but they were going to move on irrespectively.
I think Daniel Beck said it well in this short: youtube.com/shorts/wArHe5aRXnY
Yeah and it's kind of a hard thing to balance because, yes we would like to see women get opportunities to try out these fields and make in-roads but it's unfortunate that there are those that try to make a political stance out of it. These programs need not be so rigid in their approach. We just want those who have the talent and the potential to feel that they can make progress in those interests
I feel like this is a kind of a tone death strawman statement here. I think you have to understand that your son's situation is not the norm whereas women being excluded or experiencing disparity in the dev world is the norm. No one denies that your son is at a loss here. Still, most of us also understand that he will have a million other opportunities, including online groups that are already tailored to him, whereas women very often have to fit into spaces made with only men in mind or make their own.
Talk about tone deaf.
It’s hilarious to say “boys don’t face this kind of barrier” as I’m sitting here telling you about a child that’s being denied participation in a coding group specifically because he’s a boy.
They won’t even let him start an all inclusive group. So because he may have more opportunities down the road, he shouldn’t have the opportunity to participate for the 4 years he’s in school.
This whole form of reasoning is the problem.
You don’t cure division with more division
From my experience as a woman, I have been overlooked and my good observations and recommendations are typically undermined by men in my current industry of software development. Even a simple suggestion for adding a rolling log file appender to the software in case hardware goes down. I was told "use journalctl" and then another male that wasn't managing told me that was a fantastic idea. Its mostly men managers. They have big egos.
I think this is a problem with managers in general. Companies rarely value people for their quality-of-work by treating them as people, preferring instead to squeeze out every last drop of their soul as they can. The unusual company who truly values their employees prioritizes promoting their most productive worker, recognizing that, although they will take a hit in productivity from the worker no longer being at the job they are best at, the company gains something far more valuable: loyalty from the worker and satisfaction from the welcomed change-of-pace. Moreover, being so driven to be productive and thereby devoted to the company, this best-worker now-manager is likely to actually improve everyone else's productivity by getting things going and getting everyone just as invested as they are—an infection of loyalty. This is how loyalty has died in most companies and its the only organic way to regain it. Sadly, almost no company anywhere in the US does this.
I strongly disagree; I think the Peter Principle is a big problem that is mainly driven by an over-emphasis on hierarchical power as the only valid kind of growth.
We hammer it into people's heads that to gain control over others is to advance; to be promoted to a manager is success, and to keep doing the same job is stagnation if not failure.
What we need is to chill on this overly competitive view of work and accept that just doing what you're good at is fine, and that not everyone wants to or should want to effectively switch careers to become someone else's boss. Not everyone is good at it either.
This is specially bad considering how this competitive, authority-oriented career path perfectly appeals to the behaviours we drill into boys, while going completely against the behaviours we condition girls for. It's a toxic environment built to benefit competitivity at all cost.
You raise may good points and I do strongly agree the overemphasis on hierarchical progression is a plague in itself too.
But, how else other than hierarchical emphasis can someone hope to achieve better job security for themself and their family? Just trust that the company is all good and will look out for you and care for you? The higher up in a company you are, typically the further you have to fall down before you get booted out.
That's in itself a massive sign that the company structure is a lost cause. Realistically, a developer with 10 years of domain knowledge, understanding of systems and processes, etc. will be very expensive to fully replace; employers being careless about losing that sort of know-how is straight-up self-destructive.
They might do it because they can get away with it, but then they could also get away with doing that to management positions as well; at best those will rely on the same kind of knowledge and at worst they might be even more replaceable.
What it comes down is, again, a cultural problem that automatically assumes that management are the "important" roles and those who actually produce value are generally replaceable.
This is really sad news, we need more of these organizations, not less.
My wife was a developer who left the industry, and I counted that as a huge loss. I've also been annoyed by the fact that many of my female colleagues that were were talented and should've gotten very far always seem to get relegated to roles way below there talent and ambition. Supporting women in tech is something I feel strongly about.
If there isn't one already, maybe we should have a somewhere on Dev.to that lists orgs where people can get involved. Non-profits need volunteers and donations to survive, and much more to thrive, so what can the #wecoded community do to make sure announcements like these don't happen?
To anyone who still has questions, I found THIS post on linkedin showing an email that was sent out to
Women Who Codecommunity members. It provides clarity on intellectual property, trademark usage, digital/social media and moreThank you so much for expressing your feelings here better than I am able to, Jess. I too feel sad, exhausted, depressed, and a bit scared. Last year I said goodbye to Front-End Foxes which shut down perhaps for some of the same reasons - lack of funding, lack of volunteers, lack of community support, outright hostility from some quarters. I really hope there is a postmortem available at some point for WWC, because this abrupt shutdown feels really wrong in many ways. Let's continue to do the good work - the Society of Women Engineers has proven to be a beacon to me in my current role. Solidarity!
Recently having a stable job is "not hot anymore". For me the recent waves of mass layoffs by extremely profitable companies showed me that management in the industry no longer need to pretend: they never cared about traumas caused. They never cared about inclusion in the first place - and it wasn't a thing until the whole topic got simplified and boxed into several simple "diversity and inclusion programmes" and a list item on the recruiters' responsibility list ("hire me people, and hire them diversely").
In reality these were in the most cases low-effort, low-cost virtue signalling to avoid bad PR around the companies.
We need new types of tech companies which care about their employees, where fighting stereotypes and biases is part of culture, not stapled onto it.
After all, we have a common goal: great products require great code, great code has no gender, no heritage, no privilege, no disadvantage. Those who optimize for great code must also mercilessly axe stereotypes, biases and bullies in the workforce.
I'd like to say a few words on both sides of the argument.
As a disabled person (Autism) and savant (been a software developer writing real-word programs since I was 12), not being taken seriously and being boxed out of everything has been so common that its fundamentally ingrained in me. Currently 20 and still not-taken-seriously-as-ever, having the equivalent skillset of a typical 20 year software developer.
Being boxed-out is actually the reason why I got so much into programming, specifically open source software: it's the one place in life I've always been accepted and I'm valued exactly for my skills.
I think (pretty sure) the issue the author is addressing is with workplaces in software engineering and such, which is a very legitimate concern. Especially in the united states, women are certainly not taken as seriously as men in engineering circles, which is truly a travesty!
At the same time, I also have mixed feelings about organizations like Women who Code and other organizations getting people interested/invested in coding. On one hand, most of these types of organizations help things by getting more people interested and involved in coding. On the other hand, most of these types of organizations are heavily funded by Microsoft, Facebook, and other big names, and sometimes do more harm than good acting as a hiring funnel into these big companies to help them keep up their staff against obscene turn-overs, which is a travesty in itself as focusing on this goal prevents the people being "helped" from finding a community and where they belong, namely in the open source software community.
After seeing all the discussion, it truly is unfortunate that women are simply not getting enough opportunities to contribute to this industry. Without any political baggage, we do well to remember that computer programming has roots in the efforts of notable women such as Ada Lovelace, who invented the first programming language with the help of Charles Babbage, and Grace Hopper, who created the first compiler for COBOL. Don't give up! We can still certainly benefit from the marvelous insights that women can provide.
agreed
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