In Part 1, we explored gender demographics among respondents of multiple surveys and the audiences of popular YouTubers, and saw that ratios of over 90% men were the norm.
Today in Part 2, we'll take a look at some other platforms and creators that are actually managing to be more inclusive – and see what they're doing differently.
Learning Platforms
Like we saw in Part 1, this article was prompted by noticing that Scrimba was an outlier in the survey results, with a much higher proportion of women users than similar platforms.
Because Scrimba used a special tracking tag when telling their members about the survey, I was also able to confirm that 23% of the respondents who came from Scrimba identify as women.
I reached out to Scrimba CEO Per Harald Borgen to get more data and ensure this result wasn't a fluke, and an ad-hoc poll conducted within the Scrimba platform directly revealed the same thing:
This was a pleasant surprise for Per. I asked if this was the result of a concerted effort or just a happy accident:
We have actively made our design and branding inclusive, but I wasn't aware of it having had this much impact before the State of JS survey.
This case study about the Scrimba redesign also outlines the team's thoughts about inclusivity at a design and branding level, and Per also told me they promote inclusivity through initiatives such as actively recruiting women as course creators and highlighting women's success stories.
But Scrimba is not the only platform that actively tries to be more inclusive. freeCodeCamp is a free platform with even more impressive demographics, with 36% female visitors:
Once again, this is the result of a concerted effort to be more inclusive. As freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson told me:
Visitors to freeCodeCamp.org used to be about 20% female when we first started. That proportion has grown over the years, and for the year of 2022, was 36.2%.
We work very hard to cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable. That means a lot of moderation, and proactively seeking out feedback.
And while Josh Comeau didn't have hard stats to share, I found echoes of what both Per and Quincy told me in his approach to inclusivity:
I have been intentional about trying to keep the branding really friendly; I want the community I build to be really welcoming and inclusive.
There have been times where I've wondered if I'm maybe losing some people with the design [of the site]. But yeah, I figure I'd rather have a slightly smaller community of like-minded folks, rather than a larger one that isn't as friendly and empathetic.
The Importance of Messaging
This confirmed my own impression of Josh's approach. As an example, his latest course is entitled The Joy of React, and the word “joy” immediately struck me as much more inclusive than the typical naming schemes for programming courses – to the point where it almost seems out of place when talking about code!
This all points to the importance of being deliberate about the kind of community you build. Branding, content moderation, right down to your tone of voice or the vocabulary you choose to use all have a cumulative effect on the people you attract.
I don't always do a great job of this myself. As an example, current survey branding features light-on-dark themes that evoke programming terminals –because how else will people know this is a serious programming survey for the hardcore programmers?
But of course, this might in turn scare away beginners, who are by definition not "hardcore programmers" yet – and as we saw that also happens to be the most diverse segment of State of JS respondents. Moreover, the “glowing terminal” aesthetic itself can be seen as a throwback to an era of programming where inclusivity was the last thing on anybody's mind.
So is it possible that my attempts at courting one segment of the population are simultaneously pushing away another?
Multiple Funnels
We know that women represent 50% of the general population, but within the segment of the developer community that participates in the State of JavaScript survey and fills out their gender, that proportion drops to only 5%.
Between those two datapoints, there are multiple funnels that keep making that ratio smaller and smaller.
Using the U.S. as a baseline, while some stats point to 28.7% of software programmers being women, according to Wikipedia, “fewer than 12% of computer science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at U.S. PhD-granting institutions in 2011.”
Then take that number, and remove all the women developers who do not engage online for a number of reasons (harassment, lack of representation, not feeling like they belong, etc.), and you end up with a yet again smaller slice of the pie – and one that's especially tricky to measure.
Similarweb suggests that the very website you're reading this on has a 22% female audience – but as is often the case with gender stats, without more transparency about the methodology employed it's hard to know how much to trust this data.
And finally, it's worth asking if the JavaScript community itself is somehow turning women away. Although I couldn't find many other equivalent datapoints to compare the JavaScript ecosystem to, I did notice that female respondents made up 21% of WordPress developers in 2020, a much better ratio.
At the end of the day, my own limited research wasn't enough to determine which funnel is responsible for the biggest drop-off. But if you have your own theories do let me know!
Takeaways
At the end of the day, I can boil down what I've learned throughout this whole process to four things:
First, the status quo of the developer community is very male-oriented, not only in terms of demographics but also in terms of vocabulary, branding, and more. Changing that will take some deliberate action in the opposite direction, not just staying neutral.
Second, few people are actually tracking these issues in a transparent and reliable manner, and it's hard to improve what you don't track. We shouldn't be happy to merely adopt the language of inclusivity if we're not also keeping ourselves accountable to see if our efforts are effective or not.
Third, an effective way to diversify your audience is to make more beginner-friendly content, as that segment of the population is the most diverse one.
Fourth, even with the best intentions, it's really hard to break out of your own bubble. We naturally tend to attract an audience who looks, talks, and thinks like us, which is why it's so important to involve people who aren't like us every step of the way to counteract this natural tendency.
Next Steps for the Surveys
I think there's a lot in here that I can apply to the State of JS and State of CSS surveys:
- I need to keep making sure women are involved throughout the survey design process. Google's support let us hire Lea Verou to help design the 2022 State of CSS survey, and I hope to find someone equally awesome to fill her shoes for the 2023 edition!
- I suspect the surveys are not currently beginner-friendly enough. For example, as a TypeScript novice myself I'm not sure I would feel qualified to take a "State of TypeScript" survey. How can we change this?
- As I mentioned, I will improve the process for deciding what resources are featured in the survey.
Further Resources
If you want to learn more about this topic, here are some good resources:
- Code: Debugging the Gender Gap on Prime Video
- Inclusive Design Communities by Sameera Kapila
Breaking Through
I am under no illusion that this post will by itself have a meaningful effect on the situation.
But I do hope that if it gains enough traction, it can help me break through my own little male-dominated bubble, and land on the doorstep of the people who are most directly impacted by our community's lack of inclusivity – and as a result often the hardest to reach.
If that's you, and if you think what I'm doing here is valuable, then leave a comment here – or maybe even join our Discord.
Or maybe you're a woman or non-binary person who creates programming content and you have your own demographics data to share – in which case get in touch and let's start working on a follow-up post!
And at the risk of appearing self-serving, you might also consider participating in an upcoming State of JS or State of CSS survey to help us diversify our audience.
In any case, thanks for making it to the end of this post – but hopefully the beginning of an important conversation!
Cover image created using Chromata by Michael Bromley.
Thanks to Jeff Delaney, Kyle Cook, Jack Herrington, Jess Chan, Nicole Hiller, Per Harald Borgen, Wes Bos, Kent C. Dodds, Quincy Larson and Josh Comeau for being willing to share their data and feedback.
And huge thanks to Martin Heidegger, Stephanie Tuerk, Jess Chan, Sameera Kapila, and Sophonie Bazile for reviewing drafts of this posts.
Top comments (14)
Thanks @sachagreif It seems that many men don't address the gender problem (and white people don't address race issues) as they either don't care or may be afraid to say something wrong. As an ageing white male, I agree that we tend to hire and contact people who are similar to us, or we're trapped in a bubble where there are no other people left that even try to join our bubble, and then it is our task to find out if it might actually be our fault and how we could become more open minded and inclusive.
I'd go further and say there is no inherent problem with the demographic itself, but it points towards some actual problem further down the line.
An all-men team can build things perfectly fine, but should lead us to the question "how come there are no women in the team?". Maybe there is a good reason. Maybe it's a statistical anomaly. Or maybe there is something actively preventing women from getting into the team.
Your theory around the survey not being very beginner friendly I think may be a good path to go down. I would even say that it's not very intermediate friendly either. Even as someone that has been around the industry for a while and has a good amount of knowledge around existing features and frameworks, I find the survey somewhat intimidating. I can't imagine how much worse it is for someone less experienced.
Generally, the first section about the features that you know or are aware of feels like a big test of how good of a programmer you are, so it's pretty disheartening to come away from that very first section feeling like you don't know very much. And every year it adds new things and replaces older things, so even if you came to the survey again the year after now knowing more about that topic that you didn't know about before, you're greeted with more new things where you once again get to experience a feeling of imposter syndrome. It's only after the survey results come out where you get to feel like maybe you're not the only one who doesn't know about X feature.
Even though I've taken the survey throughout the years, I find myself wondering why I keep taking it and what the purpose even is for some of the questions. I would say I usually don't feel great coming out of that survey.
Perhaps some things to consider:
I think you make some great points!
This is key, the goal of the survey is anticipating future trends, which is why if we do our job right you shouldn't know about most things in the survey. In fact, once it becomes clear that most people already know/use a feature and the trend is now pretty stable (things like Flexbox or CSS Grid for example) we remove it from the survey altogether.
Great question. I think the answer might be bringing more value to people taking the survey even if they don't know the items in it. Maybe find a way to make the survey more fun or more educational?
I've found out about more than one cool upcoming feature by seeing it in one of the surveys and looking it up.
Adding some feedback for things respondents don't know about, like a "Find out what this is" popup with a brief explanation and a link might be a way to counteract this?
Anyway, this brings me to another question: Is there any data on respondents not finishing the survey? My suspicion is that a fair amount of respondents might stop the survey halfway-through as they realise how much they don't know, rather than just not participating in the first place.
What would be a way to address this, other than having microsoft paperclip go tok tok tok "by the way it's fine if you don't know most of this"? My rough ideas would be:
Great feedback, thanks!
Interesting! I think it would be helpful to make this more explicit. I also wonder then if it's worth including a little blurb about each one and see, when someone hasn't used something or know what it is, if they think they'd find it useful and/or want to learn more about it? Although I don't know if that changes the purpose of the results.
That sounds like an interesting idea! Not sure how complicated this would be, but it would be cool to have a custom resource at the end that's based on responses where someone says they haven't used X is but are interested.
The point on inclusivity of branding and design stuck with me. I am of course a data point of only one woman.
I personally find that terminal style off-putting and difficult to read. I’ve felt something similar when navigating the IndieWeb.org wiki, and several other websites like this. The common threads are that the UIs are text dense, more technical looking and difficult to skim.
There’s nothing inherently gendered here, but I’ve found this bothers me and my (few) female colleagues more than male colleagues. They might recognise the problem but don’t see it as important to fix. I’m far from a beginner so I don’t think that’s a factor.
It’s also interesting that more women responded to the CSS survey; CSS is typically seen as more visual and less technical. Is there a trend that women and other non-men in the industry are more visually motivated? Or is there some connotation of a “prettier” interface being less masculine or more feminine and therefore more welcoming to women?
I’m not sure I believe any of these things, but I think there’s something here. 🤔
Thanks for sharing your experience! I think there's also certainly some gate-keeping at play on some level. "I had to learn programming using a crappy terminal with arcane commands, and so should you!"
My own interpretation is that for a long time CSS was seen as "not real programming", and so people who didn't feel represented in the mainstream programming world might've been more likely to gravitate towards it and claim it as their own.
I had the same thought about gate-keeping. Funnily (but very not funny) the first reply to my comment was a sexist troll whose comments have thankfully been removed.
I don’t think a UI design alone deters women/NB folks more than men. But we already experience so many cultures and practices in this industry that do deter us (like sexist comments). These old school techy designs feel like a dog whistle for gatekeep-y tech bro culture, which we learn through unpleasant experiences should be avoided. We do that even though judging a community on web design alone is unfair - it’s for our own protection.
It can lead to a disconnect in well-intentioned conversations. “Why does this deter you? We’re nice here” versus “How can you not see how unwelcoming this is because it looks like other toxic spaces?”. There’s this seedy underbelly culture of tech that only under-represented folks experience. It’s really difficult to spot cultural signifiers of a culture you’re unfamiliar with. It’s also really difficult to explain cultural signifiers to a person who is unfamiliar with that culture.
The only way to bridge this gap is to keep talking about this, and keep making spaces safer for folks to share their experiences. So thank you for this series. 😊
I find idea of exploring the inclusivity of branding and design very interesting also, and wouldn't have thought of it till reading about the interaction with Josh Comeau in Part 2 here. Another sample size of one female - but I do find Josh's 3D avatar image appealing/personal, as well as his general style of connecting with people via email. I keep up-to-date with Kevin Powell's emails also, but not the videos so much - echoing what a commenter said in Part 1 about different ways of consuming content - the videos are fantastic and I'd learn something every time, but don't have the time for that so just file the video titles away in my brain for reference.
I've done the State of CSS once or twice before, and may have done State of JS once... or not. My feeling hasn't been that warm towards doing it myself again, although I find the results somewhat interesting when someone analyses them, whether I took part or not.
My reasons for not being keen on doing it again do correspond a lot with what others have mentioned in the comments here, but maybe they boil down to the idea of personal satisfaction. My time and energy are precious. If I don't get personal satisfaction from something the first or second time I do it, I am less likely to spend time on it in the future - unless a really solid reason (or incentive) is presented to me.
So my recollection from the time(s) I did the survey is that despite feeling confident in the CSS I use (as a fullstack dev), I was more left with an impression of how much I didn't know, emphasised with a "low" knowledge score (and would score even lower on JS, hence not feeling at all inclined to do that). Even if the second option was, "Heard of but not used" (I don't recall if it was), which would have been my case for many things, having one final knowledge score doesn't celebrate that I've kept up with hearing about new features (I consider that to be an achievement, considering I don't focus on frontend). So maybe a consideration of how that "final result" is presented - would a pie chart (that is print-screenable and shareable - it is the lasting impression that makes it to discord servers after doing the survey) instead of a single percentage feel less like a pass/fail exam result? Or if you kept the percentages, would I "feel better" (and therefore like the survey more) if individual scores were given for each response level? It's not so bad only getting 25% on "very comfortable" if I am also getting 75% for "have heard of but not used."
Along the same vein, someone else mentioned the changing features that are surveyed on each year, often the newer features. So yes, that doesn't give much sense of personal improvement if the features from the last survey(s) don't make a reappearance, with the expectation that year on year your "score" would increase. Does this part of the survey get longer? Sure. Is that a problem? I don't know - some will only be interested in this part of the survey anyway.
Generally, there may also be more uptake if there is more publicity related to why collecting a broad set of data is useful, regardless of perceived level of experience. Maybe include sharing some of the results/analyses from a previous year (as an intro to the survey, or link before they get to it) and why just giving honest answers that you don't know something is just as important as trying to push yourself into a higher knowledge classification.
As a side note, I would have preferred to login to post using an email address, but that didn't seem to be an option - I had to use a linked account, of which I only had one of the four options, and which I would have preferred not to use. That kind of thing may also be a barrier to some participating in things like this.
This kind of feedback makes researching and writing this whole thing worth it! Thanks for taking the time to write it and being so thoughtful about what we can do to improve, it's giving me a lot of ideas already :)
Fantastic, glad to be able to contribute. Thanks for your considered research and presenting your findings also. Even if I hadn't felt the need to comment, I appreciated reading it, so I'm sure others do too :) I'll look out for the next survey ;)
As mentioned on the previous post, this is also the experience I've made. "State of X" might sound a bit too much like it's supposed to be for people with an actual overview of the thing. Like you should only participate if you, yourself, have a grasp on the overall state of CSS/JS/whatever.
Signalling to beginners that, even if they only started learning JS a week ago, their feedback is just as important as that of a 10+ year veteran, specially because hearing from beginners is the only way to keep the platforms beginner-friendly.
In all honesty, I do feel some attachment to the "State of X" naming of these surveys. But maybe it would be for the best to choose a more open-ended name for the surveys. Something that specifically says "Outsiders are welcome!"