The schooling may be hard, but the opportunities are broad. As a coder, you could just as easily find yourself working for a hot tech start up as you could a high street fashion brand. And since a report from Burning Glass revealed that programming jobs grew 12% faster than the market average, these opportunities will keep on coming.
This is great for skilled job seekers, but tricky for employers. As the present tries to catch up with the future, there’s more demand for people who can code than there is supply. Fortunately, pathways exist for women to break in, through education programmes, university recruitment and businesses who foster and support women into the field.
Start as you mean to go on
While computing-related fields are a major growth area, non-profit organisation Girls Who Code notes that by 2020 women are on track to fill a mere 3% of these jobs in the US. In the UK women account for just 21% of the country’s science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) workforce, with only 3% saying tech is their first choice career, according to PwC. This is stark news for today’s female coders, but it’s also an opportunity for the future. One of the clear ways to close the skills gap is to pave the way for women, starting when they are still girls.
Parents across the UK who are signing their children up to after-school programmes will know that coding clubs are a way to nurture young, prospective tech leaders. Within a single term, today’s children will be able to code instructions and create their own computer games.
And it’s more than after-school; coding has been embedded into the UK school curriculum since 2013. As reported by the Guardian’s Stuart Dredge, Michael Gove, the education secretary at the time, said that the revised curriculum teaches children “not just how to work a computer, but how a computer works and how to make it work for you”.
Echoing a similar ethos, Melissa Sariffodeen, co-founder and CEO of Ladies Learning Code, is committed to sharing the language of coding to women and girls to “help us understand, harness and build – not just consume technology”.
“Learning to code is like learning any new language. While the barriers to start are really low, to become proficient and a strong developer requires practice,” says Sariffodeen. “Technology is always changing and evolving so there’s always something to learn and keep on top. That is what makes the industry and roles so dynamic for so many people – including women.”
Pique the interest of the best and brightest
As an industry with its own language, coding can be intimidating to outsiders. That’s why university fairs have become an opportunity for tech companies to present not just themselves as great employers, but to attract new talent that would not necessarily identify themselves as techies.
“Attracting a diverse workforce must start in schools and at universities,” says Sheridan Ash, who heads up PwC’s Women in Technology programme. “We want to get the message out early about the broad opportunities of working in technology which go well beyond the stereotypes.”
Doing just that, PwC tours university campuses with its own tech events, designed for those who haven’t thought about a career in technology.
But it’s not just graduates companies are targeting. Returnship schemes for those who have taken extended absences from work, and opportunities to learn new skills on the job are being used to make tech careers more attractive – and more viable – to workers who’ve developed their experience in other fields.
Life-long employment for life-long learners
Robyn Foyster didn’t expect to choose a career in technology when she joined the PwC consulting graduate scheme, but she soon discovered coding. As a maths graduate, she found it fascinating: “I’m not surprised I ended up doing something technical. Data analysis brings the same satisfaction as when you solve something or do a calculation in a cool way.”
The co-operative nature of coding came as a welcome surprise, however: “People think coding is something you do on your own, but it isn’t. We work in a team, so we talk about what we’re doing and collaborate on analysis. More brains produce better answers.”
Her analytical skills have given Foyster interesting opportunities: “A recent project used online transaction data, containing amount spent and timestamps for every action a customer took over a year, to build a model to predict customer behaviour. Proposing, testing and creating new hypotheses as we worked towards a solution was very exciting.”
Foyster employs a diverse skillset to excel in her profession: “As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, being able to complete analysis on larger datasets will become a bigger part of day to day work. But being able to do the analysis is only part of the process, we need to be able to explain what we’ve done so people can understand why insights are useful.”
She believes the industry is going to continue to rapidly evolve. “There are intriguing concepts currently being debated – if there are mistakes in code that is written by an individual, powering artificial intelligence designed by another company, where does the accountability sit?”
Foyster is optimistic about her future in data analytics, and encourages others to consider it: “It is essentially problem solving. If you are passionate about that, you can be passionate about coding.”
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with PwC, sponsor of the women in technology hub
