Nowadays no one will be surprised to see a woman working as a software engineer. This year we decided to take a closer look at the specialists and research such topics as “Women working as IT engineers”. In particular, to find out what changes have taken place since the last study, whether there are differences in the employment and specifics of the work of IT professionals of both sexes and what they are. The research we are going to discuss in this article was based on the data of DOU salary surveys and “Portrait of an IT specialist”.
Although slowly, we are moving towards gender balance
Technical specialties and professions are still considered more of a male occupation. According to our surveys, three quarters of IT specialists in Eastern Europe are men. At the same time, the share of women in the IT sector is gradually increasing, in particular in 2017-2020 it increased from 20% to 25%.
If we analyze the share of women in different positions in the dynamics, we will see that women are gradually winning places in different IT professions. In particular, the share of women in development has doubled over the last three years (from 5% to 10%, mostly in the novice category), and one and a half times among project managers (from 25% to 39%) and other technical specialists (from 20% to 31%). %).
There are more women in IT in the east of the Europe than in the west
Three-quarters of female IT professionals are under 30 (men are slightly older because they started coming to IT earlier than women, and two-thirds of them are under 30). The youngest women in IT are in non-technical positions and among developers
Educated and eager to learn further
Among women working in IT, a higher proportion of those with higher education or even two (compared to men). This difference is especially noticeable when we talk about women working in non-technical and other technical positions. Given that women in IT are often employed in non-technical positions, it is not surprising that among them less than men, graduates of Kyiv and Lviv Polytechnics and, accordingly, more those who graduated from national or economic universities (Shevchenko National University, Lviv National University). Franko, DNU named after Gonchar, KhNU named after Karazin, NaUKMA, KNEU, KhNEU named after S. Kuznets, etc.).
Women working in IT declare better knowledge of English than men. This is typical of all technicians. Only among non-technical specialists differences in English knowledge between women and men are minimal.
Women are a little more self-taught than men. At the same time, compared to male IT professionals, they are more likely to prefer online courses and trainings (attended by 66% of women vs. 56% of men) and IT events (33% of women vs. 23% of men). Women like to study with the help of professional literature less than men. Women working as project managers and other technical and non-technical positions are more active in self-education.
Women often hold non-technical positions, but began to go more actively to technical ones
Women make up the majority in non-technical positions (mostly working in HR and marketing). However, in some technical positions: in particular, among designers, business analysts, data analysts, project managers, the share of women has increased to 40-50% over the past three years. More than a third of women are QA specialists. At the same time, development, top management and system administration remain “male” occupations: 90% of those who work in these positions are men.
Over the past three years, women have become more active in technical positions. For example, compared to a three-year-old study, the proportion of women newcomers to QA has caught up with the proportion of women applying for non-technical positions; also among women newcomers the share of project managers (from 8% to 10%) and business analysts (from 2% to 5%) increased.
More than half of women developers write in JavaScript, ASP and C # / .NET
At the same time, the industry itself is changing, which also affects the number of women in IT. For example, among the participants in the salary survey from 2011 to 2020, the share of developers is gradually decreasing, where men make up 90%. The share of QA, other technical positions and non-technical specialists is growing (except for project managers – their number is also decreasing), and these are the areas in which there are many women.
For 33% of women working in development, the specialization is back-end, for 30% of women – front-end (among men, these figures are 39% and 19%, respectively). If we talk about the main programming languages, the developers are “concentrated” around JavaScript and C # / .NET (31% and 19% of women, respectively, use them as the main programming language against 23% and 16% of men).