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Only 15% of software engineers in US tech companies are women

Just how bad is the ratio of women to men in software development? Possibly worse than we thought. Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou has been collating data on IT firms using digital storytelling platform Silk and found out that of 159 US tech companies so far surveyed, only 15% of technical employees are women.

Interestingly, some organisations which you might suppose are most supportive of women in the workplace don’t do that well in Chou’s study. Codecademy has no female engineers, Github, Wikimedia and Mozilla are all in single digit percentages. Even dev-cum-equality-activists ThoughtWorks only do OK with 23.65%.

Silk is a platform for interactive digital storytelling, presenting data that users can engage with. The Women in Software Engineering Silk was created to give the world a glimpse into the ratio of women software engineers in tech companies.

The data also found that of these 159 companies, 28 companies located in the US, UK and Europe have no women software engineers at all, only 11 have more than 49%, and small tech companies aimed at women fare best on the gender scale.

But what about the rest of the world? The great thing about Silk is that users are invited to add data as well. Data journalist at Silk Alice Corona says the site is regularly updated and submissions for additions to pages are welcome to help expand data. All you have to do is create a Silk account, and you’ll then be added to the site where you can submit data so that it will be integrated into a page. You can also use Silk to create any visualizations you want and embed them on articles, websites or blogs.

“It would be really very interesting to incorporate this data here to give a more global perspective on the issue! We are also thinking as to whether open up the site and let people contribute, sort of like a wiki,” says Corona.

So if you would like to add data on women software engineers in any local company, head over to Silk and get started.

Here’s the map so far. Let’s paint the southern part red.

 

 

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