Just like many other industries, the tech world is usually dominated by men for a long period. According to the Stack Overflow’s developer survey data (2017), less than 8 out of 100 programmers are women among 34,000 respondents. It makes sense that many people consider it is hard for women to step into this field. But how about women already in this industry? Would female programmers have an advantage or a disadvantage in salary and former education? Are they satisfied with their job? Do they like coding and not just for “living”? This analysis is trying to explore those questions based on the survey results.
Question 1: Do the salary of female programmers overtake earning of male programmers?
It might be true men are usually taking the lead in the tech world, so does it apply to the earnings as well? Our analysis here only focused on employed respondents, including full-time employers, part-time employers, or independent contractors.
First, let’s take a look at Salary and Expected Salary for all employed respondents. According to the box plot above, male programmers and female programmers have a similar distribution. Then the Mann-Whitney U Test is conducted to test whether the medians of each group are equal. Both p-values(0.106 Salary; 0.187 Expected Salary) are greater than 0.05, so we cannot deny the null hypothesis that the medians are equal.
Full-time employees, part-time employees, and independent contractors usually have different total salaries, so we try to separate those groups.
According to the box plots and results from the Mann-Whitney U Test(p-values >0.05), no significant differences between medians of male and female programmers in different employed status.
Question 2. Can female programmers get hired with a lower degree?
Given that those female programmers might not have an advantage in Salary, do they have other gender advantages, such as a lower former degree?
Based on the plot above, the short answer is “no”. The percentage of female programmers that hired with a Master’s degree and above is higher than male programmers. Chi-Square test of independence is conducted to test whether there is a relationship between formal education and gender. The small p-value(0.000)<0.05 shows formal education and gender are related.
Question 3. Do female programmers enjoy their job as a programmer?
Hmmm, it seems that female programmers have no advantage in salary and even have a disadvantage in former education. Do they feel the same way? Are they satisfied with their job or career?
The results are interesting! Although female programmers have lower career satisfaction than male programmers, their job satisfaction is similar. The Mann-Whitney U Test is also conducted and shows the same result that the female programmers report lower levels of career satisfaction than male programmers.
Question 4. Do female programmers enjoy coding as a hobby?
Hobbies usually make you happier. Should you make your job a hobby or turn your hobby into your job? Most male programmers might answer “yes” while female programmers seem not. Around 36% of female programmers did not program as a hobby or contribute to open source projects while that percentage of male programmers is only 18%.
Chi-Square test of independence is also conducted to test whether there is a relationship between program hobby and gender. The small p-value(0.000)<0.05 shows program hobby and gender are related.
Conclusion
In this analysis, we explored the advantages of being a female programmer using Stack Overflow Developer Survey data from 2017.
- First, we explored the pay equality. Data showed no significant differences were found between salary and expected salary of female and male programmers.
- Next, we looked at the required former education. Female programmers had a higher percentage of the population with a Master’s degree and above, which means they might need an even higher degree of former education to get hired.
- Then we compared the job and career satisfaction. Although no significant differences were found between job satisfaction of female and male programmers, Career Satisfaction of female programmers tend to be lower.
- Finally, we took a peek at the programming hobby. Though a similar portion of male and female programmers would contribute to open source projects, most female programmers tend to show less interest in coding as a hobby.
The analysis here is not a formal study. Many other factors could be controlled including age, country, programming job types, and years of experience.
Do you have any personal experience on this topic? Do you agree or disagree on those findings? Please leave a comment below!
Resources:
Data and analysis detail can be found in my Github here.
