Katie Nelson

As today is International Women’s Day there’s no better day to write about the screening of the documentary “Code: Debugging The Gender Gap” I went to last week.

Being a female developer, the sole female developer in a team  of  10 where I work, i’d been wanting to see the film, directed and produced by Robin Hauser Reynolds, since it was released – so when White October organised a screening in Oxford I was there.

Happily a few of the other developers also decided to come along to watch too, but not without the usual “coding for girls? is that where it’s all written in pink or something?” comments and the like from some of the less modern minded men in the office.

(Don’t worry, all comments mentally noted for next time said people ask for my help / require urgent changes to something ;))

I can’t praise the film enough. There was the depressing insight into the gender splits at big tech companies, and also hearing from the female engineers/developers working for companies like Facebook, Pinterest, Etsy, Pixar and Airbnb, not only about their work life experience, but their journeys to get into those roles.

There was also a look into why many women in programming jobs tend to drop out after the 10 year mark – mostly due to being worn down over those years by the everyday casual sexism they get in the workplace and deciding enough is enough.

The documentary also covered the effort being made to bring more girls into computer science at a younger age, and to try and reassign the gender stereotype of ‘programmer’, because if you are brought up being told that you can’t do something then you believe it to be true – when in reality women make just as good programmers as men.

Most definitely worth watching, no matter what your gender or career, as a thought provoking and discussion generating documentary.

Trailer:

Go to codedocumentary.com for more information and screening information.