Since childhood, we liked beautiful, pink, sparkly things and instead of gift-wrapping code in glitter, it’s tossed at us in a dual toned black and green screens. Starting from color schemes to font choices, there is an unrecognized bias in coding favoring males.

Men would feel a lot more comfortable stepping into a tech career because it naturally flows from things they loved as children — such as video games and robotic gears. All so similar to the toys they played with at the age of six. As a contrast, asking a girl who grew up playing with dolls to code would most likely yield disinterest.

It’s too different from everything she likes and too far from everything she knows.

A common response to the unfamiliar technicalities of programming would just be intimidation and then avoidance. It might just be possibly because the field has been male-dominated for the longest time, and thus optimally designed for men and their common interests. The eventual result is that women aren’t really all that interested in programming.

So, what do women like?

Fashion and make-up and other things, but largely that really.

What is computer science?

Not that.

From a very generalized point of view, you’d find more women following beauty pages than men. And more men following tech-related pages than women. If you’re a woman and you’re in tech, chances are that you don’t share the same interests as the majority of women.

The lack of women in CS isn’t because they are less able to be technical, they’re just often less passionate.

This comes down to being a very broad problem of the image the tech industry projects and how it fails at blending with the glamor-oozing industries that women admire. There’s simply a mismatch.

The tech industry seems to have an image that limits who it appeals to — one that a lot of women don’t seem to identify with.

Being in tech myself and having observed my non-tech female friends, I believe a lot of women don’t even consider tech assuming its not for them.Not saying coding should be pink and sparkly. Changing up color schemes might superficially lure her in, but it won’t make her stay when she begins to fail to identify with the programming culture.

The way to get a community interested in a subject effectively seems to make people they can relate to or admire display interest in it. To what extent does the tech industry do that when trying to get women to code?

Or make efforts to bridge gaps between tech and women’s interests?

How would women react if, for example, Beyonce started coding?

Trying to change what appeals to girls through sheer exposure can work to an extent, but it’ll still target a specific subset of women.

By bridging the gap between women’s interests and programming, the tech industry will be able to make coding less unfamiliar for all women, and thus create an appeal that will last and expand the talent pool tech attracts.

Fashion-tech has been relatively limited, yet most startups in the space are started by women (e.g. Rent The Runway). If we see a rise in women coders, it won’t be surprising to see the fashion industry being disrupted by technology further, followed by innovations in other industries with large female-followings, such as beauty, cosmetics and wellness, to name a few.