Participants Survey

We have celebrated reaching our milestone of 10,000 workshop participants by conducting a survey to see how Django Girls alumni are doing after attending the workshop in their city. We reached out to our former attendees and received an overwhelming response from 519 awesome women who shared with us their experiences with Django Girls and how attending the workshop changed their lives.

The ages of the respondents ranged from 14 to 65 years, with 71% being under the age of 30. This shows that Django Girls workshops are open and welcoming to women and girls irrespective of their age, as long they have an interest in technology and learning programmin

We'd like to acknowledge that even though the total number of responses received is a significant representative sample of the Django Girls alumni, it is likely that most of the women who responded to our survey stayed active in the tech industry after attending our workshops and hence the results could be positively skewed.

Participants’ Involvement in Tech Activities

We asked the respondents if they were involved in tech-related activities after the workshop. The tech activities included attending tech events, organising Django Girls and similar tech events, coaching at Django Girls workshops, teaching or working in tech, working on coding projects and enrolling for programming courses. We were excited to learn that 73% of the respondents are still involved tech-related activities after the event. These statistics show that our workshops are generating interest in technology and programming in the participants who attends them. This interest then results in them organising other workshops and tech events as well as attending tech events for some of the women. These findings prove that Django Girls workshops have been a successful intervention to increase the number of women involved in engineering and programming.

Participants’ learning to code after the workshop

We were also interested in finding out whether our former participants continued learning programming after attending the workshop. 79% of women attending Django Girls workshop continued learning programming after and 7% were planning to continue learning 1% of participants had tried and given up while 13% had not continued learning programming after the workshop. The findings showed that the majority of the women who attend Django Girls workshops continue learning to code after. The women continued learning in various ways; some on their own, enrolling for online coding courses or enrolling into universities. These findings show that Django Girls is indeed increasing the number of women in the programming field, who will one day be employed as programmers after they have developed their programming skills.

Participants’ Employment in Tech after attending workshops

The biggest question we were interested to answer was to know how many of the women started working in tech as developers after attending the workshop. We were impressed to learn that 21% of Django Girls' former attendees are now hired as developers after attending the workshop! It was also interesting to note that 15% of the attendees of were already working in tech and hence their newly acquired skills made their jobs better. About 23% had not yet got jobs as developers but were still developing their skills so they could get jobs in the future while the remaining 40% had not got tech jobs and did not indicate their future plans. This further affirmed that our work has had positive results in the lives of women we introduced to coding as well as the tech industry that hires these women. We are proud that at least 109 women now work as developers after attending the workshop. This is a big achievement which we are happy about!

Impact of Django Girls workshops on Participants’ lives

We were also interested in learning other ways the participants had been impacted by attending a Django Girls workshop. The survey showed that 93% of the participants had been impacted positively in different ways. The survey showed that about 43% had been inspired by meeting other women in tech resulting in them becoming more involved in tech by organising tech events and attending other tech events. Many of these women were so inspired to learn that the tech industry and programming are for women as well. About 25% had been excited that learnt new knowledge about technology, programming and web development; gained experienced and experienced personal growth. About 14% of the participants had been happy to have been able to meet new friends and new connections within the tech industry whom they have kept in touch with since the workshop. About 11% of the participants had changed their career path and became interested in a career in the tech industry prompting them to continue learning to code so they could one day become developers. Only 7% said there was no remarkable impact on their lives due to participation in the workshop.

Summary

The findings show that Django Girls has been successful in inspiring women to fall in love with programming as participants are exposed to women who are in the programming discipline within their own communities. The friendly environment that Django Girls workshops provide enables women who have never programmed before to learn to code and thereby arousing interest in tech and causing many of these women to work towards a career change and aim to be employed in the tech industry. The friendly environment also creates an atmosphere for making new friends and creating new network connections, fostering the beauty of the Django community which strives to be welcoming and diverse.