Closing China’s gender gap: the Beijing school that’s teaching girls to code for free
Only one in five programmers are women, and Beijing-based Coding Garden is hoping to reverse the trend by offering girls a free course in writing code
Chen Bin, the founder of an online computer skills school for children , recalls vividly the excitement the hiring of a female colleague created among programmers, back in his programming days.
“There were so few of them and everyone was very excited about having a female programmer on the team,” said Chen, who worked as a programmer for Microsoft and then Cisco but quit to sell tea online in 2011. “We would discuss her education background and how competent she was at work,” even though we might not end up working together.
About a year ago, Chen went back to the programming circle, opening Coding Garden, a for-profit school which teaches both boys and girls how to write code. Among its activities is offering a free online coding course for girls.
To Chen’s surprise, the scarcity of female programmers remains unchanged.
There are four times as many male programmers as female, according to a survey by website Codeforge.cn in 2015. This gender disparity reflects a lack of women in the technology industry and computing work generally. In Singapore, 30 per cent of technology industry staff are female while in the US, women hold 26 per cent of computing jobs, techcrunch.com reported.