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Women in Tech 2022 – A report by Le Wagon & Honeypot
Honeypot and Le Wagon used their valuable data to shed light on women’s representation in the tech field across Europe. To create this report, we also surveyed women developers and tech professionals in order to understand their motivation to go into programming and their biggest challenges.
Summary
More and more women in Germany are going into programming. However, in most cases they do it later and through alternative educational paths. At the same time, they are invited to job interviews significantly less often than their male counterparts. This is the conclusion of a study by Le Wagon, a global leader in immersive tech training, and Honeypot.io, Europe's leading platform for tech jobs. The joint survey on women in tech jobs shows that women are still underrepresented in tech. The respondents lack an overview of possible job profiles as well as programming lessons already in school. The study reveals a challenge for society as a whole and sends a clear signal both to educational institutions and to the tech industry.
Le Wagon and Honeypot accompany people in the two most important phases of a professional career - training and job search. We surveyed bootcamp participants and platform users about their experiences. For example, only about 16 % of female users of the tech job platform Honeypot.io were invited to interviews in 2022 - despite the huge need for skilled workers. For male applicants, the figure was 84 %.
"It was important to us to learn how exactly women enter tech professions. In the end, women and men may hold similar or the same positions, but they get there through sometimes completely different paths. Our survey results show: Women most often start as career changers in the industry. For us as a training provider, this is an extremely important factor when it comes to tailoring our courses to meet diverse profiles." – Hakan Housein, spokesperson for Le Wagon Germany.
Yet the proportion of women learning programming is on the rise. About one in three participants (33.8 %) in Le Wagon's coding camps is a woman. However, this figure fell significantly during the corona pandemic. The study's editors suspect that one possible cause is the unpaid care work that women continue to take on more frequently and which has increased further as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Overall, women enter programming later. Nearly 75 percent of respondents did not start in the tech industry until they were 27 or older. This is partly due to a lack of information about the industry and the various career options (42 % of respondents). In each case, 33 % of respondents feared that they lacked technical knowledge or cited a lack of instruction in programming skills during their school years.
For example, most (78 %) Honeypot users learn programming in bootcamps. These are thus among the most popular sources of education in adulthood. By contrast, far fewer women opted for the university lecture hall: only five percent acquired their programming skills at a university.
Women's personal experiences with the tech field
Le Wagon and Honeypot.io were interested in the personal experiences of female survey participants in addition to the data points:
"The biggest challenges were mostly psychological," says Erika Grossehokamp, of her career path. Today she works as a data consultant, but her career began as a research assistant with a master's degree in economics.
"I sometimes felt like an impostor when I applied for jobs! I felt like maybe no one would be interested in me because I didn't have a degree or long experience in the profession. Then I found my current employer, who wasn't interested in my background so much as whether I was capable of learning. I was able to prove that through a technical challenge, and now we've been working together for over 1.5 years, and it's been a great experience."
Making tech careers accessible for everyone
So while progress is already evident in many places, there is still clearly room for improvement in others. Particularly in view of the growing shortage of skilled workers, especially in the IT sector, we all have a responsibility to bring about the necessary changes. This concerns not only the creation of structures and environments that facilitate entry into the industry, but also the questioning of existing thought patterns.
"With this report, we want to bring the discussion about the untapped potential of the female workforce in the tech industry back into focus. Women are a dynamically evolving force in the tech industry, while the need for great tech talent is growing rapidly. This could be an opportunity for companies to further expand inclusion and equality." – Imke Schultjan, Managing Director at Honeypot.
Le Wagon is a global leader in immersive tech training. We offer bootcamps for career changers in more than 40 cities worldwide as well as fully online:
