Gender

Female Developers Who Are Breaking the Gender Stereotype

Gender discrimination somehow occurs in all areas of our lives, but mostly in our decisions in life. In particular, career decisions.

For years, females have sank to selective employment for the sole reason that they have been a considered men’s job.

Gender stereotypes have somehow influenced and continue to shape our life.

Men are generally portrayed as having characteristics such as competence, and achievement-oriented.

However, the significance of women connect to communal characteristics such as affiliation tendencies, emotional sensitivity, and lack of will power.

Therefore, these characteristics are a strong enough to build gender stereotypes.

People believe that men should not be excessively warm and women should not be excessively dominant.

Therefore, these physiognomies gives people the mindset that women are not capable enough to handle a men’s job.

How it Affects Women

Like said earlier, until the past century, it’s was like a norm for women not to pursue a career which was considered as men jobs.

Every women living in a society ought to go after careers that are more feminine that requires less time and flexibility.

But even after they pursue these careers, they get less money than their male counterparts for doing the same job.

This phenomenon of gender stereotype has been visible in all industries, from movies to Google employees.

Similarly, sexual harassment has been another issue women are facing when trying to enter and thrive in certain jobs.

At least 25% of women face sexual harassment in the workplace and fail to report due to the fact that society will not accept them.

The Change

All these practices are so deeply rooted in our lives that they continue to happen even if we try to stop.

However, lately there has been some drastic changes in the way people take gender stereotyping.

In particular, women are turning their backs on these concepts and became stereotypically male-dominated careers. 

In this article, we bring you some of the powerful and brave female developers who are breaking the gender stereotype.

Gina Trapani (Tech blogger, web developer, and writer)

Gina Trapani is one of the women breaking gender stereotyping by working on several projects that inspire women to get into tech.

She is mostly famous for founding Lifehacker- a daily weblog to help people get the most out of technology via downloads ad shortcuts).

Professionally, she has also built great applications and websites like Makerbase. It is a website inspiring database of digital projects.

Trapani is also well known for her skills to provide any solution to the diversity issues using technology.

Similarly, her project Narrow the Gap, is another good example of her work contributing to eradicate gender stereotype.

It is a website about the gender pay gap where you can search for your occupation and see what the gender pay gap is currently in America.

Sarah Clatterbuck (Senior director of engineering, LinkedIn)

Sarah Clatterbuck is another women in tech industry to break all the stereotyping people have about gender related jobs.

She studied programming during her college days when she had an internship at a software startup.

Currently, she is a senior director of engineering at LinkedIn, mostly working with people, teams, processes, and technical road maps.

Claterbuck codes on her own time and contributes a bit to an open source project that the LinkedIn team uses.

Therefore, Sarah Clatterbuck is someone you should look up to if you want to break all the gender stereotype chaos in the society.

Mehvish Mushtaq (App developer)

Mehvish Mushtaq is an Indian women working as an app developer, breaking all the gender stereotype.

In 2013, she did an online course on android application development.

As part of the course, developing an app on their own was essential.

Mehvish became the first woman from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to develop an Android application.

The app ‘Dial Kashmir’ feature business list, banks, and prayer timings along with several important services.

This app is able to serve around 5 million people in India especially around the Kashmir area.

Shafi Goldwasser (Computer Scientist)

Shafi Goldwasser is another women inspiring so many young women to forget about gender stereotyping and live their dreams.

She received her PhD degree in Computer Science back in 1984 and has inspired women to get into the technology industry since then.

Goldwasser is responsible for working on interactive and zero proofs which allow secure transmission of information over the internet.

She has made fundamental contributions to cryptography, computational complexity, computational number theory, and algorithms.

Her career includes many landmark papers which have initiated entire subfields of computer science.

She is definitely someone not only girl of computer science but every field should look up to break gender stereotype in the society.

Amanda Wixter (Computer game programmer)

Amanda Wixter is yet another woman working in tech field who has inspired so many young women to break gender stereotype in careers.

After graduation from the University of Arizona in 2005, she took a job as a game programmer for SkillJam.

She worked on games like FarmVille, Live Poker, PAC-MAN, Ms. PAC-MAN for iPhone and she is also founder of Meteor Grove Software.

Wixter also lead a development team that created 10 mobile multiplayer games. She also worked on a two-player based turn-based strategy game.

She is probably responsible for a lot of users addiction to computer and mobile games as some of them have reached the top 10 list on Apple’s App Store.

Kruti Patel (Android developer)

Kruti Patel is another Indian woman inspiring so many young women to follow their dreams regardless the gender stereotype issues.

She is currently working at Isobar, Melbourne as a Senior Mobile Developer. Her daily work involves mobile apps programming, and finding new tools and technologies to improve projects.

Patel also gets involved in the pitch process for any potential IoT work in order to know the feasibility of the work before committing to it.

Kruti realized that gender diversity and stereotyping in technology fields is a big issue in the western world.

Being one of the few female developers in Melbourne, she often got approached to participate in panel discussions.

She got chance to share her experiences in tech and challenges faced by women in a male dominated society.

That inspired her to start the YouTube channel A Woman That Codes where she talks about coding and interviews woman that work with programming.

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