"A huge focus and opportunity" - Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on DEI
But “there’s a lot of work to do”
The IT sector in general skews towards the white male demographic, but the most technical part – development – is even more heavily weighted. To keep growing, the industry has got to change.
Female representation in IT hovers between 25% and 30% of the total workforce, depending on the source you read. But in development - a heavily technical and, it has to be said, occasionally insular community - that figure sits even lower.
"Generally speaking, both on the Stack Overflow platform as well as the technology industry, specifically women developers are underrepresented," says Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar. "It's just a fact. We're talking less than 20%, which is not representative of the world, and also probably not representative of the people that are actually using Stack Overflow or in technology roles."
That figure comes from Stack Overflow's own data, gathered every year in the website's annual Developer Survey, which questions more than 100,000 IT professionals. Chandrasekar admits this is not perfect, noting that people "have to feel comfortable" answering surveys like this, but it is still one of the best resources out there for insights into the developer industry.
"Clearly," he says, "there's a lot of work to do."
Bringing new people into IT is important for the industry's long-term health, and Chandrasekar speaks passionately about making places like Stack Overflow "more welcoming" for people from different backgrounds. One way the company is addressing that is through the Unfriendly Robot, which automatically flags unfriendly, unwelcoming and condescending comments - an important role to make sure developers and potential contributors are not turned away.
"Generally speaking, it's a huge focus and an opportunity to make sure that more and more folks are welcomed into communities like ours. We just need it, because of this supply-demand imbalance. If you look at the number of working mums that left the workplace during the pandemic, it's staggering how many people actually did that."
Other Stack Overflow initiatives include accessibility features for neurodiverse people; the Ask Wizard, which guides new people through how to ask a "great" question; Staging Ground, where new users can be mentored; and Overflow Offline, bringing the tool to people without a reliable internet connection, or perhaps none at all. That includes everyone from potential developers in Cameroon to scientists in Antarctica and prisoners in Europe.
The Ask Wizard and Staging Ground, especially, are close to Chandrasekar's heart because of his own "quite negative" experiences starting on Stack Overflow as a new contributor.
"I asked a question and I immediately got slapped on my hand for asking a poorly worded question. I'm not a novice programmer - I'm not an expert programmer, but I certainly had some background, so it was surprising for me to get that response. I was like, ‘Okay, I wonder what the experience is like for a brand-new person or a person of colour or a person who is not in the flow of this website?'"
As we can see above, Stack Overflow has realised the importance of a welcoming environment for new industry joiners. It is only by doing so, says Chandrasekar, that the industry will remain a creative, innovative place to work.
"All of this is in the spirit of making sure that our knowledge base is accessible to everybody that needs it, so they can learn how to code, they can start creating some great things for the world to experience."