I run the annual State of JavaScript developer survey, and I was thrilled to see survey respondents more than double this year from 16,085 in 2021 to 39,471 in 2022.
Yet despite that big increase one thing that remains constant is that only 7% of respondents identify as women, non-binary, or gender-non-conforming.
A consequence of such a skewed ratio is that the opinion of people who identify as men risks drowning out all other voices. So to combat this, I've been focusing on creating new filtering tools to make these voices louder.
Today, I want to show you how I used these tools to dig deeper into the survey's data, and then broadened my research by asking other communities, platforms, and content creators about their own audience demographics.
Two Important Notes About Gender
This post will focus on men vs women, and I am well aware that reducing gender to a dichotomy is both factually inaccurate, and also very unfair to the many people who don't fit into said dichotomy.
Sadly, when it comes to non-binary or gender non-conforming audiences the State of JS survey doesn't provide us with a lot of data. For that reason, I have decided to focus primarily on women as a first step.
Additionally, I know that the vocabulary around gender is often the subject of contention and debate. So if I happen to mis-use a term while discussing these issues or mis-gender an individual, please let me know in the comments so that I can fix it.
Introducing Filters
Our internal API has long supported complex filters, and starting today you can now control them right from the survey's UI:
These new filters work on most of the State of JS 2022 charts, as well as on the State of CSS 2022 report. One thing you can do with them is take a chart, and create variations for different subpopulations in order to compare how values differ among them:
Alternatively, you can take a chart and break down each bar according to a variable such as gender:
You can learn more about these filtering features in our documentation.
An Outlier Appears
You might have noticed the high proportion of women having gone through coding bootcamp as a first step to learning JavaScript in the chart above, and it was while applying that same "faceting" feature to various charts that I stumbled on another outlier:
The e-learning platform Scrimba was apparently doing a much better job of appealing to women than its competitors!
This immediately brought many questions to mind:
- Why were some platforms doing better than others in terms of inclusivity?
- How did other programming-focused communities compare in terms of gender ratio?
- Why was the gender ratio so skewed in the first place?
Why This Article?
When sharing drafts of this article, the most common reaction I got was something along the line of "Why are you doing this? You should focus on improving your own survey's inclusivity instead of looking for excuses elsewhere!"
And I think that's quite understandable. But I want to make it clear that I am not writing this to abdicate responsibility for the survey's own demographics in any way. No matter how generalized the gender imbalance issue may be, I know I still have a duty to try and improve things at my own level.
Moreover, this article itself is actually part of these inclusivity efforts. My hope is that writing about the gender imbalance issue will help me reach the very audience that is currently under-represented in the survey, and if not encourage them to participate in future surveys or, at the very least, make them aware that the survey exists.
With this out of the way, let's get to the data!
Surveys
As I said earlier, from the start the State of JavaScript survey has struggled to attract women respondents.
And even though these numbers are quite bad, it does seem like they are in line with other comparable surveys.
The 2022 Stack Overflow survey reported a 91% ratio of respondents identifying as men) out of 70,853 responses.
And the JetBrains survey found a similar 93% ratio of male respondents.
Things are slightly better over in CSS land, where the 2022 State of CSS survey reported a 88% ratio of respondents identifying as men.
But it's quite possible that all of these surveys share common biases due to their similar methodologies, so I wanted to broaden my research beyond online surveys, which is how I ended up focusing on online education.
Why Educators
Among the users who completed the 2022 State of JS survey, we saw the highest percentage of gender and race diversity in the lower end of the "years of experience" spectrum.
If we can make sure this new generation of developers isn't turned away by entrenched biases, this could prove to be a great opportunity to make the industry more diverse:
So I decided to focus on educational content in the hopes of highlighting that more diverse segment since this content can often serve as an entryway into the community for people looking to learn JavaScript.
Moreover, today's educational content creators also operate at a larger scale than almost anybody else. Recent surveys have made it obvious just how large an audience YouTubers can command, with Kevin Powell for example being responsible for 10% of all 2022 State of CSS respondents!
And education is also a space that shows a lot of promise in terms of inclusion: many women have managed to create a sizeable following by creating awesome programming content, including Techworld with Nana, CodeBeauty, Mayuko, Coder Coder, Ania Kubow, Tina Huang, and many more.
YouTube
Fireship
With 1.8M subscribers, Fireship is by far the largest coding YouTuber around, with popular videos regularly crossing the 1M mark.
As a reminder, the 2022 edition of the State of JavaScript survey got around 40k respondents. In other words, a single Fireship video can offer an audience sample size 25 times larger than an entire survey!
Sadly, the channel's demographics reveal the same bias as the survey, with a 94% male audience.
But maybe Fireship is an outlier? Let's keep digging to find out!
Web Dev Simplified
Web Dev Simplified has 1.2M subscribers, and their demographics stats confirm the trend with a similarly skewed 91% men ratio:
Jack Herrington
Medium-sized channels are no different. Jack Herrington is a popular YouTuber with over 100k subscribers who covers mostly front-end and web development topics and whose videos routinely get over 50k views.
According to YouTube statistics, his audience is 96% male. From the number alone, you might think Jack spends his videos talking about professional football, beard grooming, Joe Rogan, and other stereotypically male preoccupations. But nothing could be further from the truth.
I asked Jack if he was conscious of this issue, and here's what he had to say:
100% yes, and from the beginning I've made specific content choices to address that.
I use they/them pronouns in regards to all generic role types in an organization, including engineers. I very strongly skew against the "brogrammer" culture (which I despise anyway).
In general I just try to visualize that the viewer is by default a woman.
Jack also informed me he intends to do more collaboration with women on his channel going forward and it'll be interesting to see if that moves the needle.
This is heartwarming since it shows that there are at least some YouTubers putting efforts towards inclusivity, but at the same time the fact that those efforts don't seem to have a strong impact is a bit depressing…
Other Channels
As additional datapoints, Wes Bos revealed that his YouTube audience is 96% male, while Kent C. Dodds has a 93% male ratio.
Coder Coder
You might have noticed that the YouTubers featured so far present as men. So what about creators who identify as women? It turns out that Jess Chan's Coder Coder channel has a much higher ratio of women in its audience, with a comparatively low 83.3% proportion of men:
As Jess points out, this is both due to focusing on introductory content, and a consequence of who they are:
When it comes to creating my coding tutorials, the only factors about my audience that I consider is that they are mostly beginner level, self-taught web developers. I don't cater the content to one or another demographic, I just stick to making educational content.
However, as someone who is visibly different from the majority white, male-presenting creators, I feel like just existing on YouTube is my way of representing minority and marginalized groups. In some anecdotal demographic comparisons, I have significantly more viewers from Asian countries and viewers who identify as female. This is no coincidence, because we will naturally gravitate to people who look like us.
TechWorld With Nana
With 742k subscribers, TechWorld With Nana ranks among the largest programming-focused YouTube channels out there, and popular videos can even cross the 1M views mark.
The channel features demographic stats that are very similar to Coder Coder's, with 86.8% of men in its audience:
At this stage it's hard to say whether the two women-hosted channels' more diverse audiences are the result of gender, a focus on introductory content, or both. But it's certainly interesting to notice such a clear separation with channels hosted by men in terms of demographics.
The YouTube Factor
At this point there's something else that is important to highlight: it's hard to know how much influence YouTube itself is having on these stats.
Although YouTube claims that “>50% of [their] audience is female”, the YouTube algorithm can potentially bias video recommendations (for example, it might have decided not to show programming-related videos to women). Also, we don't really know what logic YouTube uses to determine a viewer's gender.
So while YouTube stats can be interesting (especially since few people proactively track their audience's gender stats otherwise), it's also good to keep these caveats in mind.
Note that one way of getting more reliable data is actually through the surveys themselves. For example, since Fireship used a special ?source=fireship tag when linking to the survey, we are able to segment the sub-group of people who followed that link and filter it by gender, which in this case confirms Fireship's own YouTube stats:
More Women Voices
I want to take a moment to address the scarcity of women voices in this very article. I have reached out to more women creators, and I am hoping to include their data in Part 2.
This is also a good place to talk about the lack of women and non-binary video creators in a recent State of JavaScript 2022 question, which raised some concern about the survey's inclusivity.
This was the first year this new question was introduced, and I completely agree that I didn't put in enough work to ensure that the list was accurate and representative.
This was careless on my part and sent the wrong message to an already-minoritized demographic, and I appreciate those who took the time to rightfully call out this oversight. Going forward I will improve the list, and make an effort to clarify and spell out criteria for inclusion for survey items.
Stay Tuned
Stay tuned for part 2 where I:
- Follow-up with Scrimba to know more about their audience.
- Get data for one of the largest e-learning communities around.
- Talk with an independent teacher and creator about how they their personal brand and voice relates to being inclusive.
- Try to identify which "funnel" is responsible for the lack of women in developer surveys.
- Share my overall takeaways.
Until then, let me know what you think of this whole enterprise by leaving a comment here or pinging me on Mastodon – especially if you've got stats of your own you'd like to add to the set!
Update: Part 2 is now available!
Cover image created using Chromata by Michael Bromley.
Thanks to Jeff Delaney, Kyle Cook, Jack Herrington, Jess Chan, Nicole Hiller, Per Harald Borgen, Wes Bos, Kent C. Dodds, Quincy Larson and Josh Comeau for being willing to share their data and feedback.
And huge thanks to Martin Heidegger, Stephanie Tuerk, Jess Chan, Sameera Kapila, and Sophonie Bazile for reviewing drafts of this posts.
Oldest comments (115)
Thanks for looking at this in details. Very interesting.
woow! that is awesome
Awesome! thanks
I wonder, if there was a concerted effort to do outreach to communities of women who program, such as Women Who Code, Girls Who Code, and the many other communities who focus on the demographic, whether more women would fill out the survey. It's asking for a little commitment of time - and many women have many claims on their time, of which this might rank lower than for other groups. In my experience, outreach makes a world of difference
I always try to set aside time for outreach, but sadly –speaking about my own personal experience here– I tend to get a very low response rate to these emails. It makes sense I guess, cold emailing organizations to ask for favors is always a long shot.
Can't say much about cis women, but in trans circles I notice a lot of "thanks for the link but I'm not knowledgeable enough to take that survey" type responses, and it's really annoying sometimes because more often than not that's not true and even if it was, hearing from beginners is valuable information as well (and it's not like cishet male beginners aren't a big part of the respondents anyway)
Maybe a bit more emphasis on the fact that it's not a survey of the leading experts, but anyone who uses the technology on a semi-regular basis could somewhat help in overcoming this, but again, I can't say whether this applies widely or is just a statistical anomaly in my friend group.
I think you already might know this, but you don't have to go this alone. There's a lot of work that can be done just by including others in your process.
I think we've talked before about the inclusion of a11y in the survey, and my offer to help with some of these logistics or just even provide early feedback still applies.
That would be awesome! Would you be able to join our Discord maybe?
This is going to be rather controversial but I will still share my anecdotal experience as coding bootcamp teacher, specializing mostly in frontend and a bit of DevOps, sample size being around 100-150 students, 25% being female identifying. Trainings were mostly remote.
There certainly seem to be some striking differences..
In short, and this is generalizing a fair bit of course, I find female identifying students more close to "average" students, whereas male students are often my worst and also my best students (more active around the extremes).
I also think that in order to thrive as an engineer, you need very strong inherent curiosity about how things work. I am like this, and I usually recognize when others are like this just by having a short conversation with them. I recognize this trait a lot more often with folks who identify as male, and I think this has a fair bit to do with the gender disparity inside the Tech industry, specifically for engineers. This is okay, in a free world we should all be able to choose our profession based on our interest, if that's different between the genders, on average, than that's fine by me. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue our efforts to make tech more inviting to women, because there are probably women out there who would thrive as an engineer, but get discouraged to try, based on societal/cultural norms.
What a time to be alive when stating that men and women have obvious genetic leaning preferences is a controversial idea (that guy from google got fired for it a couple years back) and when we have to speak in terms of "male/female identifying" and can't just say men and women.
I really hope we get past this phase and laugh about the absurdity some day... sigh
It's not language I would normally use, but given the article is written in this language and I am replying to it, I find it basic politeness to try to speak in their language. Reading back what I wrote, I noticed I failed towards the end of my reply to be consistent with it. Oh well..
I definitely wasn't criticizing your use of the language, just that it even needs to be done that way. Everyone is walking on egg shells these days regarding this topic. It's the same in all the other comments here..
I agree that this kind of language feels a bit clunky, and might even come across as non-inclusive as it risks establishing a divide between "women" and "people who identify as women".
In my opinion, we should ideally just talk about "women" or "female" and understand that to mean "people who identify as women", unless we go out of our way to specify "biological women" (and of course, same thing for men).
But since not everybody sees it that way and there is still a lot of ambiguity around this vocabulary, I thought it only prudent to try and be more explicit in my own writing.
Right, the trans folks in my social circle, I just refer to their gender, the one they identify as, and usually dress as (I still think fashion is one of the most reliable ways to determine someone's gender, although asking them instead of assuming is always appreciated in my experience, when uncertain..). I feel like no one in the real world uses "biological women" / "identifying as ..." label. It's just woman/man, no one seems to get so semantic about it unless they're debating "gender ideology" on Twitter or they're afraid of getting lynched online for not adhering to gender language etiquette (like me, tbh).
I've quite literally written a blog post where none of the content was discussed whatsoever, the only focus was on my use of "visually impaired vs normal-visioned" which was considered ableist language (which I understand btw, but come on..). Ironically, my post was meant to share knowledge on accessibility and helping disabled folks, but this intent was completely lost, because people were angry about my choice of words.
Thanks for sharing your experience! The thing I get from your post is that we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that different individuals can have different learning styles – and that gender is of course one of the many factors that can impact said learning style – while at the same time not pigeon-holing anybody solely on that basis.
But I also want to caution against succumbing too much to pattern-matching against our own preferences. For example you say that "in order to thrive as an engineer, you need very strong inherent curiosity about how things work". But I would not describe myself that way, instead my own drive is more along the line of "making cool things, without really caring how they work as long as they do" :)
I realize this doesn't fit the "traditional" mindset of an engineer (and maybe this is why I don't consider myself one despite doing a lot of the same things practically speaking) but I think it can be just as valuable to have more result-oriented people in the mix.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this mindset difference specifically has anything to do with gender, but it's an example where we risk assuming that "all engineers think this way, therefore only people who think that way can be engineers", just like we risk assuming that "all engineers are men, therefore only men can be engineers".
I think it falls in the same category, because in order to build cool things, you must understand how things work well enough to be able to build them. There's a subtle difference between wanting it to just work versus nerding out over how exactly things work "under the hood" in great detail, but I still think that without a basic curiosity of how things work, you wouldn't be motivated to build cool things; you wouldn't think of them as being "cool", you'd merely consider them "useful" as a consumer. The fact that you want to build them rather than only use them, to me, shows this inherent curiosity or intrigue about things and how they work (even if that "how" can be on varying levels).
And yeah I fully agree that we must always be mindful of bias and pigeon-holing, there is more overlap between genders than difference, and the differences are just averages, statistics, generalizations (useful as they may be). Ultimately, individuals must be treated as individuals first.
Thank you Sacha. This inspires me to do more to support women in tech.
Here's my theory - studies have shown women have higher workloads than men, both professionally and at home. They don't have time to be sitting around watching all these YouTubers and whatnot because they've got things to do. I only know about these surveys because a coworker shared them in a group chat years ago and now I get alerts when new surveys come out, so I take them. The dev teams i've been on have been about 60% male/40% female so every time I see ~7% of respondents are female, I chuckle a little and wonder why.
That's just a cognitive bias. The environment you are in does not represent whole industry.
It would be a cognitive bias if I claimed the whole industry had a 60%/40% split (assuming that is what you are referring to). I was simply stating I have always found the difference between the results and my experience interesting. A quick Google search shows the actual breakdown is more like ~75%/25%, which is still far off from the survey results.
Yes according to the data gathered by Sacha, a perfect balance is probably not achievable, as the distribution at industry-level is itself skewed. In the short run, I think we should aim for a minimum 10% of non-male respondents to produce more representative results, and ideally start a virtuous circle.
That's a good point! I think having children especially puts more stress on women compared to men. I know that studies have shown that kids impact women's career more than men's overall, and I wouldn't be surprised if that same kind of pattern also affected the demographics studied in the article.
A similar point came up in a discussion about why there was a majority of male applicants wanting to speak at conferences and meetups. The organizer said they observed that men were more likely to abandon their chores and care work in favor of preparing a talk, prioritizing their ego over family duties.
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