You code well, for a girl
I first heard these words four years ago on my first internship. I had just finished my second year of my bachelor studies on Business Informatics. I had applied for a one month internship at a software development company and I was accepted.
This was a web design & web development company that worked with e-commerce websites. They got the templates for their websites and they edited and adjusted them according to their customers tastes. So, the guys that worked there, coded on the tough side, the backend. I was the only girl programmer there.
The first week and a half they showed me around what they worked with and how they arranged their work. I got to see how they did stand ups each day, how they used project tracking websites, how they used the Agile workflow and how they participated in sprints. I also got short reviews from each of the guys working there about what their work consisted of on a daily basis.
I had said in my application that I was interested to work on frontend development so they arranged a task for me. They gave me a pdf of a websites’ homepage and I had to create it using html and css only. So I had to create just the design with no functionalities. The website just had to be responsive. I was given some hints about how to work around the task. I had to work on creating components and work on them individually. Such as finishing the header completely before continuing with the rest of the page. At the end of the day I had to complete a document about what I had accomplished that day, what I found challenging and what I would continue to do next. Most of my challenging columns were filled with: “Having to make it responsive”.
Finally, I finished creating this website for a week and a half. One of the supervisors kept asking if I did it myself…
They got me a second page now, a bit more complicated than the first one. I didn’t get to finish that while I was interning there because my one month internship was over. They offered me to extend my internship but at the time I decided to focus on my vacations and going back to school. I didn’t give the right importance to it. Thinking back, I should have stayed to learn more.
However, one day when I was about to leave I was chatting with one of the guys who supervised my work and gave me advice on it. He told me: “Well, you did pretty well on your first internship. I didn’t expect it from a girl!” I asked him why he was discriminating and he said “My girlfriend is also learning programming and she struggles a lot.” I was really surprised to hear those words. The fact that he and other people expected for my skills to be worse just because I am a girl really stuck with me.
We as girls are judged even before we have the chance to prove ourselves and our abilities. It can become frustrating at times that we aren’t seen as equal with a guy, not only in programming but usually in all STEM fields. But we can’t let this get to us. At least I didn’t.
This and maybe other prejudices only inspired me to challenge myself more and choose the hard work instead of giving up. I decided to focus more on the Informatics part of my degree than that of the Business and continued my masters degree on Software Engineering.
I am very glad that I did. After many software development internships, I now work on a company as a software development, mostly programming iOS applications with Swift Programming Language. In order to further extend my knowledge in Swift, which I have a lot of interest on, I created a blog in order to share and track what I learn, and also inspire other girls to learn programming! You can check it out here swiftcodergirl.com
