Software and Math being “male-dominated” is such a BS!
Software engineering and mathematics being “male-dominated” is such a BS! Every time I hear anything like “Women are just not interested in STEM” or “There are just no women with skills in these areas”, I call BS! You are just biased towards arrogance and hype than actual skill!
My mom was a software engineer. And her best friends as well as her social circle were all software engineers. Back when she was a student, her Faculty of Applied Mathematics (FAM) was jokingly nicknamed “Faculty Abandoned by Men” because women made up over 70% of the students. My mom wrote software that Belarusian post office probably is using to this day. I remember her coming home from work at the Computing Equipment Factory and brainstorming how to make a machine draw a circle when it only moves in 2 directions. She loved a challenge, and sometimes checked out my programming assignments in Assembler(!) when I became a student at that same faculty. She never felt like a minority in her field.
Computational sciences being female-dominated is not a thing of the past. During my studies, my specialization “Theory of Probabilities and Mathematical Statistics” (the foundation of modern AI) had 10 girls and 4 boys. The “Deep Learning” course back then was called “Theory of Statistical Decision-Making”.
During my PhD, students specializing in bioinformatics were all girls (oddly, from Eastern European background).
What I’ve noticed is that women don’t BS. They’re realistic about their abilities, openly acknowledge weaknesses, and always give credit where it’s due. They recognize the contributions of others in the success of a team or project.
So, if you’re struggling to hire women for your software engineering or ML/AI team, the problem isn’t a lack of talent — it’s your hiring process. If you can’t find female founders to invest in, your scouting process is filtering them out. If your team is overwhelmingly male, your search process might be prioritizing hype over skill and meticulous execution.
#gendergap #femalefounders #softwareengineering #bioinformatics #ai #vc #invest
