Co-Creation Hub is where I spend a huge chunk of my week, and if you ever visit the tech incubation space at Yaba, Lagos, it is almost always packed with developers, designers, aspiring founders, and bloggers that have one thing in common – gender – male. Perhaps the reason why heads turn every time a female drops by – not to say there are no one (maybe two) female developer that come in on a daily basis, but with time they acquire the ‘one-of-us’ status.
Geeks In Pink Are Scarce – It’s Everywhere
This is not unique to the Co-Creation Hub, but seem to be a trend across the African tech landscape; I am currently compiling profiles of tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria and I just have 3 females on list of 50, and I don’t even think these 3 can code but rather work in managerial roles. True, the global tech scene is male dominated, but there is good ration of female-in-tech outside of Africa: Y-Combinator, Disrupt, and Silicon Valley as a whole, often have one or two female developers and founders making the headlines, same goes for Asia and South America.
Maybe it’s now time for Africa, and I think it’s high time we started seeing more female-in-tech (not just users of tech), especially after watching the African Developers at Google IO video, as well as meeting with a duo-team of Nigerian developers at the Co-Creation Hub sometime last week – Uyoyo and Tolu. I’d be doing a follow up piece on them but for now to the question –where are the geeks in the pink?
Where Are The African Female Developers?
I want to make a big assumption and say there are almost as many females as males (if not more) in IT department of Universities and colleges. So one can only ask, where do all the females go after graduation? There are also programs such as Google Student Ambassadors – and every batch’s got a good number of females. So what happens afterwards?
Well, your guess is as good as mine. They are in IT departments at software companies, at least those that decided to stick with IT after school. Others cross over to sales, marketing, and other managerial roles within or without the tech space. Not to say females are inferior developers, because they are not. In fact you may want to go check the top of the class and students with the better grades in IT. Yes, females top the list. So, why not just go on to rock the tech space as startup founders – that can code?
I am no female, so I talked to a few that I considered developers and prospective tech startup founders. One of these ladies can code but decided to close that page. Another took up a managerial role at a tech startup, leaving coding to male members of the team, and the last pair – Uyoyo and Tolu are trying to find the right time to quit as employees to run their tech startup full time.
I’d be sharing my conversations with these ladies in follow up posts as well. Know any African female developers out there worth chatting with, I won’t mind such a lead. Contrary to Bankole Oluwafemi’s post, I think any African female developer who is actually developing in the tech space deserves digital high fives.
