Zhang Danli (right), a 32-year-old female software engineer, works with a colleague at the offices of Mtime, an online movie portal in Beijing.Zou Hong / China Daily
Independent clubs are addressing the gender imbalance that discriminates against women in China's tech sector.
The question software engineer Wang Jing is asked most frequently focuses not on how a person learns to write code, but how a woman learns to write code.
Wang, a 28-year programmer for a video-hosting service in Beijing, said people's curiosity about how she managed to land a job as a programmer is almost troubling.
"They ask 'How on earth did you become a programmer'? and 'How on earth did you land this job'?" she said.
However, the fact that she is one of just five woman programmers in a team of more than 60 also gives her a very special role, one she describes as a "mood blender" - someone who can neutralize a staid, nerdish atmosphere.
Wang believes that women can add a feminine influence to the male-dominated workplace, even though her workload is no less taxing than those of her male counterparts.
"No offense, but some programmers are just nerdish people. They don't know how to live life, but women do. We can offer snacks when the team is working overtime and decide the location of dinner parties," she said.
Outnumbered
Wang's workplace is typical of a sector long dominated by men, even though women occupy well-placed technical positions.
The gender imbalance in the industry is evidenced by several independent reports conducted and published by programming websites in China.
According to statistics released in October by 100 offer, a website that provides employment opportunities for software engineers, men outnumber women by 4-to-1.
A report published in 2014 by Codeforge, a source-code sharing website, showed that only 20 percent of programmers in China are female.
The Codeforge report, which polled more than 1 million programmers, also found that the gender imbalance is driven by the nature of the job, including the irregular lifestyle that results from the frequent need to work extra hours.
Wen Yang, who started the Coding Girls Club, an organization in Beijing that offers free programming seminars and training courses for women, said the unfair treatment of women in the sector is not obvious until it comes to salaries.
"Mostly, this unfair treatment is not obvious or palpable. The ideological indoctrination that women are not suitable to work as programmers and have poor logical thinking is behind the gender imbalance in the industry," he said.
"This ideology and indoctrination is a form of bias in the strongest and most far-reaching way."
