The gender bias is also deep-rooted, according to a paper published in July by researchers at California Polytechnic State University and North Carolina State University.
They found that when a female programmer in the US contributed to an open-source project, the work was more likely to be accepted by their peers than contributions by men, but only if the people judging the work were unaware that the programmer was female. The same work was more likely to be rejected if their gender was made public.
The researchers suggested that female programmers are at least as competent and sometimes more skilled than the average programmer on GitHub, one of the world's largest web-based hosts of source code. "It shows that women face a giant hurdle of 'gender bias' when other people assess their work," they said.
Kang, the recruitment expert, said 100 offer is optimistic that its report will attract greater attention to the income disparity between male and female software engineers.
"The situation will only improve when more female programmers join the workforce. We also need events to motivate female coders and entrepreneurs to speak up," she said.
Proficiency is paramount
However, not all female programmers have found the gender bias so obvious.
Zhang Danli, a 32-year-old who works for Mtime, an online movie portal, said gender only plays a minor part, and programming proficiency determines a person's position in the workplace.
"Some startups might prefer young, male programmers because they are more adaptable to working extra hours. But for some major corporations, gender is no longer an issue," said Zhang, who has changed employers three times in the last six years.
Su Xunbo, Zhang's team leader who is responsible for the development and maintenance of Mtime's app, said female programmers offer diversity to his team, which is composed of two women and six men.
"Programmers' meetings can be at daggers drawn. In the midst of red faces and even clenched fists, a woman's voice can have a surprising effect, including the power to calm everyone down," he said.
However, Wen Yang, from Coding Girls Club, said his organization believes that women deserve the right to use programming as a springboard for their careers, and it has set a target to provide programming training to 1,000 women across China in the next three years.
"Programming is essentially an intellectual activity, an area with no gender differences. We believe there is a trend by which the gender imbalance will disappear in the future," he said.
"It is a not a matter of whether it will happen, but when it will happen."
