Hackerrank 2018 Survey Analysis — Gender focused Insights

Competitive Coding Platform Hackerrank conducted a survey with its developers and below is the insights from analysing the dataset that was opensourced by Hackerrank on Kaggle Datasets platform.

About the dataset and Survey

• A total of 25,090 professional and student developers completed our 10-minute online survey.
• The survey was live from October 16 through November 1, 2017.
• The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey and we recruited respondents via email from our community of over 3.4 million members and through social media sites.

Focus of this Analysis

While this is a general survey dataset, the focus of this analysis is to understand Women in Tech.

Highlights

• A very clear action is to motivate and appreciate Girls code from the early age. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have started coding while they were in high school. Organizations working to improve diversity in Tech should start right from there. School. Also Parents should be educated of how important it is for their Girl child to code

• Computer Science degree has been perceived as something that Boys do well. Universities need to market Computer Science Degree for all. It should make girls believe that it’s something that’s definitely their cup of Tea. University CS Degree Marketing Also adding mandatory Female quota to improve diversity in the classroom could help.
• Proportion of Female Students seemed to be improving with respect to the past. It’s very important to preserve them, hone them and take them forward without them dropping off due to lack of proper mentorship. Hence, Community like Hacker Rank should organize Coding Awareness events among those to ensure them their confidence.

• Developing Nations — especially African nations are leading in Female-to-Male Ratio. A specific survey targeted at them and also a focus group discussion with them could help us with take away to improve the larger community.
• Helping Women move up in ther Career from Junior Developer to Senior Developer is important. That’s exactly the time when they’re filled with many commitments in their personal life. It’s important to push organizations that want to improve diversity to push Sabbatical for those women who want a long leave of absence with a surity of a job when they come back and also to emrbace Women into jobs after a career gap.

• Adding up to the above point, Enabling Remote/Flexible Working environment will also help the larger goal.
• Defining a clear learning path for new comers — espcially with respect to the langauge that’s on demand in the market — Javascript / Python. I’m obliged to mention that Freecodecamp does an amazing job in that — for completely free.
• While teaching to code, It’s important to promote maintain an online portfolio like github or a blog. Because as Cal Newport says, “If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive”. Hence the projects (mini/major) or any other work of them either in the form of code or a blog post should be made published online.
• Along with the technical skills, It’s also clear that hiring managers look for the ability to communicate well and to learn new. That makes it important to help those new learns, learn such Soft Skills.

Meta:

The above insights have been derived from the analysis performed using Rmarkdown hosted on Kaggle Kernel. The analysis uses R programming for data analysis and highcharter an R wrapper around highchart.js javascript library to interactive plots.