When Dora Palfi worked at her first job as a developer, she was referred to simply as “the girl on the seventh floor”—because there were no other women developers.
Dora’s experience is hardly isolated. Even in countries like Sweden, where a myth of gender parity persists, women represent less than a fifth of the tech workforce.
One cause of this gender imbalance may be what happens to girls at around age 15. At that point, even girls who were enthralled by STEM topics early in their schooling seem to lose interest. Thus begins a vicious cycle. The scarcity of women in tech means that girls who would be interested in technology-related fields are deterred from entering the industry by the gender gap. Even Dora, who remained interested in tech and studied human-computer interaction in college, says, “there were not a lot of role models.”