Gender representation among engineers

Gender of all engineers on cord

Among all engineers on cord, 81.71% are male, 18.21% are female and 0.08% are genderqueer/non-binary/other ("non-binary").

According to data provided by companies that use cord, 41.07% of the workforce of the average tech company is female. It is important to note that this information is gathered via an optional field which, at time of writing, 78 out of 689 companies with cord subscriptions had completed. It also includes all functions, including completely non-technical fields such as Sales, Marketing, HR, Finance etc. that don't currently have any representation as jobseekers ("engineers") on cord.

Engineers using cord are are required to have experience working a technical or product role in a technology company in the UK, EU or US, with the majority of people being software developers. This means this data is highly reliable and relevant for other people who match this criteria, as opposed to other sources that often cover the “Technology industry” as a whole. It is therefore felt that the data discussed here gives a unique insight into gender representation among people working in Tech and Product-specific roles.

Gender of engineers on cord by function

Product & Design is the most gender-diverse function, with 32.13% female engineers and 0.17% non-binary. Infrastructure has the lowest levels of gender diversity, with just 10.57% female engineers and 0.09% non-binary.

13.07% of developers are female, and 0.09% are non-binary.

Gender of developers on cord by job title

Note: any person who uses cord to find work is referred to as an "engineer". "Developers," in this context, refers to all engineers who work in a specifically Development-focused position.

Front End is the most diverse job title among developers, with 16.36% female engineers and 0.12% non-binary. Back End is the least diverse, with 11.84% female engineers and 0.07% non-binary.

Gender of engineers on cord by seniority

There is evidence that female representation in tech is improving over time, as female representation is inversely correlated to seniority. 26.41% of entry-level engineers, 23.87% of junior, 21.74% mid-level, and 15.73% senior engineers are female (across all functions). Managerial positions don't appear to reflect the diversity of the workforce as a whole, with just 13.12% and 12.32% of lead and leadership engineers, respectively, being female.

There is no strong correlation between non-binary representation and seniority, possibly thanks to the small sample size of non-binary engineers.

Gender of engineers on cord by years' experience

Examining gender representation by years' experience supports the notion that more inexperienced engineers are more likely to be female. From 0-9 years' experience, representation of female engineers falls steadily from 24.96% to 17.05%. From here there are occasional jumps (for example, engineers with 11 years' experience are 16.45% female), but overall the downward trend continues as years' experience increases. Just 9.39% of all engineers with 20+ years' experience are female.

Again, probably due to small sample size, there was no strong correlation between years' experience and non-binary representation.

Demand

Despite being under-represented in the industry as a whole, female and non-binary engineers appear to be more in-demand than male counterparts based on the number of message requests they receive, on average, from companies.

Note that, in this article, "message requests" counts approaches received by engineers from companies, regardless of whether or not the engineer accepted the request.

Engineer demand by gender and function

In all functions, non-binary engineers appear more in-demand than males or females, receiving more message requests per engineer in each. Across all functions, females received more message requests, on average, than males, except for in Data where male and female engineers received an average of 2.4 message requests each.

The average female developer received 7.4 message requests compared to 11.1 received by non-binary developers and 6.1 received by male developers.

Developer demand by gender and job title

The same trend holds true among each Development job title, with non-binary Front End developers receiving, on average, 13.8 message requests each compared to 9.1 per female Front End developer and 8.4 per male Front End developer.
Male Back End developers receive an average of 5.4 message requests per engineer, compared to 6.8 per female Back End developer and 10.7 per genderqueer/non-binary Back End developer.

Engineer demand by gender and skillset

Across all of the 10 most popular primary skills on cord, females received more message requests on average than males, indicating that females are more sought-after by companies than males with equivalent skillsets (with the exception of Python, where male and female engineers receive on average 4.0 messages each).

Data regarding number of message requests received by non-binary engineers by primary skill is erratic, likely due to the small sample size.

Note: primary skills are selected by engineers who create cord profiles. Each engineer can select more than one primary skill.

Engineer demand by gender and seniority

At entry and junior levels, females receive more message requests than males. However, at mid-level male and female engineers receive the same number on average, while from senior to leadership level male engineers receive more message requests on average than females.

Genderqueer/non-binary engineers receive more message requests than male or female engineers at every seniority level.

Key Insights

• 18.21% of engineers on cord are female. 0.08% are non-binary

• Female representation is highest among junior engineers and decreases with seniority

• In Development, Infrastructure and Product & Design female engineers receive, on average, more message requests per engineer than male, while in Data they receive the same amount.

Data Disclaimer

Data refers to 79,525 engineers across all locations (primarily London, Europe/Remote, and New York) on cord.

Gender is determined by one of two methods. All engineers are given the opportunity to self-ID. Roughly one quarter of engineers do so. The remainder have been assigned a gender (male or female) by a third-party predictive API (https://namsor.app/) based on their name. The API makes mistakes, but is accurate in 90-95% of cases.

Messages received data refers to the lifetime message count for these engineers - i.e. the total number of message requests each engineer has received from creating their cord profile.