Today is the newly created ‘Ada Lovelace Day‘ (AdaLovelaceDay09), to celebrate women in technology, and I thought it apt to look question why in over 5 years of professional web development I have never encountered a female developer. Given the fact that there was only a handful of girls on my computer science course at university this didn’t really surprise me. And then I started to look a little deeper…

As part of AdaLovelaceDay09 people have pledged to blog about a ‘woman in technology who they admire’ . The blogs are really starting to rack up and some can be viewed on the mash up. It’s well worth a browse through as it’s true, women in technology do tend to disappear beneath the radar.

I found some stats to suggest that roughly 25% of web developers are female. However, we all know that 99% of statistics are made up so we’ll take that with a pinch of salt! After a quick Google I can also see that there are a shed load of websites out there dedicated to female developers and designers. The internet is such a huge part of modern day life and it’s use is widespread across genders, ethnic and socio-economic groups, so why does this not knock on to the people behind the web?

I would be really interested to hear from female developers out there on their experiences of the industry.