Finding the right code for success

A nonprofit online learning community is looking to make a big difference in China by setting up an incubator to nurture and nourish the dreams of women aspiring to a career in China's rapidly growing internet information industry.

CXY61, an online education startup, is not only looking to teach women coding skills and provide seed capital to make their entrepreneurial dreams a reality, but also address the vast gender disparity in the sector. According to Proginn, a research platform, the ratio of male to female developers in China was about 12:1 last year.

Chen Bin, the Chinese entrepreneur behind CXY61, often called Uncle Bin by his students, said the primary objective behind the new online learning community is to empower women. "There are very few women in the internet information industry. They account for just 10 percent, or at most 30 percent of the staff in a top tech company. The ratio is even smaller in the middle and top management sections," said Chen.

Chen started his nonprofit online learning community project, Chengxuyuan - Teach Girls Coding in 2017. Currently it has over 200,000 members - not exactly a big number, but already the world's biggest female coding teaching community.

"Demand for coding professionals and knowledge is increasing steadily as there are growing concerns that jobs currently done by people will be done by machines. That aside, demand has risen as more industries are becoming aware of women power," said Chen.

According to Chen, the main purpose behind the project was not to create an army of female programmers, but to empower women with more career choices. "To further this we will recruit more management staff for the platform and introduce funds to give wings to the dreams of prospective entrepreneurs."

"I have a student who was in high school and expressed interest and passion for coding, but her family would not let her choose it as a major subject in university," he said. "Most families are still locked in the old mindset that a quiet office job is more stable and suitable for a woman."

Chen's fears are not baseless as the issue is a global one. Recently Muneer Bano, a lecturer in software engineering at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, published an article stating that the data used to train AI programmers are often gender-biased.

Bano said that while AI programs themselves are not biased, humans can inadvertently train them to be. AI can make it worse with its superior computing power, she said.

Chen and his project have achieved some positive outcomes and international attention after a year's effort. His platform has women aged from 4 to 60 and most of them want to learn other skills and be more competitive in the future. Some of them have managed to switch to the internet information industry.