Women are often typecast as front-end developers, specializing in the somehow more feminine work of design, user experience, and front-end coding.Īre women really more likely to be front-end developers? Numbers are hard to pin down. Real programmers work on the back-end, with “serious” programming languages. Front-end dev work isn’t real engineering, the story goes. I spoke to a number of developers who confirmed something I’d sensed: for some time, the technology industry has enforced a distinct hierarchy between front-end and back-end development. But while the line shifts depending on who you’re talking to, most developers acknowledge its existence. In practice, the distinction is murky: some developers refer to everything user-facing as the front-end, including databases and applications, and some developers use front-end to mean only what the user sees. There are people who design and implement what you see in your web browser, there are people who do the programming that works behind the scenes, and there are people who do it all. The partition between the two “ends” is the web itself.

But even if we confine ourselves to web development, technical people often distinguish among “front-end,” “back-end,” and “full-stack” development. Of course there are PR, HR, and management roles. It’s not always obvious to outsiders, but the term “technology sector” is a catch-all for a large array of distinct jobs. Recently, though, I’ve noticed something strange: the women who are so assiduously learning to code seem to be devaluing certain tech roles simply by occupying them.

I’ve participated in some of these get-women-to-code workshops myself, and I sometimes encourage my students to get involved. The underrepresentation of women in technical fields has spawned legions of TED talks, South by Southwest panels, and women-friendly coding boot camps. Technology has a gender problem, as everyone knows.

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