According to a study posted on HackerRank today the best women coders as judged by performance on HackerRank challenges come from Russia, Italy, and Poland. The U.S. placed 14th. Countries with largest proportions of women coders participating in the challenges are India, United Arab Emirates, and Romania. The U.S. was eleventh.
Attracting women to STEM careers generally and HPC specifically is an ongoing challenge although progress is being made (see HPCwire interview: A Conversation with Women in HPC Director Toni Collis). In the HackerRank study, roughly 17 percent of all coders participating in its challenges are women. Interestingly, the 17 percent figure roughly mirrors the proportion of women in technical positions at Google (17 percent) and Facebook (15 percent) according to HackerRank.
As with all such studies, this one must be read with a grain of salt. “We began our analysis with an attempt to assess exactly how many HackerRank test takers are female. Though we don’t collect gender data from our users, we were able to assign a gender to about 80% of users based on their first name. We did not include first names with equal gender distributions,” reports HackerRank
To determine the top performers, HackerRank reviewed scores on algorithms challenges, which account for more than 40 percent of all HackerRank tests. Algorithms challenges include sorting data, dynamic programming, searching for keywords, and other logic-based tasks. “Scores typically range from 0 to 115 points, although scores can reach as high as 10,000. We examined the 20 countries with the most female users in order to have large sample sizes. Russia’s female developers, who only account for 7.8 percent of Russian HackerRank users, top the list with an average score of 244.7 on algorithms tests,” according to the blog.
More details can be found in the full blog: https://www.hackerrank.com/work/tech-recruiting-insights/blog/female-developers