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Comment by domano | Hacker News Reader

I gave a few workshops on golang development in Jordan and what i noticed is that women were much more common in the comp sci department. They also were way more interested in the topic- is the situation in gaza similiar? This was really refreshing to see

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Yup! In Palestine 52% of CS students are women. In Tunisia 62%. In Qatar 80%. This is one of the main reasons Laila and I decided to launch Manara. :) Our 5th cohort (the one after Dalia's... they're just starting to hunt for internships & jobs now) is 100% women by the way! They're a mix of interns, junior engineers, and mid-level engineers.

A bit of our story in case it's interesting: I was working at Upwork with an engineering team that could hire talent from anywhere in the world... and still our engineers were almost all men from Eastern Europe. I loved them but also missed having a more diverse team and worried that our company wasn't going to be competitive... diverse teams usually outperform non-diverse was, and for a company like Upwork, being familiar with users around the world is critical.

I had met Laila in Gaza. Like Dalia, she studied computer engineering there. She moved to Silicon Valley in 2016.

In 2017 (or was it 2018? hard to remember now) we started working nights and weekends on what we thought would be an all-volunteer side project to connect the talent we knew from Palestine to employers in Silicon Valley. Already in our 2nd cohort someone got into Google. That's when we realized we had created something that worked. Last October we couldn't keep up with helping Cohort #4 search for internships & jobs (that's the one Dalia was in) and training Cohort #5 so I took the plunge and started working on Manara full-time. :)

Wow thanks for the detailed answer!

Can you point to reasons why IT is not as male-dominated in those countries?

Best wishes to you both. Solidarity forever.

In my experience, pretty much everywhere else out of the US you will find plenty of women in STEM. Admittedly not 50% but it’s certainly much more common.

Wow, it really irks me that truthful comments that add something to the discussion gets down votes as soon as it is stating anything that could maybe be construed as negative against the US.

I am from germany so this is at least not just a US thing.

Isn't it well known that there are way more male IT people in all western countries?

In my experience that's not the case in quite many countries. Most of western Europe is the same as the US though it varies from country to country; e.g. the nordics are a bit better on this front then e.g. Germany or my home country the Netherlands. I suspect most of South America has similar demographics.

As far as I know Asia is generally better on this front I suspect it has a lot to do with women being more interested in things that give them economic opportunities.

This is something driven by women themselves. IMHO women are actually also part of the problem in the west. There seems to be a dynamic where women self select out of career paths long before they would even be in a position to be subjected to the type of workplace abuse that is often blamed for this. Don't get me wrong, that abuse needs to be fought and challenged and rooted out. But it's not going to be enough.

You see similar dynamics across many developing nations where women empower themselves by taking on anything that earns money. Many of these countries are otherwise pretty conservative/unremarkable when it comes to women rights and arguably a lot worse than most of the west. But that doesn't seem to stop women being successful doing all sorts of things for which many high-school girls would pull up their noses.

70% of STEM graduates in Iran are women.

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...

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