Another barrier for women is the fact that there are few obvious female role models in popular culture for young girls. Girls can see witty women in lab coats who use science to catch the bad guys on TV shows like CSI, but they have yet to see an intelligent, well- adjusted female programmer creating a cool app on the big screen.

“I think confidence in yourself is the biggest thing to have going into the tech industry.

“I thought that was a really fun thing about programming,” she explains, “looking into all these tiny problems and try­ing to solve them.”

“W hen women enter university, it’s just like, well look at all the boys, they’ve been doing this since they were 12. How am I ever going to catch up?”

14,000 women left the industry, compared to 2,000 men— and they still make up less than a quarter of core tech positions.

in her computer science course, her classmates occa­sionally stole her chair and keyboard and defaced her computer. “Only me,” she recalls with a bit of a laugh.

Multiple papers and statistics suggest the percentage of women in programming was at its highest between the 1960s and the early 1980s. But in the following years that number declined sharply.

According to writer Lois Mandel, there were already 20,000 women working in computer pro­gramming, and there was a need for just as many more.

Instead she kept pushing. “I had to,” she says. “I t ’s my career; i t ’s w hat I ’ve studied for. I w anted to do the best in my job to show people th a t I can, so I have som ething to show for myself.”

But the struggle to continually prove herself was tiring and was a factor in h e r decision to em igrate to C an ad a when she was 29