The company I work for, Mendix, is a software development platform.  What’s unique is that it is based on low-code, a visual approach to delivering enterprise applications, and we’ve be at it for over a decade. Low-code is a hip buzz word these days, and for good reason: Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 70% of new apps will be developed with low-code, up from less than 25% in 2020. Even industries traditionally slow to adopt new technology, like Manufacturing and Insurance, are jumping on board.

Last week, I was chatting with a colleague about the intersection of low-code and diversity.  I made a simple comment – “Back when Mendix World was in person, there was a line for the ladies’ room…” – and their eyes widened.  They knew exactly what I meant.  It was a shibboleth for women at conferences – meaning, “this conference had so many women, you had to wait for the bathroom.”  To spell it out: this is incredibly unusual.

Since that experience, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which low-code might be a major catalyst to the long-overdue diversification of tech.  Was this bathroom line indicative of a shift in the tech population, or just an accidental moment that I’m reading too much into?

I am optimistic that low-code may be an area of tech – of software development in particular – that invites a more diverse population to participate.  There are a few reasons why: 

1. 1. The raison d’être of low-code is to democratize software development and its associated domains. The whole idea of this discipline (movement?) is that more people can participate in software development because it provides an additional layer of abstraction from the nitty-gritty.  So the barrier to entry is much lower than it has been with traditional software development.
   2. People who work on low-code projects are usually closer to, or at least more exposed to, the business need or problem they are trying to solve. This rewards delivering business value rather than rewarding lines of code or creating and managing esoteric complexity.  (A little diversion here – geeking out can be cool, too.  I like to reminisce about having written a Scheme interpreter in Scheme back in college, which is more recursion than most people want to deal with. But when esoteric complexity and geek cred become the only yardstick by which contribution is measured, a less diverse workforce rises to the top.)
   3. More low-code developers come from backgrounds either in a business discipline (like marketing or legal) or a data analysis background (like BI or Ops).  Both of these areas have significantly more women than traditional software development. If low-code is really the next wave of software development, the fact that it is sourcing talent from more diverse areas of the business is good news for the diversity of the future workforce.   

And lest we forget – the urgency to diversify software development has never been greater.  More software will be delivered in the next five years than had been in the last twenty years.  Even if all that software could be delivered by a mostly homogenous workforce (which it can’t, no matter how fast people can code), the increasing role software will play in every domain – from healthcare to education to finance – means we can no longer accept AI models trained on homogenous datasets or user behavior interpretations that tacitly assume demographics about their users.

Look, (most) software developers aren’t evil. I truly believe that most developers are trying to deliver the best code that they can. But someone has to be in the room to say, “that gender field needs to be perpetually editable” or “that AI model is assuming skin tone is lighter than eye color,” and low-code is a mechanism that opens the door for more people to enter that room.

Low-code is not a panacea – just like it won’t solve all the challenges of software development without accompanying cultural change, it also won’t unilaterally solve tech’s diversity problem. But it wedges the door open a bit more, makes a little more space at the table, and puts a broader set of people who want to participate in software development in a position to do so.