Melek Elmas is only one of the female programmers suffering from drawbacks of working in a male-dominated industry. "Your resume seems fine but we prefer a male programmer because I don't think that women are suitable for flexible schedules," one employer told Elmas - just one event among many that shattered the young woman's dream of becoming a code writer - a line of work that she had been training for since 2003. Having studied coding in her high school years, she graduated from the Computer Technologies and Coding Department in 2009 at Istanbul Commerce University, even taking private courses on coding and database.To no effect.. Elmas remains sour to judgements based on her gender rather than her skills. "I was pretty much annoyed by this stance. That's why I decided to change my career path despite the fact that I have trained as a coder and love this job," says Elmas, 27, who now works on search engine optimization for websites. Elmas's experience captures the numerous challenges that effect female coders around the globe and also in Turkey. Made of words, numbers, brackets - incomprehensible in layman's terms - code directs programs to accomplish set tasks.Behind any shiny graphic interface, complex computer game and smartphone app, there is coding. The computer world, and specifically coding, has long been considered a male-dominated environment. Figures appear to support this.A 2013 survey indicated that 11.2 percent of software developers worldwide were women. Moreover, the U.S. research suggested that women faced double standards even though they turned out to generally be better at coding than men.According to research on GitHub - one of the largest open-source software communities in the world - 78.6 percent of proposed code changes made by women were accepted compared with 74.6 percent of those made by men. When these women revealed their identity, the rate dropped to 62.5 percent. The researchers concluded that bias against female code writers "exists."In Turkey, the percentage of female code writers surpasses 20 percent, according to Nuri Ödemiş, the vice president of the Istanbul-based IT and Software Authors Association (BIYESAM).At least 160,000 coders have been employed by the Turkish software sector, Doğan Ufuk Güneş, the chairman of Istanbul-based Software Industrialists Association (YASAD), told Anadolu Agency (AA). At the national level, there has been no academic study or survey on whether or not women programmers face prejudice. But, female code writers and prominent figures of the industry speak of a rampant bias against women. "I can say that there has been discrimination against women within the sector," Ödemiş told Anadolu Agency.Ödemiş believes the reason for this bias is a reflection on the problems within society. Özge Kasap, a 28-year-old programmer, conceded that regardless of the working environment, being a woman is a challenge, in general. "During a job interview, an employer questions a woman's plans to marry or to have a child. I did not hear such questions being asked to male candidates," Kasap noted.Elmas stated that her story represents prejudice against female programmers during the hiring process. Another problem facing women in coding stems from a tendency for male workers to stick together in a sort of comradery. Ödemiş said that male workers tended to isolate the typically lone-female worker. Kasap added that she heard of other female coders switching departments due to pressure from male workers or because their ideas were not well considered. "If a person is a good coder, gender should not make a difference," Kasap said. Software Industrialists Association Chairman Güney argued, however, that the software sector is the most convenient place for female workers. "Our work is free from time and place. You don't have to be here to do the job. A woman coder can work from home even if she gets pregnant," Güney said.Despite existing difficulties, Elmas and Kasap were confident that a bright future awaited tech-savvy women. Elmas said the solidarity of self-confident women among female coders has begun to flourish. Ph.D. candidate Kasap said that she observed the number of girls enrolled in the coding department surpass that of male students. "When I enrolled at university [in 2009], we were the only two girls in the Coding Engineering Department [at Istanbul-based Bahçeşehir University]," Kasap said. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Education revealed that it had set up a commission to revise coding class to teach programming at an early age. Coding will be taught at middle school, according to senior officials of the ministry.In recent years, Turkish girls have outperformed boys at the central university placement exams. Nationwide results released in March 2015 showed that, for example, 72 percent of girls scored the 180 points needed to apply for the second round of Turkey's national university entrance exam. Only 66 percent of boys made the grade, according to the government-run Measurement, Selection and Placement Center. Not only are girls outscoring boys in tests, they are also enrolling into universities in higher numbers. "In the future, I believe there will be successful female coders whose names will be written in gold letters," Kasap said.