The All Girls Programming Contest, held on Wednesday at Dhaka University’s Institute of Information Technology, was won by Faria Ahmed of the Islamic University of Technology. Nishat Tasnim and Sadia Jahan, both of the Military Institute of Science and Technology, took second and third. At the school and college level the winner was S M Sabikun Mim of Jalalabad Cantonment Public School and College in Sylhet. The three top finishers received cash prizes; every winner received a certificate.
The top ten
Fourth to tenth were Umme Habiba (BUET), Atia Maisha (East West University), Taufika Bhuiyan (Jahangirnagar University), Mahrin Afroz and Nabiha Tahsin (both BUET), Lamia Rahman Khan (Jagannath University) and Meherin Nisha (North South University) — seven universities in the top ten, public and private, which is itself a sign of how far competitive programming has spread beyond BUET.
Who ran it, and why
The contest was organised by the IIT Girls Community of Dhaka University together with the Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN), as part of Luna Shamsuddoha ICT Week. Luna Shamsuddoha, who died in 2021, founded Dohatec New Media in 1992, built the government’s e-procurement system and was the first woman to chair a state-owned bank in Bangladesh; BdOSN marks her memory each year with a week of events for women in technology. Professor Lafifa Jamal of DU’s robotics and mechatronics department said the contest exists to give women a place to show their coding skill and to compete against other coders; BdOSN general secretary Munir Hasan said it honours Shamsuddoha’s work for the country’s ICT sector.
Why a women-only contest
Because the open ones are not, in practice, open. Women are roughly a fifth of computer-science students in Bangladesh and a far smaller fraction of contest participants; at the national ICPC preliminaries a women’s team is rare enough to be photographed. The all-girls format works like a training ground — the same problems, the same judge, the same clock, without the crowd that persuades many first-year women that this is not for them. Its graduates turn up, a year or two later, in the mixed contests, which is the point.
Where the pipeline actually leaks
Bangladesh does not have a shortage of women entering computing. Enrolment in CSE departments has risen for two decades and women now make up a substantial share of first-year intakes at the public universities. The attrition happens later, and in two identifiable places.
The first is competitive programming itself, which is how Bangladeshi students signal ability to employers and how ICPC teams are formed. Training happens in long evening sessions in labs and in informal groups that assemble themselves — both of which select heavily for students who can stay late and who are already inside a circle of friends who code. A first-year woman who is the only one in the room usually stops turning up, and the gap compounds every semester after that.
The second is the first job. Software work here concentrates in a few areas of Dhaka, is advertised through referral as often as through postings, and rewards long on-site hours. Each of those is neutral on paper and not neutral in effect.
What a contest like this is for
It is not a lowered bar; the problems are standard ICPC-style sets. What it changes is the room. A student who has placed in a contest has a result to put on a CV, a reason to keep training, and — more to the point — twenty peers she now knows by name. The organisers’ stated aim is that its competitors turn up in the mixed contests a year later, and that is the measure worth checking in 2025.
