Geek girls, a man's world

One with a more regular routine, set hours and not much overtime, Xie says. Overtime and long hours hunched over a computer are commonplace in software development, she says.

This was the same message Chu and her female classmates heard throughout school - from schoolmates, friends and even their male teachers.

"They said: 'Girls, one day you'll be pregnant, but this job will still require you to work overtime'," Chu recalls.

"They said that if I took a less complicated job, like working for the government, teaching, or doing sales, marketing or clerical work, I'd feel more relaxed. My looks won't suffer, and I'll have more time for my family.

"People outside the IT industry only see our long hours and tiring work. But this profession offers a huge sense of achievement. The codes I write and applications I create help people make online purchases. There's a lot of value in it."

When her software development class of almost 120 students graduated in 2008, fewer than half of the group's 16 women entered the IT industry, Chu says. She's the only woman among 24 men on her Alipay team.

Women who work in China's technology industry are largely involved in marketing, idea design, art work and product testing, says an IT sales consultant for an international recruitment firm, who declined to be named because of company policy.

These jobs are regarded as more social and artistically creative than coding software or constructing hardware, the consultant explains.

In a country rooted in socialist ideals - which hold men and women as equals - the belief that certain professions are "men's work" has endured and influences women's choices.

Since society regards computer science as a man's domain, women are discouraged from studying it. The result is a small trickle of women entering IT, says Susanne Choi, director of the Gender Research Center at the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies.

The industry's gender imbalance - what Choi calls "occupational gender segregation" - reinforces existing gender stereotypes. It also fosters a male-dominated professional network and culture that become barriers to women who want to enter the field, she says.

Having more female role models can help break this cycle, human resource experts say. But only 11 percent of Fortune 500 technology companies' executives are women, IT Manager Daily reports.

"If there aren't any role models for women to look to, they might not see themselves in that position," says Christine Wright, Asia operations director of Hays, a multinational recruitment company with offices in China.

Only 11 percent of the software developers Hays recruited on the mainland from July 2012 to June 2013 were women. The rate was 3.2 percent in the previous 12 months.

"We have tips that we give (companies) about what they should be doing for female applicants to feel that they can apply, that they can get ahead," Wright says.

Amid working long days and irregular hours, Chu dreams of becoming a software architect helming the creation of innovative programs.

She's also envisioning her happy home - one in which she's sitting next to her husband, son and daughter, all of them tapping out new software applications on their laptops.

Zhang Yue contributed to this report.