The issue of the low number of girls taking up STEM subjects at school has been a major issue for many years. The stereotype of such things being ‘male’ jobs when much of the technology involved didn’t even exist within living memory clearly needs tackling.

Of course, few things could be more likely to prompt your daughter to join an after school coding club than being inspired by women in tech through social media platforms with large young female audiences.

A tech-themed website run by a woman who is a coding influencer and features lots of female tech speakers might sound like just what was needed. So it seemed with Julie Kirsina and ‘her’ Coding­­_Unicorn site, with 115,000 Instagram followers.

However, according to Tech 404, the self-styled ‘most popular coding account on Instagram’ is a fake. Research by various developers passed to the website has indicated the site is in fact run by a man called Eduard Sizovs, who just happens to be the founder of software developer conference DevTernity.

DevTernity has already been hit by a scandal after it was claimed fake women speakers were added to the line-up for a conference on December 7th, which has now been cancelled.

As well as evidence that Mr Sizovs has used the logins for Julie, many of the images used on ‘her’ Instagram are identical to those on the DevTernity site.

So far, Mr Sizovs has only admitted to one conference speaker profile being fake, which he claimed was ‘auto-generated’, and claimed genuine female speakers had dropped out.

Either way, it may come as a big disappointment to learn that it looks like one of the leading female lights in coding isn’t the real deal.

That, however, is all the more reason for parents to enrol their daughters in coding classes. That way, maybe one of them can be a real-life coding influencer whose existence and identity is not in doubt.