Girls Who Code Turns Five: What I’ve Learned Since Our Founding
Girls Who Code began as an experiment. In the summer of 2012, we brought together 20 girls from New York City and for seven weeks taught them how to code. I borrowed a conference room from my good friend Brian O’Kelley at his company, AppNexus and I lured them with pizza and a $50 stipend. That first class had girls from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city to some of the poorest. None of them had a background in computer science, but instead a willingness and bravery to try something new. And by the end of the summer, I saw something magical. I saw girls who began as strangers call each other sisters. I saw girls who thought coding was only for boys, gain new role models that looked like them. And I saw girls who never thought they’d be interested in coding build apps and websites solving issues that tugged at their heartstrings.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that experiment at AppNexus would turn out to be the seed of our Summer Immersion Program, and the inspiration for our Clubs program a year later. What began as an experiment has turned into a national movement. Now, five years later, our programs have taught over 30,000 girls — that’s 3X the number of girls who graduated with a degree in CS last year! We have programs in every U.S. state — yes, even Alaska.
We’ve engaged thousands of volunteers and instructors across the US. Our staff has grown from 2 people to 45 people with offices in San Francisco and New York. And this year, we’re launching our new book series — actually 14 books, we basically have our own imprint — for girls everywhere to learn to code.
I’m so proud of our accomplishments. But here’s what still keeps me up at night:
Despite our progress in the last five years, the numbers are actually getting worse. In the next 10 years, women’s share of the U.S. computing workforce decline will decline from 24% to 22%. Much of the private sector funding that has poured into this area has gone toward universal access to computer science and has NOT focused specifically on young women. If we want to reverse the decline, we need to focus on girls and design interventions specifically for them.
I founded Girls Who Code with the belief that computing skills are a critical path to security and prosperity in today’s job market. That access to a computer science education could bring women into a thriving innovation economy and give families a real shot at the middle class.
In the wake of the election, it’s clear that a lot of Americans have anxiety about their future in our economy. And I worry that as an organization, we’ve failed to make the case that teaching GIRLS to code is a critical step towards job growth and economic opportunity. We must do more to show that families who are struggling to make ends meet can give their daughters a real shot by helping them learn to code.
We can’t take our eyes off gender.
The stories we’re reading in the news today — stories of sexual harassment and failed leadership — are a direct result of what happens when we don’t have women on our technology teams. These stories are urgent reminders that we need to dramatically increase the percentage of women in our engineering workforce and we need to do it now. The culture of tech companies cannot change if women aren’t in the room.
As we celebrate Girls Who Code’s Fifth Anniversary, I encourage you to explore our 2016 Annual Report as we look back at Girls Who Code’s achievements this year and since our founding five years ago. Today, the hard work continues as we march towards closing the gender gap in tech within the next decade.
Reshma Saujani is CEO and Founder of Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in tech. To learn more about their programs, visit www.girlswhocode.com.
