The first thing most people know about me is usually that I’m a policy nerd — a total junkie, in fact. On issues from supporting immigrant entrepreneurship to promoting women in politics, I’ve been on the front lines for decades.

But despite my voracious appetite for news and opinion, it wasn’t until 2010 when I was running for Congress in New York City that I came face to face with an issue I didn’t know much about: computer science education. Since then, I’ve thought about little else.

Here’s the stat that got me: the U.S. Department of Labor projects there will be 1.4 million computing job openings by 2020, and yet the United States is only expected to produce enough qualified candidates to fill 29% of these jobs. And women?

Women make up just 12% of all Computer Science majors — down from 37% in 1974.

At a time when more and more jobs were moving towards the computing fields, at a time when women were the majority in college and the majority in the workforce, how was it possible that we could be going backwards? I became obsessed with solving this problem.

I expected the biggest challenge would be convincing people that we had a problem in the first place, but I was wrong. Technologists and innovators like Beth Comstock got behind this idea early. Parents and teachers were already looking for a solution.

Instead, the biggest challenge I faced was that no model existed. What would an initiative aimed at closing the gender gap in technology look like? How could you inspire girls who had been told for years directly and indirectly that this field wasn’t open to them? What curriculum would you use? How could you ever teach enough girls? When I decided to start Girls Who Code, I had many more questions than answers.

Charting the Unknown

The more I talked to entrepreneurs (entrepreneurs know a thing or two about uncharted territory), I determined that the answer was to create a pilot program that we could study, refine, and if it worked, scale. The first year of the program, we recruited 20 young women and put them in a technology company where we taught everything from programming robots to building websites and mobile apps to video game design. We brought in guest speakers from leading technology companies and took the girls on field trips to places like Google.

Two weeks in, I already knew that teaching girls to code would fundamentally change the world. When we asked them to come up with ideas for mobile apps, one student proposed an app that would help disabled New Yorkers better navigate the city. Another suggested an app that would help homeless youth find food and shelter.

Girls Who Code came about by using imagination, taking risks, asking for advice, and exercising willpower. Another reason I know our girls will change the world? These are the exact techniques they deploy when they set out to write new code.

Today, Girls Who Code has grown from that one pilot program in New York City to a national non-profit organization. This year, our Summer Immersion Program will reach more than 320 girls from Miami, New York City, Seattle, Boston, and the Bay Area, and Girls Who Code Clubs — our latest innovation — will reach thousands more in public libraries, after school clubs, and community based organizations.

So as women continue to increase our numbers in college and in the workforce, Girls Who Code will be hard at work making sure that we aren’t just represented in the technological revolution, but leading the charge.