Changing the Game for Women in Tech: A Behind the Scenes Look at Code Like Her
From Django Girls Cape Town to Code Like Her, we finally pulled it off.
A lot of what Codie Roelf, my fellow colleague and developer at Praekelt.org, and I talk about is how we can “get comfortable with failure, and fail fast”. We saw this come to life when we tried and pushed hard on Django Girls. Django Girls Cape Town is a branch of the global Django Girls that we started in 2016 to combat the gender gap in the technology space and provide women with an introduction to the industry. Our events were a huge success and gained a lot of traction, but, in being agile (a process of building things in small iterations and failing fast) we knew that we had to pause and reflect on what was working well and where we were failing.
Becoming okay with failure in the software industry is empowering. It forces us to become excited to iterate rather than being insecure around failure. Reflecting on that, we realised that the pain point for the both of us was really around taking the specific South African context into account.
The problem areas that we identified with our approach to Django Girls was that not everyone had access to a laptop for the day, attendees arrived to the sessions assuming they would walk out being coders at the end, and the tutorial itself was missing context in terms of what the code meant in the real world. Coding in its raw form is really hard to digest without knowing what one can do with it, the cool things we can build and the different kinds of jobs that exists within the industry outside of being a coder. We want to make it all relatable: someone once told me “you can’t be what you can’t see”.
That leads us to our name too: Code Like Her. If you can listen to and see someone whom you can relate to, it makes the dream feel so much more achievable.
And so our failures informed our structure. We had a problem statement: we have one day, with 30 women, primarily from previously disadvantaged backgrounds, with no previous exposure to code or tech, and we wanted to show them that it’s possible for them to be part of the technology movement. We also wanted to provide them with a few spaces to go to afterwards as well where they can be well supported in their journey of learning.
Our iteration became:
- Stop what we were doing (Django Girls), and identify what needed to be changed.
- Embrace the fears that we both had about starting something of our own and be an example in that way.
- Split the day into two portions:
Morning: talks by a diverse group of women in tech, find a male in tech ally to the agenda, have space for a panel discussion and give them lots of space to ask questions in a safe space.
Afternoon: split into three different rooms, each room supported by two coaches to introduce coding principles by bringing it back to everyday life examples. We had sessions planned — data constructs, control flow and a combined session of the product life cycle and where different jobs and roles fit into the product life cycle. We split the women into three groups and each group attended each session. At the end of this we had a session on Scratch where women could pair up with a coach or fellow participant who had a laptop and learn visual programming using animation.
4. Get money to make this happen, but keep it lean by not making too much of the focus around the usual tech nice-to-haves (excessive food, decorations and sponsor talks)
5. Make use of the brand that we have already created around “Codie and Lisa” as women of colour in tech who open doors for marginalised groups of women. This was personal!
We pushed each other really hard and I have to thank Codie for never saying no to any of my crazy ideas and her relentless ambition of bringing people to coding as a “not so scary” skill that anyone can learn.
This is a pay-less initiative, but probably one of the most rewarding pursuits I have been on in my career that no amount of money could compensate for. What is the point of being marginalized in society and somehow achieving some kind of professional success if you can’t turn around to open the door for the other women needing a path in? Like a woman of colour in the tech world told me once when I told her that carrying this responsibility is so tiring: “keep pushing, baby girl, eventually those doors will fall, keep doing the pushing”. That stuck with me and always keeps me going.
Standing at the back of the talks, I took in the diverse women on stage. A previous Django Girls attendee spoke about her personal journey with making a complete career switch to software engineering with only mentorship from Codie and self-teaching at the age of 29 years old. As a coloured woman I could identify with this and respect how much it takes to have the courage to do make a career shift like this when we are expected to hit the ground running from a very early age: pick a job, go do it, pay the bills and incur the black tax that you are expected to carry. It is extremely hard and expensive to afford yourself the opportunity to start over so late in your twenties. She showed the audience that it is possible and there are resources available to support you.
Pi Delport spoke about her experience as a high school drop-out, leaving school really early on in her life and learning code to becoming a full-time software engineer representing trans-women in tech and being one of the most involved people I know in the Cape Town “empower other women” scene. She also showed us a very different view from the stereotypical coder persona we are so used to. Then there’s our own Sewagodimo Matlapeng who is always inspiring, opening her heart and giving a vulnerable talk on where her journey began and pushing forward even as one of the only females who pursued software engineering in her school. She kind of dog-fooded her skill set from just being something that she utilised at work, to using it in her personal time to build a site that supports school learning inspired by her sister.
My colleague Benjamin Vermeulen, fellow project manager on Girl Effect, spoke about his journey into tech. He started off his working career by literally offering to work for free just so that he could learn to now being one of the fiercest, bad-ass Tech Project Managers that I know. He worked hard to carve his own space in this industry and still manages to be a relentless ally to the women in tech agenda. He spoke about how men need to call out each others’ gender bias even if it makes you less likable. He spoke about his own marginalisation as a gay man in tech. He dropped the mic when he hit the crowd with the fact that many men get confused about giving up their seats at the table for women vs moving up and making space.
Debbie Rogers, our Managing Director, also took the stage. She shared her journey about losing motivation as a female software engineer so much that she went back and studied Digital Art. Years later she became our MD building a tech organisation that represents what diversity CAN look like and fearlessly driving the agenda. I am always left feeling incredibly inspired after listening to Debbie’s story and sheer pride that we have a female leader who has the ability to make herself that relatable at all intersections. This time I watched 35 other women have that same reaction and a few “how do I get a job at your organisation” afterwards.
There was a moment where I was taking all of this in from the back and being humbled that this was coming to life. I was looking around to see where my 7 year-old daughter was (I’m a single mom and she has to sometimes tag along to these events). I saw her sitting right in front listening attentively to the talks and I realised that she is being exposed to a wealth of examples of strong women and men breaking down important barriers. My heart kind of wanted to explode into a thousand pieces just imagining her doing a talk of her own one day and how this exposure at a young age to women pursuing the roads less travelled in careers could shape an amazing story for her.
If you have opportunity share it. If you find passion in something, pour it out in cup fulls for those around you. If it doesn’t impact a whole bunch of people, do it anyway. There may be a 7 year-old little girl standing around watching you and you could change her entire future.
A massive thank you to our sponsors and coaches for believing in our initiative and supporting us, especially Praekelt.org for always encouraging us and being so committed to women in tech.
Contributed by Lisa Adams, Project Manager, Praekelt.org
