Ten years ago, 20 girls from high schools across New York City gave up seven weeks of their summer to gather in a tech company's Flatiron Building conference room and learn the basics of computer programming.
At the time, it didn't necessarily feel like that big of a deal — but that experiment became the inaugural summer program of Girls Who Code. Founded in 2012 by Reshma Saujani, the New York-based nonprofit works to close the gender gap in computer science jobs, partially by creating a steady pipeline of female talent with STEM backgrounds.
Girls Who Code has taught computer science skills — from basic coding to designing algorithms and websites — to roughly 500,000 girls across the world, a number it aims to double over the next decade. More than a third of those participants have gone>'Where are the girls?'
Girls Who Code is the product of a failed political campaign: Saujani is a former corporate lawyer who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, and ran for a U.S. Congressional seat in New York in 2010. Her bid came up short, but on the campaign trail, she saw something interesting.
Actually, it was more about what she didn't see.
"I would go into [a] computer science classroom, and literally just see, like, lines and lines and lines of boys trying to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg," she says. "I was just like: Where are the girls?"
