Encourage Your Daughter To Code and Change Her Life

The U.S. Department of Labor projects that by 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer specialist job openings. U.S. universities are expected to produce enough qualified graduates to fill only 29 percent of these jobs. Women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but they hold just 25 percent of the jobs in technical or computing fields.

Girls Who Code, a program offering computing classes to young women, aims to provide computer science education and exposure to 1 million women by 2020. It launched in 2012 and initially ran one program in New York City.

Immediate success led to national clubs providing girls from grades 6-12 with computer science education. Schools, libraries and community-based organizations have started offering Girls Who Code classes as well.

Reshma Saujani, former deputy public advocate of New York City and the first South Asian woman to run for Congress in 2010, founded the program. As a congressional candidate, she aimed to galvanize industry leaders into closing the gender gap in STEM education. That cause later became the catalyst for Girls Who Code.

“As far as I’m concerned, we run the Internet,” Saujani said during She++, Stanford University’s conference on women in technology. “Women Facebook more, they tweet more, they make 85 percent of all consumer purchases. We should be sitting on the other side.”

Saujani says that most teenage girls plan on pursuing a career that will allow them to participate in social work or philanthropy, but do not consider the advantages of computer science when thinking about the ways they can assist others on a global scale.

Many of the teenagers of the Girls Who Code camp begin with little interest in computer science and emerge from the program contemplating a career in related fields.

“I do think that there’s a sense that girls are just either not interested or not good at it, and I think both of those are absolutely false,” Saujani said. “I think they are really interested in it, but we don’t make the connection between computer science and changing the world enough. We need to make that connection to young girls.”

Head over to the Girls Who Code website to find out more information.

Photo courtesy of Girls Who Code.