Recently, Trevor Noah invited Reshma Saujani to The Daily Show to talk about why we need women who code. When Saujani was running for office in 2010, she would go from school to school and meet hundreds of little boys who wanted to be the new Marc Zuckenberg or Steve Jobs, and thought to herself; but where are the girls? So she started “Girls Who Code” as an experiment in closing the gender gap.
In the 70’s, the first coders where women. In the 80’s, 37 percent of computer science graduates were women, and today that number has shrunk to 18 percent. Saujani feels it’s because in the west, we’ve promoted a culture of “Brogrammers” but that’s starting to change. There are women programmers in films such as “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” and on TV series such as “Criminal Minds.”
We need role models for girls in coding, but the most important thing is to focus on the schools! This year “Girls Who Code” has taught 40,000 girls in every state, and work closely with the White House on President Obama’s initiative to expand and improve computer science education, since only one out of 10 American schools have computer science. Saujani explains why it’s so important to have women who code:
“Because women are going to build awesome things and women are going to change society.
“Let me give you an example; we had a Syrian refugee who built an app to help Americans get to the polls. A 16 year old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant, to save her daddy’s life… Young girls are change agents and when they have technology, they are looking at their community, they are looking at the world, and they are thinking; how can I use technology to make it better?”
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Last year’s Tribeca Film Festival premiered Robin Hauser Reynolds’ film “CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap” addressing the same issues. In the discussion following the screening, Reynolds also pushed for the importance of diversity, including minorities and people from different backgrounds:
“Have you heard of the female factor? This is true. Regardless of anyones individual IQ on a team or a group of people, if you add a women to that group, the overall collective IQ rises. We’ve all heard the studies that productivity goes up when you add a women to the room. Adding women and people of color to a team increases the perspective which is going to make a better outcome of the product.”
According to Saujani, there are 1.4 million jobs now open in computing and technology. Let’s hope the efforts of “Girls Who Code” and the Obama initiative ensures a larger percentage of women will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, along with minorities and people of diverse backgrounds.
