Girls Who Code’s Reshma Saujani Thinks Diversity in Tech Starts with the Media
Girls Who Code’s Founder and CEO and 2013 CIW Speaker Reshma Saujani thinks Volkswagen’s Super Bowl spot should have stirred up more controversy than it did—and she’s not referring to the recent successful petition by PETA to encourage the company to remove a short ad featuring primates from its marketing campaign. Instead, the ad that did run at the Super Bowl aired to little-to-no backlash. In a playful riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, engineers in the ad earned wings every time a Volkswagen car’s mileage hit 100,000.
So, why might someone like Saujani, a vocal proponent of computer science and engineering education, find this apparently harmless celebration of engineers so distasteful? To Saujani, it’s obvious: None of the engineers depicted were women.
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| Reshma Saujani discussed the importance of organizations like her own at CIW’s Tech Summit. |
“You cannot be what you cannot see,” Saujani stresses, arguing that positive media depictions of women and other minorities in these fields can do for STEM what she believes television shows like Ally McBeal and L.A. Law did for law. Today, women make up over 30 percent of those in legal professions, up from fewer than five percent in the 1970s.
Saujani’s goal with Girls Who Code is to promote a similar jump in female careers in computer science through the promotion of positive media and the use of a mentorship and educational program that teaches girls computer programming. Only one in five computer science and engineering majors are women, and the gender gap remains high in technology jobs post-graduation, too, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Census Bureau. These numbers are even starker for African-American and Hispanic students, who account for only 15 percent of college graduates in computer science and engineering.
Girls Who Code began in New York City and relies on a network of volunteer experts to teach interested teen girls computer programming skills. It is expanding this year to programs in Miami, Seattle and Boston, with plans to reach Chicago in 2015. The program also aims to decrease the disparity in computing resources and educators between schools in urban and low-income areas and those in higher-income districts.
In addition to classes in coding, participants are exposed to the wide variety of jobs available in technology through tours of companies such as and talks from technology innovators such as Lyndsey Scott, a Victoria’s Secret model who developed an app in her free time.
“The image that we project in the media is a geeky guy that nobody likes sitting at his computer every day, and that’s not what it is,” Saujani said.
“It connects to everything you do. We just have to show those connections,” she continued.
