going to be filled by U.S. graduates. Three percent of that is going to be filled by women.”
The issue is further compounded by a dearth of tech education in this country prior to reaching the college level. “Only one out of 10 American high schools offers computer science,” Saujani said. The overall lack of early exposure to such training means even fewer women have a chance to get on track to pursue tech jobs in the future.
Despite the fact that both of her parents were engineers, Saujani does not have a background in coding—she majored in political science in college. “I was one of those girls who was terrified of math and science,” she said.
In 2010, Saujani ran for Congress. Though she ultimately lost, while campaigning and visiting schools she witnessed something that gave her pause. “New York City was just starting to be this tech boom, and as I’d go into these robotics labs and computer science classes, I’d see hundreds of boys clamoring to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg,” Saujani said. “I thought to myself, ‘Where are the girls?’”
That lingering question drove the formation of Girls Who Code, which includes summer sessions conducted at companies such as Accenture.
Mo Barbier and Emma Joseph, for instance, were in the 2015 summer program where they used HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Google Maps to condense information for finding a healthcare system into an easy-to-use website they called Help & Heal.
During the final two weeks of the summer program, participants create whatever they want. A couple of years ago, another pair of young women from the program in New York decided to build a video game that was not about the violence that typifies that industry. They created Tampon Run. (And let’s be frank, it is easy to find video games where players can lob nuclear bombs at their enemies or absorb the souls of dragons they slay—yet menstruation is somehow taboo.)
The creators of Tampon Run wanted to make something that spoke to what women go through when they have their period. “These two girls who were 16 years old built this game in the middle of Gamergate, when there was so much sexism happening in the gaming industry,” Saujani said. “No boy was going to create Tampon Run.”
But the bottom line is creating more access to computer science and other technology education can lead to opportunities to move up the economic ladder, Saujani said. “The power of technology to be the great equalizer and solve poverty, I believe in that and want that to happen quickly,” she said.
Girls Who Code will have reached some 40,000 young women by the end of this year, Saujani said, but she looks forward to the day when the program is no longer necessary because the gender disparity in tech would no longer exist. “I’m trying to put myself out of business,” she said. “I’m not trying to build the Red Cross; I’m trying to solve a problem and be done.”
