Tech Companies Announce ‘Girls Who Code’ Initiative – NYTimes.com
July 12, 2012 at 5:00 am 1 comment
From the rest of the article, it sounds like Twitter (at least — maybe the others, too?) are creating courses to help teach young women to become successful as programmers and engineers. These are big name companies to get involved. Interesting that, of these four companies, only Google is part of NCWIT. Will have to watch this and see what the companies actually bring to the table.
On Tuesday, Twitter, General Electric, Google and eBay announced that they were joining an initiative called “Girls Who Code,” which they hope will increase the number of young women who become programmers and engineers. They want to create a mentoring and teaching program.
The Girls Who Code group was founded by Reshma Saujani, the former New York City deputy public advocate, who plans to begin the coding program in New York this summer. Ms. Saujani hopes to introduce the program to other cities in 2013.
In a press release, Ms. Saujani, a hedge fund lawyer who lost a Congressional primary race in 2010, said that although 57 percent of college graduates were women, only 14 percent of computer science and engineering degrees were awarded to women.
via Tech Companies Announce ‘Girls Who Code’ Initiative – NYTimes.com.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, NCWIT, women in computing.
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Alfred Thompson | July 12, 2012 at 10:03 am
I’ve talked to some of the women involved in getting this going and it appears that the startup community in NYC is really seeing the need for more women getting into the field. Actually more people period. Many of them are also supporting the Academy for Software Engineering in NYC as well. I wonder if part of this is the desire of many of the New York born and/or raised to build up the tech community in their own backyard. Not everyone thinks the west coast is “the place to be.”