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You could argue that Reshma Saujani accomplished more by losing her Congressional bid than she would have if she’d actually gone to Capitol Hill.
Back in 2010, when she was running in the New York Democratic primary against long-time Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, and talking to parents while stumping at schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Saujani noticed that the gender divide in technology classes, computer rooms, and robotics’ clubs was striking.
“I would be at a school—advertised as a woman who was talking about tech—and only boys showed up for the talk,” she recalls. “Or there would be a robotics program, and there wouldn’t be any girls there.”
After the election, when Maloney headed back to her seat in Washington and Saujani became Mayor Bill de Blasio’s deputy public advocate, this inequality continued to nag her. So, for the next 18 months, after she got home from her day job, Saujani worked to launch Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that provides girls with a free, intensive seven-week summer program designed to close the gender gap in science and tech fields. Her first class, in 2012, drew 20 high school girls. For 40 hours a week, they got hands-on experience in computing concepts from robotics to mobile app development, along with exposure to the tech industry and mentorship from women working in the field.
Now in its third year, Girls Who Code will expand its free summer programs to 19 cities and 150 clubs in middle and high schools in all 50 states. Some 10,000 girls are expected to have gone through Girls Who Code programs by the end of the year—tripling the number of 2014 participants and doubling the number of states. The goal: For participants to envision themselves in tech fields later in life.
“We are awakening young girls all over America to say: ‘Tech is cool, coding is cool, I want to do this,’” Saujani says.
The girls’ work isn’t just theoretical. In the final two weeks of their summer program, participants solve a problem they’ve identified—for example, one NYC girl started a mobile app to help local parents filter for the best public high school for their child. Saujani now wants to pitch it to the Mayor’s office. A few years back, a 16-year-old Bronx Science student developed an algorithm to help detect cancer malignancies.
These projects are exactly why many of the country’s leading companies—including Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Verizon—are funding Girls Who Code.
And Saujani, who turns 40 this fall, knows how to make those around her, employers included, take notice. Since graduating law school, she’s run a non-profit, been an attorney, worked in finance and government, and written a book. But Girls Who Code seems to be her most passionate calling. That and tending to her 3-month-old son, Shaan. An uber-feminist, she recalls that when she was pregnant last year, she felt like she just knew she would be having a daughter: “My whole life is about girls,” she says.
So when informed that, in actuality, she was expecting a baby boy? “I literally cried,” she says, thinking back. “I was like: ‘What am I going to do with this boy?’”
But, not surprisingly, Saujani has a plan—Shaan will be brought up as a passionate women’s activist. “It’s been really powerful to have a son,” she adds. “If we don’t raise sons who are feminists and who care about these issues and who treat women well, we’re never going to change things.”
To learn more about Girls Who Code, visit girlswhocode.com.
