No boys allowed: Girls Who Code takes on gender gap

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Each morning this summer, Jazmine Fernandez hopped the subway to downtown Oakland and boarded a shuttle bus bound for Silicon Valley.

The youngest of four raised by a single mom who works at Burger King, Fernandez, 18, is a high school senior growing up in the hulking shadow of the Oakland Coliseum.

She likes to study mechanical engineering and build robots in school. A couple of friends suggested she apply for Girls Who Code. The non-profit is part of a nascent but growing movement to close the gender gap in the technology industry.

Fernandez had never known any software engineers. She wasn't even sure Mexican Americans could get jobs with big technology companies.

"I thought I wasn't smart enough. I thought I couldn't do it," she said.

Turns out she could.

One of 20 teens to spend seven weeks on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif.​, with Girls Who Code, Fernandez got a crash course in computer science. She went on field trips to top tech companies. And she attended workshops run by leading female engineers and entrepreneurs.

Fernandez says her self-doubt melted away when she met Raquel Vélez, who is a senior software developer at npm Inc., an open-source software company.

For the first time Fernandez says she can picture herself working for a company like Facebook.

"Now I can really say that I can do this," Fernandez said.

That's the whole idea.

Launched in 2012, Girls Who Code's summer program has grown from 20 girls in one classroom to 380 girls in classrooms at 16 companies across the country.

Founder Reshma Saujani says she's determined to reach 1 million girls by 2020.

"I want to give girls the opportunity to be the next Mark Zuckerberg," she said. "I won't be satisfied until I get every company in America to sign up and until I reach every girl in America."

Saujani is addressing a pressing challenge for the tech industry: There are not enough computer science graduates to fill openings.

Nearly three-quarters of girls in middle school express interest in engineering, science and math. Yet, by the time they are in college, very few major in computer science.

Fifty-seven percent of bachelor's degrees are earned by women but just 18% of computer science degrees go to women.

Women make up half of the U.S. workforce but hold just 25% of the jobs in technical and computing fields.

The figures are even starker for women of color. Black women make up just 3% of the computing workforce and Hispanic women just 2%.

Saujani says the tech industry needs to find a way to engage the other half of the U.S. population. And so far the results from Girls Who Code show that early intervention is the key, she says.

Of the graduates from the Girls Who Code summer program in 2013, 95% said they were definitely considering or were more likely to consider studying computer science in college, and 99% said they were considering a career in technology.

Saujani, the daughter of two engineers who were refugees from Uganda, hit on the idea for Girls Who Code during her failed run for Congress. As she visited schools on the campaign trail, she noticed the same thing again and again: few if any girls in computer science classrooms.

Championed by high-profile executives such as Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Square's Jack Dorsey, Girls Who Code has gotten off to a quick start.

"This is a big commitment: 20 girls in a conference room for seven weeks every day," Saujani said. "But the companies tell us they get more out of it than the girls do."

Saujani received early support from Sandberg, who sent her an unsolicited e-mail one evening that simply said: "What can I do to help you?"

And help she did. Sandberg encouraged other tech companies to participate in Girls Who Code.

"We need programs explicitly about girls coding," Sandberg said in an interview with USA TODAY after holding a town-hall-style meeting with Bay Area teens taking part in Girls Who Code. "We need to flip the switch, and I think Reshma is doing that."

The curriculum was designed by educators, engineers and entrepreneurs to get girls interested in coding. At the end of the seven-week stint, the girls build a project and pitch it to engineers.

Cora Frederick, 19, enrolled in Girls Who Code's inaugural summer class in 2012 in New York. Frederick researched machine-learning techniques and advanced detection algorithms to lower the rate of false positives in breast cancer screening. She's now studying computer science at the University of Michigan.

Ming Horn took part in the summer program at Twitter last year. She was inspired after a field trip to Facebook to pitch apps to Sandberg. Ming, 16, who was adopted from China and whose brother was adopted from Cambodia, went on to found KhodeUp, which is teaching orphans in Cambodia to code.

This summer at Facebook, Fernandez worked with a team to build a fun educational app, Wacky Words, to help students learn SAT words. Players are quizzed on multiple-choice questions in 60-second rounds so they can test themselves without SAT books or flashcards.

"Whether it's clean water or obesity, these girls see a problem they are facing or that their family is facing and they try to solve it," Saujani said.

Like many of the girls in the summer program, Samantha Baker, 16, a high school senior from Burlingame, Calif., delighted in the free gourmet meals in Facebook cafes, the friendly engineers who acted as mentors and the wide array of fun activities.

She says she was surprised to learn that tech workers don't spend long solitary hours pounding on keyboards in darkened rooms.

"This opened the door to show me what it's really like to work in tech," Samantha said.

Briana Sidney, 16, is a senior at Oakland High School. She has been playing video games since she was 4 and owns nearly every gaming console.

Briana had never coded before. Over the course of the summer, she says she developed skills and confidence — and she got a leg up in her dream to go to college to study computer animation and design.

Her goal: to become a video game designer for Naughty Dog, the Santa Monica, Calif., company that makes The Last Of Us, one of her favorite games.

While exploring the Facebook campus, Sidney discovered an arcade with pinball machines, video games and a statue of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.

"This is amazing," she said.