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New documentary follows Big Dream of girls in tech

Jon Swartz
USA TODAY
A scene from the documentary 'Big Dream.'

SAN FRANCISCO – Diversity has been a hot-button issue in tech much of the year, amid a flurry of demographic reports from Apple, Google, Facebook and others that show a woeful number of women, blacks and Hispanics among their employees.

A new documentary, Big Dream, looks at a slice of the issue.

The 90-minute documentary traces the narrative arc of seven young women breaking into the science, math, computing and engineering fields – and the barriers and personal challenges they encounter.

Njeri Chelimo, 20, starts her own developer school in Nairobi after being denied entry to the U.S. to attend Brooklyn Hacker school, where she was accepted. Her big dream is to win the Nobel Prize by the time she's 30.

Software engineer Cassidy Williams, a 22-year-old Chicago native recently transplanted in New York, is profiled in a Glamour magazine spread on 35 influential women in tech under the age of 35. "The numbers for women in tech are horrible," Williams says. "But there is more acceptance and things are getting better, slowly but surely."

Mariana Quesada, 19, from San Jose, Costa Rica, is about to embark on an internship at NASA.

The documentary, scheduled to be shown at the Napa Valley Film Festival in November, could be a significant addition to the national conversation on race, gender and age in tech hiring. The topic has been widely reported, but hasn't been touched on in a high-profile film until now.

"There was a lot of noise on the topic but never any personal stories from the girls that stuck with it," says Kelly Cox, who makes her directorial debut with the doc. "Everything was either talking heads or finger wagging or to-camera interviews that felt like they were really just speaking to tech executives and other thought leaders. Not girls."

"I saw something lacking in the conversation," says Cox, who created Original Fare, a cultural food series currently in its second season on PBS.

Big Dream is one of several films highlighted at the festival, which runs Nov. 12-16. Other entrants among more than 100 include What The F@#- is Cancer And Why Does Everybody Have It? and Harlem Street Singer.

Microsoft partially underwrote the film, and helped Cox find several of the girls, including Williams. It supports a forthcoming website for the film that helps young women find opportunities with the aid of local companies and non-profits.

In 2012, Cox was finishing a web series for Disney on environmental science education in schools, which led to a meeting with government officials about the dearth of girls in STEM. She came upon research that indicated girls were dropping out of the science and math fields during their middle-school years because of a lack of confidence.

"The tech industry has gotten very good talking about how few young women are in the field and doing their best to reach out to them," Cox says. "Now, it's time for that to happen more frequently."

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