Girls Who Code

“When I talked to people, the number 20 kept coming up, that you wanted to put a group of 20 together to teach them a new skill set, and so I designed these summer camps to have 20 girls, and then I did my first program.”

“I mean, now we have over a 130 companies that are part of Girls Who Code, that have either had a class, that have sponsored a club, that have mentored, that have written a check.”

“I built Girls Who Code like it was a tech company. You know, every year I had metrics of scale, and I pushed, and you know, the way we hired, our culture, everything was about building big things, scaling hard, solving tough problems.”

“They're starting companies together. The amount of students that are really thinking about what can I build here? What can we build together? So it's powerful.”

“This is a job where you can march up into the middle class. Maybe for the first time, we're kind of starting kids out at the same place. And whether you are a young girl living in a homeless shelter in Harlem, Or a girl going to the best private school in New …”

“In 10 years, I raised a hundred million dollars from the private sector to build Girls Who Code, and we taught over 600,000 students.”

“You're now then enabling another 50, 60 employees to participate in this summer program and teach these girls. And it just helps you in this really powerful way. It helped you retain the women that you had already hired. Even for male technologists who may hav…”

“By the beginning of the pandemic, we had over 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs.”

“In college, if I declare poli-sci as a major when I start my freshman year, there's a 99% chance that I am going to complete college majoring in political science. But if I declare computer science as a major, I'm a woman, a person of color, there's only a 75%…”

“I believed in this idea that if you actually bring together girls that were black, white, straight, gay, you know what I mean, rich, poor, and you put them in a classroom together, and you taught them a new skill set, that they would become best friends.”

“I went to the big foundations, Soros, Ford, they wouldn't write me a check.”

“So I thought, you know what, if I could connect coding to change making, I could inspire a generation of girls to go into technology.”

“74% of high school girls wanted to pick a career that was about changing the world.”

“74% of high school girls wanted to pick a career that was about changing the world. And back then, less than like .2% of girls were going into computer science.”