A Fix For The Homogenous Tech Industry: Black Girls Code
26/07/2013
The educational outreach program that launched two years ago, now has over one thousand students and is raising $100,000 to get (...)
The educational
program
that launched two years ago, now has over one thousand students and is raising $100,000 to get more diversity into
tech culture. As a black, female electrical engineering student at the beginning of the dotcom boom, Kimberly Bryant says she was part of a unique period of
to women. Still, she was only one of the handful of
around her to graduate with a degree in computer science, and remembers feeling isolated. "There were more
attending college and getting degrees in engineering, but there still wasn’t a lot," she says. "It was very lonely--and especially for me, coming from the inner city of Memphis." In the decades after Bryant graduated, the ratio of
graduating with engineering degrees plummeted from 36% to 13% with computer science degrees. But it was only when Bryant decided to launch her own health-related
tech startup after building a successful career in the biotech
industry that she started looking deeply into ethnic and gender disparities in her field. "I started doing a lot of networking. I’d go to events and there would be no women, or maybe a handful of
and no folks of color," she says. Then, at one leadership conference at the University of California, Berkeley, a question was posed for the breakout session: Why don’t
tech companies hire more women?Read Full Story