by CHRISTOPHER ROSS
http://youtu.be/rp5jXZeAonI
Saujani founded Girls Who Code with the goal of closing the gender gap in tech. After partnering with industry giants Facebook and Google, she has a new goal: to teach a million young women to code by 2020
RESHMA SAUJANI’S motivation to found Girls Who Code, the nation’s pre-eminent nonprofit dedicated to closing the tech gender gap, traces back to her last day of eighth grade. As the daughter of Indian parents who had fled Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda for suburban Illinois in the 1970s, she was constantly reminded she was different by the color of her skin and her parents’ thick accents. When she went grocery shopping with her family at the local Dominick’s, she’d check the racks of key chains personalized with names—Jennifer, Tom, Charlotte, Michael—her hopes of finding Reshma perpetually dashed. Then, the day before summer vacation started, a classmate called her a hajji, a slur against people of Middle Eastern and Indian descent, and she decided to fight back. But when they met after school, she found herself facing off with two girls—one swinging a tennis racket, the other spraying whipped cream—and after being battered and knocked down, Saujani trudged a mile home to her mother, who found her daughter bloody and bedraggled.
But if her tormentors intended to cow her, they had the opposite effect. “It was an identity-awakening moment for me,” says Saujani, now 38. When she started high school that fall, she formed a diversity club to educate her fellow students about other cultures. It was the first step on a path that led to an Ivy League education, into the fields of law and politics and, ultimately, to starting Girls Who Code in 2012. The organization provides intensive education in computer science to high school sophomores and juniors via summer programs in nine cities across the country. Girls learn the nuts and bolts of coding, website and app development, and robotics. They also have the chance to meet with industry leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg . In just two years, Girls Who Code has been explosively successful, winning sponsorship from tech companies including Twitter, Google and GE and expanding from one program in its first year to an estimated 40 in 2015.
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