Since 2012, Girls Who Code has been trying to close the gender gap in tech, teaching computer science skills to nearly 200,000 young women and launching mentoring programs across the country.
But Silicon Valley is still stubbornly, overwhelmingly male. And Girls Who Code CEO Reshma Saujani is not happy about that.
“Year after year after year, I get emails from my students saying, ‘I applied to Google, I applied to Microsoft, I applied to Facebook. I’m a 4.0 MIT student, Berkeley, Stanford, you name it. Can’t get my foot through the door,’” Saujani said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “… [And] you still have all-white-male panels. You still have serious bouts of sexual harassment and discrimination happening in these companies. You still have a culture that is not welcoming to women and people of color.”
In other words, even if women do get hired at big tech companies, there’s a serious risk they will feel so unwelcome that they will…
