WOMEN WHO SPARK PRESENTED TO KIMBERLY BRYANT Bryant's commitment to making coding more accessible to girls of color has earned her numerous awards
color Bryant recalled of this experience in a video interview with Winfrey You can imagine how I felt as a new engineer being introduced to my peers as a twofer With hard work and steadfast determination Bryant learned to look beyond the gender bias and racial discrimination and thrived Then in 2010 her 12 year old daughter attended a Stanford University summer camp geared toward teaching kids how to code or write programming instructions for computers and apps She was the only child of color and one of very few girls in the group Bryant knew she needed to act She left the corporate world and in April 2011 she founded Black Girls CODE Building the Future According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics 1 4 million science technology engineering and math STEM related jobs are expected to flood the marketplace by 2020 But as of 2014 African American women make up only 2 percent of the science and engineering workforce in the United States This contrasts CODE SCHOOL FEVER When Bryant started Black Girls CODE she was tapping into a nationwide trend especially one targeting college graduates and professionals In 2014 alone nearly 6 000 people completed a coding boot camp a crash course that provides instruction on how to build websites or apps using a computer programming language The course is full time five days a week for eight hours a day and can last anywhere from six weeks to three months Today there are more than 80 coding schools around the country Tuition is expensive Some cost nearly 18 000 But the rewards are potentially huge code school graduates can often command better jobs and higher salaries
Black Girls CODE volunteers include professional computer scientists software engineers and college students with white men making up 51 percent and white women accounting for 18 percent in the same fields Judging by these figures African American women are vastly underrepresented in many tech related careers In Bryant's mind it was up to her to train anew generation so they would have the skills to take a more prominent role in the growing industry When she launched Black Girls CODE in 2011 Bryant started small She hired two staff members and used her own money to fund the organization until large tech companies such as Google signed on as corporate sponsors In her first one week summer training program in San Francisco California she focused on teaching girls aged 10 to 13 entry level toolsthey might use intheir every day lives such as video game and website development As word beganto spread about Black Girls CODE and girls as young as 7 and as old as 17 expressed interest in attending future sessions Bryant added a wider variety of classes including robotics and complex programming languages She also took the girls on field trips to tech companies such as Facebook and staged girls only hackathons events where students could come together to solve problems by writing apps By 2015 Bryant's staff had grown to five people Today Black Girls CODE has transformed from a local start up into a national phenomenon The group's volunteers number into the thousands and have trained more than 8 000 students in nine cities around the United States and in Johannesburg South Africa Bryant hopes that by 2040 the organization will have taught one million girls of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to code
