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
In addition to forming a valuable organization Bryant has achieved personal milestones too In August 2012 she was given the prestigious Jefferson Award for Community Service because of her efforts to support communities in the San Francisco Bay area In 2013 Business Insider magazine named her as one of the 25 Most Influential African Americans in Technology and traditionally black publication Ebony included her on its Power 100 list And in 2014 Bryant was given the first Women Who Rule in Technology Award by Google and the political news publication Politico Visionary Women Bryant is one of the many women throughout recent history who have navigated uncharted territory in order to make great strides in business There were others before her who paved the way for future generations Madam C J Walker became one of the first female self made millionaires in 1905 by creating specialized hair products for African American hair Margaret Rudkin cooked up a recipe for wheat bread in the late 1930s It was so healthy and delicious that it inspired Pepperidge Farm a bakery Rudkin founded that would blossom into a 28 million enterprise During the second half of the 1900s and into the 2000s women such as talk show host and spiritual guru Winfrey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg continue to shape the world's progress in ways never imagined Others such as actress Sofía Vergara and biotech start up founder Elizabeth Holmes have left their mark in all areas of business from clothing and cosmetics to medicine and technology Each of these women faced gender biases and overcame obstacles not only in the workplace but also in society at large
If there is a lesson to be learned in Bryant's path it is that success takes patience strength and an unshakable vision for a brighter future Initially I just wanted to take money out of my savings and A LEADER IN PHILANTHROPY send a group of girls to the same When Melinda French started dating her boss Bill Gates at Microsoft in 1987 the summer camp so my daughter first thing she noticed was his busy schedule But when he proposed six years wouldn't be alone Bryant said later and the two married in 1994 little did she know that she too was about to get much busier That same year the couple started the William H Gates But now Black Girls CODE is in Foundation with Melinda as cochair and in charge of the day to day planning of nine cities That's a lot of little much of the philanthropic programs black and brown girls learning to For more than 20 years Gates's efforts and donations have improved the lives of thousands of people in need across the world One of the foundation's main code and I just know that many of focuses is its Global Health Program The initiative partners with organizations our students are going to go on to around the world to develop effective and affordable vaccines and medicines become leaders in technology I for communities in need In 2012 Gates pledged 560 million toward helping women in third world countries gain access to contraceptives have absolutely no doubt
