When Reshma Saujani ran for US Congress in 2010, she made campaign stops at schools throughout New York City. Her run against a long-time incumbent was unsuccessful, but the loss wasn’t a complete failure: she came away from it with an idea born of concern. “As I would visit schools, I’d go into their computer science labs and robotics classes and I’d see dozens of boys clamoring to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg,” she says. She wondered where the girls were. The number of women graduating with a computer science degree has dropped from 37 percent in the 1980s to less than 18 percent today. Saujani blames the decline, in part, on an American culture that paints the computer programmer as a “dude in a hoodie, sitting in a basement, drinking a Red Bull.” Girls can’t relate. So in 2012, Saujani created the organization Girls Who Code. It’s working to close the gender gap in technology by teaching girls across the country to computer program. “It’s so important to give girls access to coding and technical skills,” she says, “because I promise you, they’re going to solve the problems of today and tomorrow.”

 

Reshma Saujani spoke at Spotlight Health in 2016 as part of a session called Girls, Unleashed.