Computer-related jobs are being created at such a rapid clip in the United States that its workforce can't keep up, so one woman is using that opportunity to create change in a community that she says is suffering from a disparity in education and income.
"Girls, especially women of color, are summarily bypassed as far as being accepted as creative, and capable change agents in the tech industry," said Kimberly Bryant, founders of Black Girls Code, a Bay Area organization that trains young women of color of the ages between seven and seventeen to code.
Bryant made her remarks during a Thursday morning presentation at Personal Democracy Forum in New York City.
"Black Girls Code was founded to redefine this dominant narrative, to shift this paradigm, to make a radical and fundamental and lasting change in the technology industry," she said.
Bryant pointed to current workplace trends to illustrate her point. Not only do fewer women in general graduate with computer science degrees, but African American women make up only three percent of those overall graduates. Latinas and Native Americans comprise only one percent of those graduates, according to the Department of Labor.
Yet African Americans are more than 29 percent more likely than the average American adult to own a smartphone, she noted, and about 13 percent more likely to hold a portable tablet kind of device, and more likely than average users to listen to music and movies online.
"We believe that radical action is needed to move the needle, and close the opportunity gap for women and girls of color, and to provide them with the needed skills to go beyond just being consumers, and transition them to being creators of technology," she said.
So Bryant, herself an electrical engineer who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, founded Black Girls Code in October 2011 to change that. Her goal: To train one million girls to code by 2040.
"With Web courses, and both Web development, and mobile app development, robotics and game design, we are slowly but surely redefining the image of what it means to be a geek," she said. "Our goal is to become the girl scouts of technology."
Her group has already trained 1,200 young women and girls. Bryant noted that the course can be transformative and even have a multiplier effect. One student named Ida took a course at Black Girls Code, graduated at the top of her class and started training other girls both at Bryant's organization and at her own school. She began the entire endeavor skeptical, telling Bryant initially that she wasn't interested in coding, but instead was interested in being a doctor.
Bryant noted that the Department of Labor estimates that there will be 1.4 million "computer-related" jobs in the United States by 2020, and that it's the fastest-growing and one of the most lucrative professionally-related fields. In the Bay area however, African Americans aren't benefiting from that trend. She noted that on average, African American families' net worth is a tenth of white families at about $28,000 a family versus an average of $285,000 for white families.
Crying as she recounted it, Bryant said that many mothers had thanked her organization for going to their neighborhoods to offer the training.
"That's why I as a mother, I feel that the work that we're doing is both radical and critical to making a change for not just my daughter, but for all of our daughters. This is a movement for those who believe that it's time is now to bring girls and women to the forefront."
Source: http://techpresident.com/news/23974/kimberly-bryant-wants-black-girls-code-be-girl-scouts-technology
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