About five years ago, my friend Reshma Saujani reached out to ask if she could borrow some office space to pilot a program dedicated to teaching high school girls how to code. At the time, my company, AppNexus, was still very much a scrappy New York startup. We weren’t a big organization, and we certainly couldn’t match the major tech behemoths for comfort or amenity. But I was happy to open our doors for a good cause.
As Reshma remembers it, she recruited twenty girls from New York – “from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city to some of the poorest” – “lured them with pizza and a $50 stipend,” and crammed them into a conference room for the summer. “None of them had a background in computer science, but instead a willingness and bravery to try something new. And by the end of the summer, I saw something magical. I saw girls who began as strangers call each other sisters. I saw girls who thought coding was only for boys, gain new role models that looked like them. And I saw girls who never thought they’d be interested in coding build apps and websites solving issues that tugged at their heartstrings.”
That modest beginning begat a movement. Today, Girls Who Code is a national organization that has helped 40,000 girls learn fundamental computer science skills, either through summer immersion programs in partnership with leading technology companies like Facebook and Google, or through high school coding clubs. It’s been gratifying to watch it all unfold. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am not an impartial observer. The organization is housed at AppNexus’ offices, we continue to sponsor a summer immersion program, and to a person, we consider ourselves full-throated allies and admirers.
As Reshma and her team celebrated the organization’s fifth anniversary this year, I wanted to understand how a summer immersion experience can – or cannot – change the playing field for young women who endeavor to break into a field traditionally dominated by men. My interest is in part personal: my daughter is seven years old, and I want her to enjoy every intellectual opportunity that many boys her own age can easily assume as their birthright. My investment is also professional: I’m the CEO of a global technology company, and I know that if we don’t attract and retain a diverse workforce, we will fail to achieve our full potential.
This summer, I sat down with Diana Kris Navarro, a member of that first Girls Who Code class. After taking a gap year in the Philippines, Diana is now finishing her degree in Computer Science at Rutgers University. She recently completed a summer internship at Tumblr, where she worked as an infrastructure engineer, and has also racked up professional experience at Adobe and Qualcomm. In no small way, she is a living testament to the power of Reshma’s dream. “It’s been pretty good after Girls Who Code,” Diana told me.
Yet as the late Texas governor Ann Richards once said of Ginger Rogers – she “did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” – women who enter computer science have to work twice as hard and demonstrate thrice the grit.
Diana first developed an interest in coding when she found that she could fiddle around with the HTML on her MySpace account. “I wasn’t really coding,” she concedes,” but I guess I knew that you can change this stuff to make your website look like this.” That experience nurtured a deeper curiosity. With encouragement from her godbrother, who had majored in computer science in college, she enrolled in her high school’s Advanced Placement CS class. She was one of only three girls in a hyper-masculine environment. “I remember this one dude was complaining that he only got a 98 on an exam, and I got a 57 or something, and I was like: ‘this is clearly not for me. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this class.’”
It was on a lark that she applied to participate in the first GWC summer immersion program. She did so “literally with the intention of only having something for my college applications.”
That was where the magic began. That summer, Diana was exposed not just to coding fundamentals, but to “all these women engineers” who impressed upon her, and the other nineteen pilot students, that it was indeed possible to crack the glass ceiling. Five years later, she still retains deep respect and affection for my colleague, Theresa Vu (aka Tvu), an immensely talented computer scientist who holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown and who was one of the first engineers at AppNexus. “TVu doesn’t look like anybody that I’d ever seen,” Diana recalled, and certainly she didn’t resemble the “out-of-the-box stereotype” of a computer scientist. Yet there she was – “this incredible developer and engineer here at AppNexus. And we had all these other women engineers come in to speak to us, from Google and Facebook – and I didn’t know that this existed.”
It was a transformational experience. Then the summer ended.
Diana found her return to high school and her first months at college a jarring contrast. “I went from learning how to code in this room of 19 other girls to literally being one of 19 girls in a class of 150 or 200 students. It was surprising, even though I knew that the gap was big.”
This concept is not intuitively easy for people like me to grasp. When I attended computer science classes, whether in high school or college, I was one of many white men in a field dominated by white men. This same inborn advantage has followed me through my professional life. But for pioneers like Diana, forging ahead means “not seeing anybody who looks like you. You think, ‘do I belong here?’” These are challenges with which I have never had to contend. Should my daughter develop an interest in engineering or computer science, I’ll be forever grateful to trailblazers like Diana, who have made that road just a little easier to travel.
One of Reshma’s mottos is that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” She hits that point often, but Diana “didn’t really put two and two together” until after she began college. “Boys in my class saw Steve Jobs; they saw Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t have the women role models that I needed to go into engineering at a younger age. There was Ada Lovelace, but I literally had no idea who she was until college.” (Ada Lovelace was a nineteenth-century English mathematician and arguably one of the first computer programmers. She should be a household name, but she isn’t.)
Along the way, Diana has found many of the men in her classes to be predictably dismissive of the few women in their midst. She readily offered that some professors are keen to support women, but others either don’t perceive or won’t acknowledge that the discipline of computer science is rife with unconscious bias and marked by a pervasive demographic imbalance that intimidates many women who might otherwise enter the field.
To be clear, Diana has great respect and admiration for many of the men with whom she has worked. At Tumblr, she was the only woman on an otherwise all-male team. She rates her colleagues as “amazing” – “they helped me in every way that I needed, when I had a problem they were always there to figure things out with me.” But she missed having access to a “super strong sisterhood that I could turn to if I ever had an issue at work or just outside of my professional environment.”
Of course, none of this stopped Diana, who has already worked on complex problems for some of the world’s most prestigious technology companies. She developed in Scala and C to improve Tumblr’s backend services for logging, metrics, and link handling. She built a Layers panel prototype for Adobe’s Photoshop software. At Qualcomm, she developed an Android app. And to repeat, she hasn’t even graduated college yet!
As she weighs the professional opportunities available to her, Diana is less interested in the accoutrements typically on offer at tech companies – “the free snacks, LaCroix sparkling water,” game tables and cocktail hours. She’s looking for the very same culture that she first experienced five years ago – the “opportunity to meet female engineers,” “see women doing impactful things” and operating on equal footing with men. “If the company doesn’t have good diversity or if I don’t see strong women in engineering roles or in other positions of power, it’s just a complete turnoff for me.”
That’s a shot across the bow. Here is a smart, accomplished, and driven computer scientist. She’s sitting in a room with me – the CEO of a global tech company. And she all but tells me: I don’t care how much you pay me or how cool the fringe benefits are. If your engineering team isn’t diverse, if your leadership ranks aren’t inclusive, then I’m not interested in working for you.
That’s a message I cannot afford to ignore; neither can the CEO of any other technology company. We owe it to our customers and investors to attract the best talent available. If we allow conscious or unconscious bias to turn off a large part of the workforce, then we have failed as leaders.
Girls Who Code is doing its part to animate the curiosity and ambition of thousands of girls each year. But if we introduce girls to the magic of computer science and then throw them back into a world that devalues their potential, we will not have met our obligation. What happens after the summer ends – when the girls go back to high school and onto college, when they begin their professional careers – is just as important.
Five years later, the girls are still coding. That’s a great thing to see. It’s incumbent upon every leader in the technology industry to ensure that they have an open, equitable environment in which to pursue that dream.
