14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s promise to help invest in a future where more women come to work for the company in an effort to diversify its workforce seems to be taking shape even more. The company has promised to invest up to $50 million (€36.7 million) in organizations that can help encourage girls to take an interest in computer science at an early age.
The Made with Code initiative seeks to reward teachers who support girls who study computer science courses on Codecademy or Kahn Academy.
“Today, we’re attempting to solve this issue on a much larger scale. Along with Chelsea Clinton, Girls Inc., Girl Scouts of the USA, Mindy Kaling, MIT Media Lab, National Center for Women & Information Technology, SevenTeen, TechCrunch and more, Google is launching Made with Code, an initiative to inspire girls to code,” announces Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's CEO.
The program includes introductory Blockly-based coding projects, such as designing a 3D printed bracelet, learning to create animated GIFs or building beats for a music track. There are also collaborations with organizations such as the Girl Scouts of the USA and Girls, Inc. to introduce the Made with Code into their networks and encourage young girls to give coding a chance.
“Nowadays, coding isn’t just a skill useful for working at a tech company; engineering isn’t just for engineers. Interior design. Medicine. Architecture. Music. No matter what a girl dreams of doing, learning how to code will help her get there. Their future — our future — is made with code. Let’s do what we can to make sure that future is as bright as possible,” writes Wojcicki.
The YouTube CEO presented several cases of women who have learned how to code and who don’t necessarily work for Google or other tech companies. She tells the stories of a hip hop dancer and choreographer who lights up stages thanks to the things she learned, or of a cinematographer at Pixar, or a humanitarian fighting against malaria around the world.
She points out that these are women with amazing jobs that use computer science and their ability to code in the things they do. The problem is that there are far too few women like them and far too few young girls following in their footsteps.
Wojcicki, who is one of the first employees Google has ever had and who was appointed as YouTube CEO recently, shared the fact that the issue hits home for her since her school-age daughter doesn’t show an interest in creating technology, despite understanding it and liking to use it.