What’s the purpose of Code It Like a Girl?
Code it Like a Girl is a social enterprise whose main goal is to familiarize women with coding so they can use it for their professional or personal development.
We envision a world where women, confident in their IT skills, will innovate and channel their creativity to ameliorate the world. They will work and excel at technological professions reducing in this way the industry’s gender gap.
Code it Like a Girl intends to become a hub where creative women will come together, share ideas and use their technological skills for innovative problem solving. Our challenge is to expand in each and every Greek city and become the organization with the most intense impact on women all over Greece.
How does it work?
Code it Like a Girl organizes coding workshops and events throughout the year. The only necessary prerequisite for any woman to participate in our workshops is her determination to learn. Age, previous knowledge or education don’t matter. What is innovative and unique concerning our educational approach is that we use a project based methodology for our workshops. Apart from the necessary theoretical knowledge, participants have the opportunity to learn through action, since at the end of the workshop they have created a useful, real life and long lasting project such as a website or a game. Additionally, we create a safe, judgement-free, respectful and collaborative environment where women feel free to ask any question without pressure or competition.
After the workshop, we try to keep the Code it Like a Girl graduates connected not only with our organization but also with other graduates with whom they might share similar interests or aspirations, thus building a community with strong bonds and enhanced networking.
Why are you doing this?
We want to eliminate or at least reduce the underrepresentation of women in the technological sector. Less than 20% of Computer Science students are girls and even those girls who decide to pursue a tech career often leave early due to the industry’s culture. Studies show that of all the IT employees in Europe only 30% are women and only 9% of the mobile applications in Europe are built by them. Even though technology affects more and more aspects of our lives, women remain mostly consumers and not creators of technological products. This disparity hurts firstly women since they lose the chance to work in a well paid and fast growing field with plenty job vacancies (900.000 in Europe until 2020). It is remarkable that besides the high unemployment rates, job offers in IT augment rapidly but there is no talent to sufficiently fill the shortage. Moreover, this is negative for the technological industry itself, since it loses the perspective of half of its consuming audience. There is no doubt that if women brought their view to the table, the technological products would be more efficient. In a larger scale it also harms the financial progress and technological innovation, since research suggests that gender diversity leads to better decision making, increases creativity and enhances performance within companies.
How did it start?
In 2014 Maria and Anastasia, Law students and founders of Code it Like a Girl, tried to learn coding so they could build their own sites and actualize some of their ideas. Trying to learn with the help of books and online tutorials they faced two problems. Firstly, the lack of physical presence of a person made it harder to find answers to their questions. Secondly, there were no tutorials in Greek, so they thought that people with little knowledge in English couldn’t learn by their own. At the same time they discovered a global movement that promotes the presence of women in IT. All these combined they decided to create Code it Like a Girl to help Greek women who want to start their adventures in tech world. So August 2014 codeitlikeagirl.com was on air. With an open call at social media they found the other women who were meant to be the members of the founding team, based in Thessaloniki, and together they established the first organization in Greece with the aim of attracting more women in programming. Today, what started as a team of 5 has evolved in a social enterprise of almost 50 members with a strong presence in Thessaloniki and Athens.
What have you succeeded until now?
Until now we have equipped 128 girls and women in Greece with basic coding skills through coding workshops and offered 17 lectures to ages 11-45! Our workshops are sold-out within a few hours and after their completion girls and women report that they have changed their view on coding. Some of them have used their newly gained coding skills to gain jobs, promotions or continue their studies and the majority have felt empowered and able to learn whatever they want.
Furthermore, we have the honour to be selected for the Angelopoulos Clinton GIU Fellowship, thanks to which we actively participated in the Clinton Global Initiative University meeting at Miami,Florida, where we presented our idea, exchanged feedback with students from all over the world, discussed partnership proposals with international projects, attended skill building sessions and met social change leaders. In addition, we were selected as 1 of the 5 best participations in Women Innovators for Social Business in Europe (WISE).
Through active blogging and showcasing of women role models we gradually change the mentality of women and inspire them to be great regardless of society’s stereotypes. But above all we are proud for the participants of our workshops and what they have created. You can take a look at a few of the projects created during our workshops here.
photo credits: Γιασμίν Παπαδοπούλου
