Girls Who Code Teams Up with Tech Recruiters
Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2012 to teach adolescent women computer science skills and inspire them to close the gender gap in tech. Three years and thousands of graduates later, the “teaching” part of that mission is humming right along. Next comes the part when these women—many of them in college now—land their first tech jobs, and they’ll have some impressive options open to them.
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and 23 other household-name companies have signed on to Girls Who Code’s “Hire Me” Campaign, pledging to share internship opportunities with the organization’s newly created network of alumni.
The pledge doesn’t constitute an explicit promise to hire women from the program—most companies will just be publicizing their internships and encouraging graduates to apply. But a few, like mobile payment startup Square Inc., have taken it a step further and indicated they’ll be saving spots in their internship program for Girls Who Code alums.
For the rest of the companies on the list, they’re still offering these women an in with some of the biggest names in tech. It’s a remarkable step forward for a young organization that could lead to a tangible improvement in tech’s diversity statistics.
“Now we have girls in the pipeline that have been educated, that are coming from top schools, Saujani told the Wall Street Journal. “Are the tech companies going to hire them? This is a pledge from the top tech companies in the world that says yes. Given how bad the numbers are, if they hire just five of them, their tech teams are going to look dramatically different.”
Based on Girls Who Code’s track record, we’d be surprised if these companies stop at five hires when they see the kind of talent that’s coming their way.
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.