You Cannot Be What You Cannot See: Girls Who Code Aims to Close the Tech Gender Gap WRITTEN BY GIRLS WHO CODE
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ill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Albert Einstein, and Neil Armstrong are household names—but Katherine Johnson, Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, and Jean Bartik are not nearly as well known. As children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman says, “You cannot be what you cannot see.” The gender gap in STEM persists, and when girls can’t imagine themselves as computer scientists, they are less likely 14 ATPE NEWS
to pursue the field. Those who do are in the minority, making it likely that they’ll drop out somewhere along the pipeline. But according to research at Stanford University, if girls were to be exposed to female inventors at the same rate as boys to male inventors, female innovation rates would rise by 164%, and the gender gap in innovation would fall by 55%. Enter Girls Who Code.
