What entrepreneur Yasmine Mustafa didn't know definitely hurt her.
What Mustafa didn't know was the basics of coding -- a problem,
considering that her blog marketing business, 123LinkIt, relied on coding.
"It cost me time and money and a lot of stress," she said. "If I would
have been able to code, it would have helped me a lot."
That's why, in April 2011, Mustafa founded the Philadelphia chapter of
Girl Develop It, an international nonprofit organization based in New York
that provides low-cost tech instruction to women -- or, as they are called in
the GDI world, nerdettes.
Since then, 750 women have taken classes in Philadelphia. Mustafa started
the local organization, in part, because she got tired of traveling to New
York for classes. On Saturday and Sunday in Old City, 18 women will receive 10
hours of instruction on HTML5, a coding language, for $90.
"For $10 to $13 an hour, it's basically like going to a yoga class," she
said. "Every class sells out. That speaks to the demand."
Her organization isn't the only one aiming to close the gender gap in
computer technology, where, federal data indicate, men outnumber women, 2-1.
Part of it is a pipeline problem: Only one in five students who take the
Advanced Placement Computer Science test are girls, even though they make up
nearly half the group taking the AP Calculus exam, and less than one in five
college computer-science majors are women.
Experts say it's key to influence girls while they are still in middle
school, which is why, in 2009, Tracey Welson-Rossman began TechGirlz.
"Girls are self-selecting out of technology around ninth grade,"
Welson-Rossman said. "To them, it's not collaborative, not creative, and it
also looks like what they think . . . a nerd looks like."
Meeting monthly, TechGirlz's middle-school-age members connect to
technology through hands-on projects. Last Saturday, they learned KODU, a
game-creation language.
Welson-Rossman, a founder of Chariot Solutions, a Philadelphia-based
software-development company, sees encouraging young women to aim for
computer-tech professions as a national imperative, with job openings
dramatically outstripping qualified workers in the next decade.
"This is something that's really important for the fabric of our
country," she said. Her company "wants to hire women, but we aren't seeing
enough female candidates."
EBay agrees. On Monday, TechGirlz (www.techgirlz.org) announced that it
had received a $5,000 grant from eBay Foundation Corporate Advised Fund at
Silicon Valley Community Foundation to develop afterschool programs for girls.
One of the TechGirlz is Nala Bailey, 14, of Marlton. She always liked
mathematics, but now her grades are higher, and she said she's more confident
about her ability to tackle tough problems.
"Most girls think we're smarter than guys," she said, adding that girls
don't always put those smarts to use. "I think girls lean more toward
fashion."
Bailey said she leans toward science and technology and aims to enter
that field as a grown-up.
"I like the way TechGirlz makes me think about stuff. It makes me think
about all the possibilities that girls from my generation can figure out with
science for the next generation and to help our nation go on to the next
step."
Mustafa, who also serves on the TechGirlz board, said Girl Develop It
classes help women gain skills and confidence.
Shannon Baffoni, 27, of Philadelphia, took her first class so that she
could fix minor coding mistakes she found as a quality tester.
"I could use the lingo. It gave me a little bit more confidence," she
said.
The courses provided her with the skills to pursue a new passion and a
new job as a website developer for a local advertising agency.
Baffoni said she has taken mixed-gender classes but prefers the Girl
Develop It approach.
"You didn't feel anyone was judging. You didn't have anything to prove.
You were just there because you wanted to learn," she said.
"GDI makes it a point to be very welcoming. It's OK to ask questions,
it's OK to mess up, it's OK to not know what to do."
