Google Launches “Made With Code”, A $50 Million Program To Get More Girls To Code
Google has launched a new initiative dubbed, Made With Code, set to encourage more young women to learn how to code and close the gender gap currently being witnessed in the tech-industry. The program is meant to show young women that all the tech-things they love and use; ranging from the various apps on their smartphones, to the movies they love to watch are all brought about through coding.
The program will have its own website offering resources and projects to the girls that will help them learn how to code. In addition to this, it will also facilitate community members to discuss different lessons and projects among themselves and with mentors. It will also provide information about regional events. All of these will be geared towards getting more women into the driver’s seat and taking an active role in technology development.
Megan Smith, Google X EVP said that there are various factors that could turn things around all of which are easily attainable. First we could start by encouraging more girls to start coding, and the person encouraging them must not necessarily be a technician themselves. “You don’t have to know how to code to encourage someone else to code.”
Smith further explained that for some girls, the problem is a lack of a clear avenue to code while in others there are no female role models and heroes they can look up to. Not even in the television shows do girls finds such heroes; computer scientists characters in movies are often men, rarely are they women. Made With Code seeks to remedy this, by encouraging girls to start coding as well as giving them female role models to inspire them.