Reshma Saujani Keynote

Founder and CEO of Girls who Code Reshma Sajani So I always say, first and foremost, I am the daughter of refugees. Three generations of my family was born in Africa. And my father was literally watching television one day when the dictator Idi Amin came on and said that they had 90 days to leave the country. But my parents were lucky for one reason. They were engineers. And it was the 1970s and this nation was desperately seeking engineers. So they became two of a thousand refugees who got status to come to this country. So from the time I was a little girl, I have loved this country because this country literally saved my parents life. And if you asked Reshma when she was 12 or 13, what she wanted to do, she would have told you that she wanted to serve. I'm not a coder. I did not major in computer science. My passion for solving this problem doesn't come because of my professional experience, but it becomes because I am an American. And I believe that there are so many people out there that are desperately seeking 21st century jobs, so many girls, and we have to teach them. So in 2012, the failed politician, the non coder, decided to do something about it. And I had an idea and I said, what would it look like if we created a program to teach Girls who Code? And I literally was like, girls who Code, That's a really good name. I went on GoDaddy.com bought it for $1.99. I researched all of the existing programs that were out there, found out that there wasn't a lot, and thought that the best way that I could intervene in solving this problem was through a summer program. And so I built a summer program. I took 20 girls and I embed them in a classroom in a technology company at Appnexus, because Brian o' Kelly was a friend and I asked him to borrow a conference room. I literally sent an email to all my friends and said, I'm starting an organization called Girls who Code. Can anybody help me? One of those emails ended up in the inbox of Sarah Heider, who was a 23 year old engineer at Twitter. And. And she took that email and she went into Dick's office and said, we gotta do this. 72 hours later, Dick asked me to come fly to Twitter and signed up to be a partner when it was just an idea in my head. I remember on launch day, we couldn't get a reporter to write about Girls who Code. And we got one line from Twitter on a blog saying, we're working with an organization called Girls who Code. And I Literally, the Internet just exploded. And in the past four years, we've had explosive growth. In 2012, I taught 20 girls how to computer program in one classroom in New York City. This past year, we'll reach 40,000 girls in all 50 states. It's so powerful for me to see four years later, four and a half years later, almost five years later, the results that we're getting. 90% of our alumni are going on to major or minor in computer science, and 77% did not want to when they entered. It's possible we can close that gender gap in our lifetime. It's possible. People always ask me how you can help. And the first thing is, we gotta change culture. Everywhere you look, there are images, there are shows, there are T shirts, there are books that are discouraging our girls from being creators, from being innovators, from being change makers. And we have to take on culture. Culture plays a huge role. And what our girls think is possible, probable for them. There are so many things that we do that are so unconscious, so unintentional to our young girls that discourage, dissuade, and don't allow our girls to reach their fullest potential. And we don't do it intentionally. I want all of you in this room to be conscious of how we're raising our girls and how we can raise our girls to be brave and how we can encourage them to tinker and to take things apart, to get their dresses real dirty. Thank you.