Black Girls CODE Helps Young Women of Color Get Into Tech

This past Sunday, the latest weekend session of Black Girls CODE came to an end. In case you don’t know, Black Girls CODE is an organization that is dedicated to increasing the number of women of color in tech companies by helping young women of color learn how to code. Seems simple enough, no?

By getting children interested in tech at an early age, they help solve part of the problem with diversity in tech right at the source. They have chapters and events all around the country, and have had girls churn out some incredibly clever apps.

The winning team’s app, called Mana, is designed to help students collaborate and study together. They were awarded $2000 for their efforts. The second place app, called BeeU, is geared to helping bullied children. To those familiar with the concept, the weekend resembles a hackathon where small teams of people band together to build something from scratch.

This bit from the Black Girls CODE website explains it all, really:

“Imagine. Build. Create.” has always been our motto at Black Girls CODE. The digital divide is steadily eroding, but if we want to create truly universal access to technology, San Francisco needs to come together as a community.  Imagine a world where everyone is given the tools to succeed, and then help us build ways for everyone to access information and create a new age of women of color in technology.

(via Huffington Post)

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Jessica Lachenal

Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.

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