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Black Girls Code
20:40 with Kimberley BryantKimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls who Code, talks about her experience about her efforts to empower girls of color ages 7 to 17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology.
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[MUSIC]
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[APPLAUSE] Good morning everyone.
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I wanted to really just share a little bit with you this morning about my
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journey as the founder of this organization that we really feel is
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doing revolutionary work in introducing girls to coding and technology.
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And this is a journey that started back in April 2011, and has really,
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literally taken us around the world in terms of introducing girl to,
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girls to code, and telling folks why that's important to do.
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I wanna talk a bit today about when girls hack and
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designing the future of technology for women and girls of color.
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One of the things that I was recently asked in an interview was
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a reporter said, well, can you tell me something that your organization has
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accomplished that made you feel that was their highest achievement?
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And now though as an organization, we've achieved many things.
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We have sponsorships by Google, sponsorships from Microsoft.
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We've been awarded awards and for doing our work in, at the White House, and
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we've, we've just received lots of accolades for this work.
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When I thought about it, the thing that really made me an,
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really feel proud of the work and that this work was really important and
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I was on the right path, was thinking back to this day in December of 2013.
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When we took three girls,
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from our organization that you see here, to the [UNKNOWN] Startup Conference,
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to give an Ignite talk, the very first time that the Lean Startup organization
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had ever even invited youth, to come to the Ignite stage.
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And these three girls from our organization, Kai,
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Sharmian, and Rebecca, spoke about their journey as hackers.
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And being able to attend one of their very first hack-a-thons and
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creating this app that would really solve a problem in their community.
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And to see them on the stage amongst hundreds and hundreds of people,
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talking about their work with such confidence and such committment, and
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with such pride, was everything that our organization is about.
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But to just give you a little bit of how they got to the Ignite stage,
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I wanted to talk a little bit about that particular hackathon.
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A few weeks before Ky, Shermie and Rebecca went to Ignite,
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they participated in a youth hack-a-thon that was hosted by
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another nonprofit organization in the Bay area called Level Playing Field Institute.
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And during this youth hack-a-thon, the girls formed a team of five, looked at
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all the issues in their surrounding community in Oakland, and decided to
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create an app that would address the issues related to food bank accessibility.
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And as you see on the top, that's the work in the, for the designers.
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I'm sure you'll appreciate that.
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That the girls actually did to map out everything that they needed to do in this
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app, every user that it needed to touch, every issue that it needed to address.
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But not only did they create one working, fully working and
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accessible app during those two day hackathon experience,
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they created two because they thought well, Food Bank app is great.
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You know, this is really solves an issue by connecting folks that wanna give
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away food to food banks that need certain things.
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But that's not really solving all of the problem.
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So they went a bit further and created a second app.
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The connect to Food Bank called Feed Me, that would actually connect consumers that
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needed certain items to the places where they could find it.
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So about this time at middle of day one, I'm feeling pretty stoked.
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Because I'm a non-profit founder, but I'm also pretty competitive.
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And I was like yes, I put together the dream team, we got it,
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we're gonna win this thing [LAUGH].
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but, things don't always work out as you plan.
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We like to think that one of the things that probably our girls
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weren't expecting when they went to the Hackathon was that our team of three super
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star coders were going to have to add two people to those, to that their team.
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And that just happened to be two boys.
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[LAUGH] So no offense to the men in the room, but
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because we generally work as girls and these girls are some of my star coders,
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they were none too happy about the fact that they had to add boys to the team.
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But they did, and they worked together well.
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But when they got to the presentation, there was a little bit of clutch,
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and they couldn't really present their ideas specifically to the judges.
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And a result, they didn't make it to the finals.
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So I remember vividly at the end of the competition and
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as all the teams that were finalists were called up to the stage, and
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my star player team didn't make the cut, the girls were devastated.
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So as I'm talking to the girls, as I'm like, you did great, you know,
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this is amazing work.
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You should be proud of your accomplishment.
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It was still just that little thing in their eyes that told me,
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they didn't really feel that they achieved as much as they really wanted to.
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So when the opportunity came to present and
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ignite, we really jumped at that, for the girl's sake.
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And not because there was a prize at the end of the day for
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them being able to present their ideas, but because what we knew it would do for
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their self confidence, and their self esteem, and their self efficacy.
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And at the end of their presentation at Ignite,
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in a room about this size and actually made me a little bit bigger,
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they received the very first of the nice standing ovation.
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So now even though I'm the founder of Black Girls Code was
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presenting the next day at the largely startup conference,
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everyone that came up to me in my presentation, was asking about the girls.
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And Food Bank and Feed Me.
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And because of that, and seeing the look on their faces, and
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the look on their parents' faces, and the look on the audience faces,
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it really solidified everything that Black Girls Code is about.
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Our focus is really to paint a picture of the face of
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technology that doesn't exist today.
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To really put a stake in the ground and
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say that this is something that girls can do, girls of all colors, and so much more.
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And that's the reason we were founded in 2011.
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Our focus is really to address one key issue.
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And that's that women and
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girls of color are vastly underrepresented in the technology industry, and
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are being left behind by participants in this burgeoning innovation economy.
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Our mission is a simple one.
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We want to empower young women of color between the ages of seven to
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17 to embrace this tech marketplace as builders and
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creators by introducing them to skills in computer programming and technology.
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And we'd like to think of ourselves as the girl scouts of technology.
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And we have a, what we think is a modest goal, but not really.
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We hope to reach and train one million girls of color to code by the year 2040.
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In just a few short years, we've really launched into this learn to code movement
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as the only organization still, of its type with the focus specifically on
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introducing girls from underrepresented communities to technology.
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And we sit in between some very awesome partners, some of which I think you're
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gonna hear from Girls Learning Code and their founding members later on today.
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But our work is specific because it really taps into the issue of
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the intersectionality, between race and gender, and
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how that impacts girls from these underrepresented communities, and
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their openness and acceptance of the ability to go into the technology field.
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Since we started in 2011,
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our organization has really experienced some exponential growth.
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We currently have seven chapters in the US.
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From places as far as New York City, to Memphis, New York,
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Las Vegas, Detroit, and Chicago.
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We even have an international chapter in Johannesburg that we launched with our
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partner at Daltworks Incorporated.
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And to date we've reached over 3000 girls.
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But why is this work important?
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I, I think speaking to [UNKNOWN], sure we're all aware of the dire numbers in
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terms of women in the field of technology.
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But this wasn't always the case.
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I myself as an, I'm an engineer.
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When I graduated in the mid 80s, you can't really see the bottom of this chart but
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the peak is right about 1985 to 1989-ish.
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Where you can see the number of women that were going to college to receive
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a degree in computer science, was almost 40%, 36, 36, 38%.
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But it's the end of this chart if you can see the number there that's about 2004,
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2003, the number has plummeted.
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So the amount of women that are receiving bachelor's degrees in
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computer science to date, is less than 18%.
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And if we look at women of color that number is even lower.
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It may be 2% for women from African American communities, and
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less than 1% for Latinas and Native American women.
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So, I think the question that we solved in 2011 when we saw this chart and
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these DAR numbers, was why in this age of birge and the economy, are women being
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summarily bypassed as effective creators, and leaders in the field of technology?
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To say that there are issues endemic to
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society would be something that we all would agree on.
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When we look at some of the barriers to women in terms of going into the field
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of technology, and particularly women of color, the statistics say that if you do
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a survey of girls in middle school, over half of them, and, and maybe even close to
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70%, express an interest in going into technology or a STEM field.
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This is middle school.
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But by the time they reach highschool that number plummets to less than 2%.
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When we look at girls from African American and Latin communities,
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not only are they having problems like bridging that gap between middle and
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high school, over 40% of them don't even graduate from high school.
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But the problems for girls of color and
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underrepresented communities starts much earlier.
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Because in third to fifth grade, they average about three grade levels lower
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than their counterparts in terms of their proficiency in math and science.
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When we look at women that actually enter the workplace, and
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even entered the startup field,
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we see those numbers that we all saw in the recent weeks from Google,
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from Twitter, from LinkedIn, representing a workforce that's less than 30% women.
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Now I'm not sure if everybody looked at these numbers as deeply as we were looking
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at it in our office, but when we looked at those statistics by people of color,
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the numbers for African Americans and Latinos in the work force, force,
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currently today, was summarily about 2 to 3%.
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That's all both male and female.
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So if we're 2%, 2 to 3% male and
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female in the current workforce, when we look at those numbers and
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dissect those numbers even further for women of color, it's even less.
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Now, although the statistics themself paint a very dire,
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dire picture about the state for women of color in the field of technology,
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some of the things that touch me even greater, and really make me so
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determined to meet our goal of training girls in technology,
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are really those personal stories that I hear time and time again, from women and
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girls about their experiences and their interest in technology.
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>> I remember very vividly a story of one student,
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who went to school at a very prestigious college for engineering in the South.
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Top of her class in high school, coming out of an optional school program
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in Memphis, Tennessee, and went to her very first class in Civil Engineering,
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and sat in a room of about 200 students and had the professor ask, well,
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can you hold up your hand if you received a four or five on the AP math exam?
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And in this class of about 200 students,
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she was the only student that raised her hand.
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But interestingly, the professor didn't acknowledge her.
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She defacto became invisible.
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And this professor went on to talk about something else.
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Or the experience of another student that just so happens to also be from Memphis,
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Tennessee, who is now a road scholar and is studying at Oxford,
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working on her Master's and soon to be working on her Phd in computer science and
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engineering went to school at Georgiatech.
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Started a startup company while she was in college.
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Excellent student, excellent leader.
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But when she was in high school and
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was interested in taking this thing called APCS exam, she went to the teacher and
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to advice her over the CS department and said, I'm interested in APCS.
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And the teacher said, well, that's great, but
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I think maybe you'll be more suitable to this CAD class.
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Why don't you take CAD instead?
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[LAUGH] The student decided to go a different path and told he, no, thank you.
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Or a recent student.
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A very smart, bright, ninth grader that was interested in going into APCS in tenth
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grade, or who after had done, attended lots and lots of Black Girls Code classes.
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Very bright.
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Gamer.
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Developer.
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Very interested in going in computer science and
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expressed an interest to the CS teacher about enrolling in APCS.
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Well, for some reason her application to get into ABCS was denied.
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But when we looked a little bit deeper at the student and
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the class that were accepted, about 80% of them were boys, and
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none of them had any CS background or experience.
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Yet the student who was interested in going into CS, and, and
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had really gone to the teacher with this background of two and
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three years in coding, didn't get the same opportunity.
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So these are some of the biggest barriers that we see.
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The access denied.
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The no acceptance allowed messages that we give to girls.
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That we give to women of color when they express an interest in technology, and
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they express an aptitude of it,
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because we think societally that that's just not what girls do.
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Part of our work is changing that dynamic.
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Changing that thought process.
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Giving everyone an insight into the type of students that could be codis,
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which is everyone.
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Opening up the field so it inclusive of all, so that all ideas come to the table.
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Some of the stories of success I'd like to talk about, speak to those few students.
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The first college student that I spoke about that was a Civ E,
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in Civ E class, that was me.
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The second student I mentioned was a student named Joy, who's from
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Memphis Tennessee and is a Rose scholar going on to study her for MIT for a PhD.
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And the second one that I mentioned was actually my daughter Kai,
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which was the first girl on this side of the screen that you saw
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from the [UNKNOWN] hack-a-thon.
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But when we give these same women the confidence, and the encouragement, and
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the training to develop these technology skills, they not only soar, they thrive.
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In this particular site, you see my daughter Kai very young picture but
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also as a high school student.
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Not only does Kai still program and is still very active in design and
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computer programming, she's also a part of her high school robotics team.
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When we look at students like Charmiane who was one of the middle girls in
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the first slide that I talked about from the competition and
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the [UNKNOWN] startup conference.
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Sharmian is only 12, but she's been programming since she was eight.
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Sharmian has an app, and actually she has a couple of apps in the iTunes store and
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the Google Play store.
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One of them called Doll Finder,
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that she created with the help of her older brothers.
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And she continues to program as well,
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as having many other interests, or students like Rebecca.
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Rebecca was the third student on the slide that I mentioned earlier.
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Rebecca is determined to be a game developer.
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And not only has she continued to teach herself many, many skills such as Ruby on
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Rails, Python, JavaScript, beyond what we teach in Black Girls Code
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classes themselves, she even decided to take her mother with her to learn Python.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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And finally, there's this girl.
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That girl was actually me, about circa 1970 something.
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I won't tell you my age.
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[LAUGH] But the point of this is that we never know what girls are capable of,
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until we tell them that they're capable of whatever their hearts desire,
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and we give them the skills and the encouragement to follow their dreams.
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Not only maybe they will become a coder,
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a game designer, a business owner, they may become the leader of a movement.
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I truly believe that by focusing or removing the barriers that impede women
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and girls of color from reaching their potential, as leaders and creators,
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recreate a cast gating effect, which results in opening doors of tech inclusion
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for all and provides innovative solutions to a plethora of societal issues.
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I see my role now as both an engineer and a technologist as
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not just the maker of things, but as the creator of possibilities.
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And if I could relive 1,000 more of those moments in
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December at the lean startup competition, I feel completely fulfilled.
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But I know there's much more work to do, and many more lives to change.
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Our goal for the new, near future with Black Girls Code is to open eight more
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cities and chapters by the end of 2015, and reach 5,000 students.
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We continue to need help and support of supportive communities like yourself,
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to both step up as volunteers, mentors, sponsors, advocates, and
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even cheerleaders for this important work.
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By removing these issues and barriers for
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women of color, we improve all of their individual lives.
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Lives of communities, and affect the greater good for all.
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I encourage you all to join the movement, and
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stop telling girls what they can't do, and helping them to become what they can.
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Thank you.
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[APPLAUSE]
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