[MUSIC]

[APPLAUSE] Good morning everyone.

I wanted to really just share a little bit with you this morning about my

journey as the founder of this organization that we really feel is

doing revolutionary work in introducing girls to coding and technology.

And this is a journey that started back in April 2011, and has really,

literally taken us around the world in terms of introducing girl to,

girls to code, and telling folks why that's important to do.

I wanna talk a bit today about when girls hack and

designing the future of technology for women and girls of color.

One of the things that I was recently asked in an interview was

a reporter said, well, can you tell me something that your organization has

accomplished that made you feel that was their highest achievement?

And now though as an organization, we've achieved many things.

We have sponsorships by Google, sponsorships from Microsoft.

We've been awarded awards and for doing our work in, at the White House, and

we've, we've just received lots of accolades for this work.

When I thought about it, the thing that really made me an,

really feel proud of the work and that this work was really important and

I was on the right path, was thinking back to this day in December of 2013.

When we took three girls,

from our organization that you see here, to the [UNKNOWN] Startup Conference,

to give an Ignite talk, the very first time that the Lean Startup organization

had ever even invited youth, to come to the Ignite stage.

And these three girls from our organization, Kai,

Sharmian, and Rebecca, spoke about their journey as hackers.

And being able to attend one of their very first hack-a-thons and

creating this app that would really solve a problem in their community.

And to see them on the stage amongst hundreds and hundreds of people,

talking about their work with such confidence and such committment, and

with such pride, was everything that our organization is about.

But to just give you a little bit of how they got to the Ignite stage,

I wanted to talk a little bit about that particular hackathon.

A few weeks before Ky, Shermie and Rebecca went to Ignite,

they participated in a youth hack-a-thon that was hosted by

another nonprofit organization in the Bay area called Level Playing Field Institute.

And during this youth hack-a-thon, the girls formed a team of five, looked at

all the issues in their surrounding community in Oakland, and decided to

create an app that would address the issues related to food bank accessibility.

And as you see on the top, that's the work in the, for the designers.

I'm sure you'll appreciate that.

That the girls actually did to map out everything that they needed to do in this

app, every user that it needed to touch, every issue that it needed to address.

But not only did they create one working, fully working and

accessible app during those two day hackathon experience,

they created two because they thought well, Food Bank app is great.

You know, this is really solves an issue by connecting folks that wanna give

away food to food banks that need certain things.

But that's not really solving all of the problem.

So they went a bit further and created a second app.

The connect to Food Bank called Feed Me, that would actually connect consumers that

needed certain items to the places where they could find it.

So about this time at middle of day one, I'm feeling pretty stoked.

Because I'm a non-profit founder, but I'm also pretty competitive.

And I was like yes, I put together the dream team, we got it,

we're gonna win this thing [LAUGH].

but, things don't always work out as you plan.

We like to think that one of the things that probably our girls

weren't expecting when they went to the Hackathon was that our team of three super

star coders were going to have to add two people to those, to that their team.

And that just happened to be two boys.

[LAUGH] So no offense to the men in the room, but

because we generally work as girls and these girls are some of my star coders,

they were none too happy about the fact that they had to add boys to the team.

But they did, and they worked together well.

But when they got to the presentation, there was a little bit of clutch,

and they couldn't really present their ideas specifically to the judges.

And a result, they didn't make it to the finals.

So I remember vividly at the end of the competition and

as all the teams that were finalists were called up to the stage, and

my star player team didn't make the cut, the girls were devastated.

So as I'm talking to the girls, as I'm like, you did great, you know,

this is amazing work.

You should be proud of your accomplishment.

It was still just that little thing in their eyes that told me,

they didn't really feel that they achieved as much as they really wanted to.

So when the opportunity came to present and

ignite, we really jumped at that, for the girl's sake.

And not because there was a prize at the end of the day for

them being able to present their ideas, but because what we knew it would do for

their self confidence, and their self esteem, and their self efficacy.

And at the end of their presentation at Ignite,

in a room about this size and actually made me a little bit bigger,

they received the very first of the nice standing ovation.

So now even though I'm the founder of Black Girls Code was

presenting the next day at the largely startup conference,

everyone that came up to me in my presentation, was asking about the girls.

And Food Bank and Feed Me.

And because of that, and seeing the look on their faces, and

the look on their parents' faces, and the look on the audience faces,

it really solidified everything that Black Girls Code is about.

Our focus is really to paint a picture of the face of

technology that doesn't exist today.

To really put a stake in the ground and

say that this is something that girls can do, girls of all colors, and so much more.

And that's the reason we were founded in 2011.

Our focus is really to address one key issue.

And that's that women and

girls of color are vastly underrepresented in the technology industry, and

are being left behind by participants in this burgeoning innovation economy.

Our mission is a simple one.

We want to empower young women of color between the ages of seven to

17 to embrace this tech marketplace as builders and

creators by introducing them to skills in computer programming and technology.

And we'd like to think of ourselves as the girl scouts of technology.

And we have a, what we think is a modest goal, but not really.

We hope to reach and train one million girls of color to code by the year 2040.

In just a few short years, we've really launched into this learn to code movement

as the only organization still, of its type with the focus specifically on

introducing girls from underrepresented communities to technology.

And we sit in between some very awesome partners, some of which I think you're

gonna hear from Girls Learning Code and their founding members later on today.

But our work is specific because it really taps into the issue of

the intersectionality, between race and gender, and

how that impacts girls from these underrepresented communities, and

their openness and acceptance of the ability to go into the technology field.

Since we started in 2011,

our organization has really experienced some exponential growth.

We currently have seven chapters in the US.

From places as far as New York City, to Memphis, New York,

Las Vegas, Detroit, and Chicago.

We even have an international chapter in Johannesburg that we launched with our

partner at Daltworks Incorporated.

And to date we've reached over 3000 girls.

But why is this work important?

I, I think speaking to [UNKNOWN], sure we're all aware of the dire numbers in

terms of women in the field of technology.

But this wasn't always the case.

I myself as an, I'm an engineer.

When I graduated in the mid 80s, you can't really see the bottom of this chart but

the peak is right about 1985 to 1989-ish.

Where you can see the number of women that were going to college to receive

a degree in computer science, was almost 40%, 36, 36, 38%.

But it's the end of this chart if you can see the number there that's about 2004,

2003, the number has plummeted.

So the amount of women that are receiving bachelor's degrees in

computer science to date, is less than 18%.

And if we look at women of color that number is even lower.

It may be 2% for women from African American communities, and

less than 1% for Latinas and Native American women.

So, I think the question that we solved in 2011 when we saw this chart and

these DAR numbers, was why in this age of birge and the economy, are women being

summarily bypassed as effective creators, and leaders in the field of technology?

To say that there are issues endemic to

society would be something that we all would agree on.

When we look at some of the barriers to women in terms of going into the field

of technology, and particularly women of color, the statistics say that if you do

a survey of girls in middle school, over half of them, and, and maybe even close to

70%, express an interest in going into technology or a STEM field.

This is middle school.

But by the time they reach highschool that number plummets to less than 2%.

When we look at girls from African American and Latin communities,

not only are they having problems like bridging that gap between middle and

high school, over 40% of them don't even graduate from high school.

But the problems for girls of color and

underrepresented communities starts much earlier.

Because in third to fifth grade, they average about three grade levels lower

than their counterparts in terms of their proficiency in math and science.

When we look at women that actually enter the workplace, and

even entered the startup field,

we see those numbers that we all saw in the recent weeks from Google,

from Twitter, from LinkedIn, representing a workforce that's less than 30% women.

Now I'm not sure if everybody looked at these numbers as deeply as we were looking

at it in our office, but when we looked at those statistics by people of color,

the numbers for African Americans and Latinos in the work force, force,

currently today, was summarily about 2 to 3%.

That's all both male and female.

So if we're 2%, 2 to 3% male and

female in the current workforce, when we look at those numbers and

dissect those numbers even further for women of color, it's even less.

Now, although the statistics themself paint a very dire,

dire picture about the state for women of color in the field of technology,

some of the things that touch me even greater, and really make me so

determined to meet our goal of training girls in technology,

are really those personal stories that I hear time and time again, from women and

girls about their experiences and their interest in technology.

>> I remember very vividly a story of one student,

who went to school at a very prestigious college for engineering in the South.

Top of her class in high school, coming out of an optional school program

in Memphis, Tennessee, and went to her very first class in Civil Engineering,

and sat in a room of about 200 students and had the professor ask, well,

can you hold up your hand if you received a four or five on the AP math exam?

And in this class of about 200 students,

she was the only student that raised her hand.

But interestingly, the professor didn't acknowledge her.

She defacto became invisible.

And this professor went on to talk about something else.

Or the experience of another student that just so happens to also be from Memphis,

Tennessee, who is now a road scholar and is studying at Oxford,

working on her Master's and soon to be working on her Phd in computer science and

engineering went to school at Georgiatech.

Started a startup company while she was in college.

Excellent student, excellent leader.

But when she was in high school and

was interested in taking this thing called APCS exam, she went to the teacher and

to advice her over the CS department and said, I'm interested in APCS.

And the teacher said, well, that's great, but

I think maybe you'll be more suitable to this CAD class.

Why don't you take CAD instead?

[LAUGH] The student decided to go a different path and told he, no, thank you.

Or a recent student.

A very smart, bright, ninth grader that was interested in going into APCS in tenth

grade, or who after had done, attended lots and lots of Black Girls Code classes.

Very bright.

Gamer.

Developer.

Very interested in going in computer science and

expressed an interest to the CS teacher about enrolling in APCS.

Well, for some reason her application to get into ABCS was denied.

But when we looked a little bit deeper at the student and

the class that were accepted, about 80% of them were boys, and

none of them had any CS background or experience.

Yet the student who was interested in going into CS, and, and

had really gone to the teacher with this background of two and

three years in coding, didn't get the same opportunity.

So these are some of the biggest barriers that we see.

The access denied.

The no acceptance allowed messages that we give to girls.

That we give to women of color when they express an interest in technology, and

they express an aptitude of it,

because we think societally that that's just not what girls do.

Part of our work is changing that dynamic.

Changing that thought process.

Giving everyone an insight into the type of students that could be codis,

which is everyone.

Opening up the field so it inclusive of all, so that all ideas come to the table.

Some of the stories of success I'd like to talk about, speak to those few students.

The first college student that I spoke about that was a Civ E,

in Civ E class, that was me.

The second student I mentioned was a student named Joy, who's from

Memphis Tennessee and is a Rose scholar going on to study her for MIT for a PhD.

And the second one that I mentioned was actually my daughter Kai,

which was the first girl on this side of the screen that you saw

from the [UNKNOWN] hack-a-thon.

But when we give these same women the confidence, and the encouragement, and

the training to develop these technology skills, they not only soar, they thrive.

In this particular site, you see my daughter Kai very young picture but

also as a high school student.

Not only does Kai still program and is still very active in design and

computer programming, she's also a part of her high school robotics team.

When we look at students like Charmiane who was one of the middle girls in

the first slide that I talked about from the competition and

the [UNKNOWN] startup conference.

Sharmian is only 12, but she's been programming since she was eight.

Sharmian has an app, and actually she has a couple of apps in the iTunes store and

the Google Play store.

One of them called Doll Finder,

that she created with the help of her older brothers.

And she continues to program as well,

as having many other interests, or students like Rebecca.

Rebecca was the third student on the slide that I mentioned earlier.

Rebecca is determined to be a game developer.

And not only has she continued to teach herself many, many skills such as Ruby on

Rails, Python, JavaScript, beyond what we teach in Black Girls Code

classes themselves, she even decided to take her mother with her to learn Python.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

And finally, there's this girl.

That girl was actually me, about circa 1970 something.

I won't tell you my age.

[LAUGH] But the point of this is that we never know what girls are capable of,

until we tell them that they're capable of whatever their hearts desire,

and we give them the skills and the encouragement to follow their dreams.

Not only maybe they will become a coder,

a game designer, a business owner, they may become the leader of a movement.

I truly believe that by focusing or removing the barriers that impede women

and girls of color from reaching their potential, as leaders and creators,

recreate a cast gating effect, which results in opening doors of tech inclusion

for all and provides innovative solutions to a plethora of societal issues.

I see my role now as both an engineer and a technologist as

not just the maker of things, but as the creator of possibilities.

And if I could relive 1,000 more of those moments in

December at the lean startup competition, I feel completely fulfilled.

But I know there's much more work to do, and many more lives to change.

Our goal for the new, near future with Black Girls Code is to open eight more

cities and chapters by the end of 2015, and reach 5,000 students.

We continue to need help and support of supportive communities like yourself,

to both step up as volunteers, mentors, sponsors, advocates, and

even cheerleaders for this important work.

By removing these issues and barriers for

women of color, we improve all of their individual lives.

Lives of communities, and affect the greater good for all.

I encourage you all to join the movement, and

stop telling girls what they can't do, and helping them to become what they can.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]