The Boulder chapter of Girl Develop It is only one year old - but it’s already taught nearly 300 local women how to code. Here’s to some good news about women in tech!
The very first GDI Boulder Intro to HTML/CSS class
The bad news has been everywhere lately. In case you haven’t heard, women are fleeing the tech industry and young women and girls are avoiding it. The percentage of workers in computing occupations who are women peaked at nearly 40 percent in the early 1990s and has since dropped to around 25 percent. At the same time, the percentage of computer science graduates who are women has withered from a high of 37 percent in 1980 to just 18 percent in 2010. Women are in scarce supply among startup founders as well, despite figures showing that women-led tech companies are a better investment than male-owned companies.
There’s more than one way to deal with a leaky pipeline. Nonprofits like Girls Who Code are working to tackle the problem early by bringing more school-age girls into computing careers. But not every woman enters the pipeline as a girl. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of grown women living in the Front Range who are excited about learning software development and finding computing jobs. I know because I’m one of them, and I’ve met dozens more women like me in coding workshops and over coffee, cocktails and laptops.
A GDI Boulder Code & Cocktails event.
Hundreds of women developers and aspiring women developers like me have shown up at weekend and weeknight workshops and events organized by groups like Girl Develop It. For the past year, the Boulder chapter of Girl Develop It has reached and rallied local women of all ages, from all sorts of backgrounds, who want to be better at coding.
Local developers Cara Jo Miller and Kate Bierbaum started the Boulder chapter of GDI, in June 2013. You might recognize them from another Built in Colorado post, 5 Amazing Women Developers in Colorado. They’re currently planning a 1st anniversary party to commemorate a rip-roaring year of growth and achievement with a community of students, sponsors, teachers, volunteers and cheerleaders. In just one year of existence, GDI Boulder has held more than 30 low-cost classes and workshops taught by local volunteers, and taught 300 women to code. In the coming year, you’ll see volunteers from the Fort Collins and Denver communities spin up new GDI chapters that will provide the women in those cities with the same access to local, low-cost coding classes and support that we have here in Boulder.
Meanwhile, the GDI Boulder Meetup has grown to nearly 500 members. That’s 500 local women who want to code more than they do now, and it includes me. I took HTML5, Javascript/JQuery, Python, NGINX and Git/Github classes with GDI and immediately put some of those skills to work at my day job as a web content manager.
Many women, like me, take more than one GDI classes and leave each class hungry for more. In the meantime, I’ve enrolled in a web development bootcamp, WebLab, to keep learning and practicing coding between GDI workshops. I’ve seen some of my GDI classmates go on to learn enough to teach their own classes for GDI.
This is not to say that women developers are the only ones who are excited about more women learning to code. Men and women both volunteer their time to teach and TA courses and workshops for GDI. I’ve met many men who have told their wives, girlfriends, friends, daughters, and mothers about GDI; men who cheer on beloved women as the women pursue education and advance their careers in software development.
The overall Colorado tech and startup community has been a wellspring of support and enthusiasm for GDI and its mission. Local individuals and companies, including SendGrid, Salesforce, SpotRight, HyperDog Media, and SimpleEnergy, support GDI with space, sponsorship and supplies for workshops and events.
At GDI Boulder’s first birthday party, we’ll be toasting people everywhere who are tackling the leaky pipeline on all fronts. Here’s to those of us who are entering the pipeline later than many - but who hope to stick, and maybe even help plug up some of the leaks.