Black Girls Code (BGC) is setting out to see “one million girls of color” in the tech industry by 2040. The nonprofit—founded by Kimberly Bryant in 2011—seeks to address the “underrepresentation of women of color in tech and business,” offering a variety of free and paid programming for girls and women aged seven to 25, including boot camps, summer camps, and hackathons, according to the organization’s website.
Headquartered in San Francisco, BGC already has a presence in 15 cities and will host summer camps in Atlanta, the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles, Chicago, Raleigh, Durham, Boston, Arlington, and NYC, according to CEO Cristina Jones, who said she also hopes to launch a program in Puerto Rico soon.
IT Brew caught up with Jones to chat about current initiatives and how the org is making moves to give Black girls “a real seat at the table.”
Why did you get involved in Black Girls Code?
“I stepped into the CEO role almost a year ago. Black Girls Code originally was developed because the founder didn’t have spaces where her children could learn computer science after school with people that looked like her,” Jones, who had previous stints at 20th Century Fox and Salesforce, told IT Brew.
“When I started moving into technology, however, I started noticing something that was disturbing, and it was a lack of Black women in technology…I think was [around 2015] or [2016], I went to a conference in San Francisco, and I looked around, and it was for AI, and I was literally the only Black woman in the room,” she said, adding that “there’s an entire demographic missing in rooms where technology is being developed, marketed, legislated.”
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What does your goal of launching 1 million girls in tech by 2040 look like?
“We are providing these virtual boot camps, these partnerships with ServiceNow, which is already announced…we have incredible donors, and we are just now going to start rolling them out next year—broad partnerships where we activate cities at scale. And that’s where we’re going to be able to…reach and inspire these girls to understand that tech is for them,” she said. Some of BGC’s partners include major tech companies like Google, IBM, and Sony, according to the nonprofit’s website.
“We’re going to be focused on entrepreneurship opportunities for these girls as well because tech touches everything. We absolutely cannot allow for demographics to be left behind. And I have to tell you, as we look at the success and the engagement around our digital programming offerings, and what’s happening on YouTube, I start to believe that maybe the 1 million number is not ambitious enough.”