"Without women actively contributing...technology can be coded in a way that includes racial and gender bias."
The tech industry is responsible for the some of the most life-changing innovations of the past few decades. From the Internet to smartphones to the apps we use every single day, tech touches basically every part of our everyday lives. But while the tech industry’s audience ranges far and wide, the actual engineers, developers, and CEOs behind the products and services we rely on are overwhelmingly white and male, with women and people of color vastly underrepresented in the field.
According to statistics published by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, in 2017, women made up only 26% of the professional computing workforce in the United States. When you look at shares of that percentage by race, the stats only get worse: Black women made up 3% of 2017’s computing workforce, Asian women 5%, and Hispanic women only 1%.
Luckily, organizations like Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code, and celebs like Karlie Kloss, known for her Kode With Klossy summer camps that now teach up to 1,000 girls per summer how to code, have led and joined the charge to diversify the industry. And recently, global superstar Priyanka Chopra has lended her power to advocating for the continued growth of coding education opportunities for underrepresented communities, by investing in and becoming a trustee for the Holberton School, a coding academy that teaches students a comprehensive full-stack curriculum — all without charging any tuition up front — with a goal to find people who “might not come across as fitting the usual ‘software engineer’ profile, but will nonetheless become leaders once in the industry, and give them the means to become just that,” according to their website.
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