Black Girls CODE adds cities, and maybe boys: Kimberly Bryant found it ironic that in 2011 the African-American girls in an impoverished neighborhood just miles from Silicon Valley had few opportunities to learn about technology.
Bryant had left a 20 year career in engineering at Fortune 500 companies like Genentech, Merck (NYSE: MRK) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) intent on starting a company. But those girls stuck with her, reminding her of the 1980s when she was one of a whopping five female electrical engineering majors in her class at Vanderbilt University.
"I was really surprised to come out and take a look again and see that numbers of women in engineering are even less," Bryant said. The percentage of women earning computer science degrees has dropped from 27 percent in 1984 to 18 percent today. Yet, computing and mathematics are among the fastest growing occupations. The Association for Computing Machinery projects 150,000 new computing jobs annually during the next eight years.
"That's what really drove me to refocus my efforts," Bryant said.
The nonprofit Black Girls CODE was soon born.
