Black women make up less than 0.5% of leadership roles in tech. Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code Inc., is trying to change that.
Bryant’s small community effort attracted the attention of ThoughtWorks, a global tech consultancy company. ThoughtWorks invested in Bryant in January 2012 and gave her access to space and resources across the country, as well as in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a few years, the operation transformed from a basement experiment into a global non-profit with 15 chapters.
The Black Girls Code curriculum teaches everything from web development to robotics to Artificial Intelligence. Many of the first-year students are now in college, including Kai, who is in her sophomore year studying computer science.Bryant wants to expand Black Girls Code into a life-long support network to help retention rates in tech.
Bryant said she was never interested in coding — that was all her daughter. Instead, Bryant studied engineering at Vanderbilt University. She said she met only one other African American female engineering student in her four years there, and that none of her professors were even female, let alone black.Still, she excelled. Bryant was only 25 when she became a manager at DuPont in Tennessee.
For tech companies, a tipping point came around 2014 when Google publicly released its employee diversity numbers for the first time. They were“There was this unspoken understanding that we had a diversity and inclusion issue, but we didn’t have the courage to discuss it,” said Bryant. “But now, the data was there, fully transparent. Companies started to change...I’ve seen gains in the number of women in tech roles...But we’ve still not made progress in the number of women of color.
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