 Our next vignette is Reshma Sajani, who is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code. She's also the author of a book. I just I love the title. She actually interviewed me for that this book, but that's not why I love the title. It's called Women Who Don't Wait In Line. So I think one thing you can think about is Girls Who Code are women who don't wait in line. Reshma is a former deputy public advocate up for New York City. She was also the first South Asian woman to run for Congress in 2010. She's going to be speaking about, this will not surprise you, girls in tech. So welcome Reshma Sajani. Hello everybody, I'm Reshma Sajani, the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code. And I think like each of you, I wake up in the morning and I think about a problem that I want to solve. And the problem that I want to solve is to make sure that we have gender parity in technology by 2050, to make sure that we get a million girls to raise their hand and say, I want to learn how to code. Full disclosure, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a hacker. When I was six years old, my father would say what's two plus two and I kept saying five and he gave up on me. I came to this problem as someone who was running for office and in other rooms I don't like to admit that, but since I'm in DC, I feel like I'm in good company. But in 2010 I was running for Congress and when you're running for office, do you go to a lot of schools? You meet with a lot of kids, you meet with a lot of parents and I'd be in the Upper East Side in New York City and there'd be a hundred boys that were in a robotics lab desperately wanting to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And then I'd be in Queensbridge, the largest public housing in the country, and there'd be one girl in the basement of the church. And I said to myself, what is going on here? Where are the women? So if you're not familiar with the statistics, they're quite startling. The White House released a report that there's going to be 1.4 million jobs that are open in the computing and technology related fields. And at the current rate, less than 30% of them are going to be filled by our workforce and less than 3% of that 30% are going to be filled by women. In the 1980s, 37% of all computer science graduates were women. Today that number is 12%. Think about that. Steve Jobs and his original Apple team probably had more women on it than Mark Zuckerberg has today. What is going on? So this issue is not important because of gender parity for the sake of gender parity. It's important one because the innovation of our nation depends on this. I don't have to tell you the numbers, right? Women, we make up 56% of the labor force. The majority of those in college, as Hillary mentioned earlier today, were 40% of all breadwinners. When it comes to the internet, we own the internet. 85% of all consumer purchases are made by women. We Facebook more. We tweet more. 40% of children's, China's children know how to code. But only 12% of computer science graduates are women. That is a huge crisis for our nation. Second, it's important because of gender parity. Women in STEM jobs make 33% more than women in non-STEM jobs. There is no pay gap between male and female engineers. And it matters more as women do continue to become the breadwinners of families. And finally, I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world that's run by men. And with the advent of social network, every young man in America wants to be Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, wants to found the next Facebook and the next Twitter. And this is going to be the next generation of wealth. And if we don't do something about it, if we don't crash that glass ceiling before it's created, it is again going to be run by men. So what's happening with young girls? I'm sure a lot of people in this room have young women in their life, and you probably see the things that I see. Well, one, young girls are actually more digitally engaged than boys are. They perform better on math and science tests. They're smarter than the boys. But then something happens, right, around eighth or ninth grade, and all of a sudden I hate math. I'm not good at it when you really are. You know, in the 1970s, 10% of doctors and lawyers were women. And today that number is 40%. Why? I decided that I wanted to be a lawyer because I saw Kelly McGillis on the accused and I thought she was amazing. But it's true. Kelly McGillis, L.A. Law, Grey's Anatomy, we were inundated with these images of women that were brilliant and smart and fashionable and cool, and we thought that we could be like them. What do our young girls see today? Well, they get the Barbie doll that says, I hate math. Let's go shopping instead. I can still walk into Forever 21 and buy a t-shirt that says allergic to algebra. Don't get me started on HBO's latest show, Silicon Valley, or the Staples ad, or, you know, image after image after image is saying to girls, this is not for you. You are not good enough. You are not smart enough. And they are listening because you cannot be what you cannot see. And girls do not see technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers or hackers who look like them and they're choosing not to go into those fields. And so I decided in 2012 that I wanted to do something about this. So in 2012 I took 20 young girls, most of them lived under the poverty line, and I put them in a classroom at a large engineering firm in New York City. And we taught them for eight weeks every day, 9.30 to 4.30, we taught them how to computer program. We taught them how to build websites. We taught them how to build mobile apps. We taught them how to have conversations with engineers about their business plan. We taught them how to code. And when we started, quite frankly, they could have not learned how to code. But what happened instead is not only did they learn how to computer program, they were incredible at it. And they showed that they wanted to solve problems that were about changing the world and making our world a better place. So we started with 20 girls in 2012 and last year we taught 152. And this year we're going to teach 400 in 19 companies across America, in Boston, Seattle, New York, Miami at companies like Facebook, Twitter, Square, eBay, Intel, Intuit, Stanford, Adobe, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, every single company, major technology company in America, is going to have 20 young girls learning how to computer programming, learning how to computer program and become the future of innovation in our country. And the most amazing thing about teaching young girls how to computer program is they teach other girls. If you teach a boy how to code, he will teach no one. If you teach a girl how to code, she will teach at least three. So our girls graduated our program and they said, you know what? I want to start a club at school. I want to teach my dad how to code. I want to go to my church and teach them how to computer program. So by the end of this year we'll have another 2,000 girls that go through our girls who code club programs. Again, changing the face of innovation. Our program matters because I truly believe that the products that these young women will create will change the world. One of our young girls, Cora, her father was diagnosed with cancer when she was five years old. So she decided that when she was five she was going to save her daddy's life. She was going to become a doctor. And she didn't understand the connection between technology and medicine until Girls Who Code. And in the last two weeks of our program she built an algorithm to help detect false positives in breast cancer testing. She's 16 years old. Leslie came from a really, again, poor family. She's Latina. She'd walk around her neighborhood and the woman who ran the bodega would come up to her and say, Leslie, I heard you know how to build websites. Will you build one for me? She started building websites for immigrant entrepreneurs in New York City. Because most of those entrepreneurs, less than 5% of them have websites. Julia came from a family of five and every day she'd come to Girls Who Code and she'd be hungry. And when she would go home, her daddy would say to her, Julia, what are you learning? And she'd say, dad, I'm learning how to code. And he said, well, you teach me. So every night she would do her Girls Who Code homework with her father. He is now on his way to being a computer programmer making $85,000 a year, changing the entire trajectory of her family. These are not just three stories. Story after story after story, Danielle, lots of poverty in Detroit she was in our program last year. African-American just got a full ride to Harvard to learn computer science. Kephila, three generations of public housing in her family, first one to go to college, full ride to Westland. Again, story after story after story of these young girls. I had the wonderful experience a couple weeks ago of actually being able to read the applications for the 400 girls that are going to go through our program this year. Every idea was about what they can do to make their community in their world a better place. They wanted to build an app to help fight bullying before bullying even starts. I don't know how they're going to do that, but awesome. You know, one of our girls is hearing impaired and she wants to build glasses to help those that are hearing impaired actually watch and hear movies. They care about their communities. They don't want to go into a corner and build video games. They want to make their communities better. The United Nations will be for bli we are for hunger, for obesity, for cancer. And this is why our failure to teach our young girls the fact that we continue to send messages to them that turn them off of computer science. The fact that we're doing that, this is why this as the most important domestic issue of our nation's time. 0.3 % of high school girls say that they want to go into computer in CS last year. Only 20,000 kids took the AP computer science exam. 3,000 of those kids were girls. In three states, no girl took the AP computer science exam. I know Mississippi has girls there. We have a huge issue that we're trying to solve. And at Girls Who Code, we feel like we've found a solution. 95% of our girls are graduating our program and they're going into computer science. And at the rate that we're going, that in fact, in the past two years, we've gone from 20 girls to 3,000, we will turn that 7,500 number on its head in this decade. I truly believe, the reason why I am so passionate about this is I truly believe that when I am 80 years old and I'm hopefully sitting in my rocker somewhere, one of my girls is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize for finding a cure to cancer because she will have discovered that connection to technology and she will have made our world a better place. And so what we do at Girls Who Code, we're not a nonprofit, we're a movement. And I guess what I'm here today is to not only share the story and share these statistics because they are really stark and I think not enough people know how bad the problem is, but to also ask each of you to join our movement. I know that you have a young girl in your life. Tell her how to code. Teach her how to code. Tell her how to build something. Change the perception that we have out there because I do believe that one girl at a time we can change the face of technology. So thank you.