WATCH: Twitter Co-Founder Talks About Women in Tech, Says ‘There’s a Leadership Crisis’
Jack
Dorsey knows code. The co-founder of Twitter and CEO of the mobile
payments company Square, Dorsey has the perfect pedigree of a Silicon
Valley programmer turned business mogul.
Dorsey grew up in tech at a time
when men dominated the field. They still do. Only about 20 percent of
programmers are women. But with changing attitudes and programs like
Square’s College Code Camp, which Dorsey participates in, the gender gap
is slowly starting to close.
“I think it starts at an early
age — I think that’s when the gender divide really starts,” says Jackie
Orth, a “camper” and college senior from the University of Louisville.
“Boys get Legos for Christmas.
Girls get Barbies and get interested in fashion design, while boys get
interested in building and creating new things,” she says.
Square’s CFO Sarah Friar admits
that changing the culture isn’t going to happen overnight but says
Square’s commitment to strong female leadership is a great signal to
young women entering the field.
“In my mind there is no better
thing we can do to inspire women engineers than to show right at the
head of engineering at Square, we have a woman [Alyssa Henry] and she’s
amazing.”
Eva Snyder, a sophomore at Mount
Holyoke College, agrees: “I definitely think having strong female role
models, even something as small as if your sixth-grade teacher in
mathematics is a woman, makes a big difference.”
The four-day immersion program of
College Code Camp is designed to inspire, educate, and empower the next
generation of women in technology. The program uses leadership
sessions, coding workshops, and a hackathon to bring together top female
engineering students and build a stronger community around women in
tech.
With an average salary of over
$87,000 for U.S. tech professionals, it’s easy to see why more women
would want to enter the field.
Dorsey hopes Code Camp returns benefits for future and current Square employees.
“It’s just doing it on a daily
basis,” he says, “and if we can really have a program and people can
actually see our folks who live it every single day and who really push
themselves and also get pushed by the energy and the drive that they see
from these girls, everyone gets better for it.”
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