Empowering Women Empowers Everyone

Women of all ages now more than ever before have the ability to influence mass change on a global scale. There are several entities that have set out to do many things, and one of the most important is empowering women. Entities like Girls Who Code, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, and Melinda Gates' commitments to promote gender equality are leading the way when it comes to empowering women and empowering everyone else women interact with.

A huge chasm that women can cross is increasing representation in STEM-related fields, and no one is a greater pioneer in that than Girls Who Code. Their mission statement is the following

"Girls Who Code is on a mission to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does"

Girls Who Code's mission statement

They are building the largest pipeline of female engineers in the United States by offering capabilities which are the combination of knowledge and skills, career opportunities for their alumni, and a community of supportive peers and role models. Currently only one out of five computer science graduates today is female and there is an ever-growing demand for computer scientists in industry and research. The gender gap in this specific field has been increasing year over year and is forecasted to keep that trend going, in 2017 the gap was 24%, in 2027 it is expected to be 22% female representation.

Computer science alone isn't the only answer, but having the skills to do computational thinking is a necessary skill set in all fields, not just STEM, but STEAM as well (A = Arts). Having the ability to decompose large and complex problems into smaller more manageable problems is extremely important as it allows simplification of work and allows more creativity to be used to solve problems. We like to focus on decomposition the most as it's the start of all great things after, like recognizing patterns, come up with abstract ideas, and ultimately creating an algorithm based on the previous three steps. Learn more about it here from our article on Jeanette Wing who coined the term Computational Thinking.