Girls Who Code founder: Men build technologies to 'replace their mothers'

KITV-TV ^ | August 21, 2017 | Haley Draznin, CNN Money

[2ndDivisionVet]

Reshma Saujani is not a coder but she's empowering "an army of young women" to take on tech's gender gap through her nonprofit Girls Who Code.

"I think that this is an opportunity we have to give every single one of our children," Saujani says in a new episode of CNN's Boss Files with Poppy Harlow. "I think the problem is right now, culturally, images that we see are very male. We have to be thoughtful and think about how can we open the door."

Through Girls Who Code, Saujani is helping to bridge the opportunity gap for young girls through after-school and summer immersion programs. Since 2012, the organization has grown from serving 20 girls in New York to nearly 40,000 girls across the U.S.

Saujani says she has seen firsthand how girls use technology differently than boys to solve big problems.

In a statement that Saujani admits is controversial, she argues that empathy tends to be "uniquely female" and is the primary difference between the problems boys and girls choose to solve with the technologies they create.

Saujani recounts when two young female students -- Lucy and Maya -- "built an app [about] lead poisoning because they saw that kids were dying in Flint, Michigan." She also recalls a bunch of girls in Austin who built a tool back in June 2016 to track where Zika was going "because Congress couldn't get it together to pass a bill for funding." (Congress eventually passed a bill in September 2016 to help fight the Zika virus and study its effects).

Men, on the other hand, create companies "to replace their mothers," says Saujani, who is herself the mother of a two year old boy.....

[Stevenc131]

I worked in data processing for nearly 30 years as a programmer/analyst. Best programmer I worked with was a self described farm girl from Iowa who taught herself to code. High IQ, but that was commonplace.

What set her apart was tenacity and a prodigious memory. She took care of the smallest detail, tested relentlessly and tracked down every bug. Even years later, if there was a question about some part of one of her programs, she would get a listing, flip immediately to the relevant section and start highlighting and scribbling notes, like it was just yesterday that she had been working on the program.

[ConservativeMind]

That post rocks.

[MeanWestTexan]

She seems rather sexist.

[Jonty30]

She would be wrong. Men build kingdoms, but women build homes.

[TalonDJ]

“built an app [about] lead poisoning because they saw that kids were dying in Flint, Michigan”

“ABOUT”?? What does it DO? Directing technology at ‘compassion’ is not the same as solving a problem.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Yeah, and Girls Who Code are envious of men’s pr*cks.....

[hal ogen]

Moreso, probably, of their “hanging chads”.

[NorthMountain]

Men, on the other hand, create companies "to replace their mothers," says Saujani,

Bullcrap.

who is herself the mother of a two year old boy.....

Poor kid ... It'll really suck for him growing up with a psycho-witch for a mother.

[grey_whiskers]

[longtermmemmory]

who wrote the code to order pizza without human interaction?

[Bobalu]

Sounds like she may have had OCD.

OCD is hard to deal with but it makes for great programmers.

I have OCD, I count EVERYTHING, I can’t bring myself to leave ANYTHING to chance. If there is 1 chance in a billion a routine might fail then I have to improve it till I’m satisfied it will never fail.

Code I wrote in the late 70’s did not have to be modified for the Y2K problem as I took that into consideration...this was greatly appreciated by those still using the code.

My specialty is pattern recognition, I have mostly worked on gov projects.

I used to do consulting, sometimes I solved the problem while talking on the phone to the people that needed help....I made it clear up front that if I came up with a solution while we were discussing the problem I was to be paid. I got stiffed a few times. :-/

There are people walking around today with medical devices implanted in them that run code I wrote.... I really sweated over that code!! I created a test device to send data to simulate usage inside a patient....it ran at a much faster rate than a real-world test... It simulated several centuries of use and never had a single failure and it sent literally millions of bits of faulty data to the device.

I always insert a random string of characters inside a comment in my source code along with instructions on how to use that string to locate me, even decades later. A simple google search on the string brings up my contact info.

I still have all my old projects in encrypted form on several devices...just in case I need to fix something....the need has not yet arrived.

[Bobalu]

That graphic is funny because there is some truth to it.

I would rather hire twenty male compsci grads sight unseen than 20 female compsci grads with 4.0 GPA

Go to a dorm room with a few male computer geeks and you are likely to find them doing something like burning the plastic off of an IC using acid to get at the actual silicon. You would never see a bunch of girls doing this...unless they were being led by someone like Lady Ada ;-) she is the finest female computer geek I know. But I really don’t understand why she keeps a Pitt Bull as a house pet!?