Fixing Tech’s Gender Gap

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, is on a mission to get more young women into computer science. She says the problem isn't lack of interest. Her non-profit organization has trained thousands of girls to code, and the ranks of female science and engineering graduates continue to grow. And yet men still dominate the tech industry. Saujani believes companies can certainly do more to promote diversity. But she also wants girls and women to stop letting perfectionism hold them back from volunteering for the most challenging tasks and jobs. She is the author of the book "Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder."

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.
0:37.0	I'm Allison Beard. I would like to be an engineer and hopefully inspire girls of young youth and
0:50.6	underrepresented neighborhoods to do the same thing.
0:53.0	I learned the computer science was not the hard monotonous engineering that I,
0:58.0	and so many women around me, viewed it as.
1:00.0	If you're not open to stuff like seeing girl coders, you're not going to think to be a coder.
1:04.0	You only see women doing women-dominated jobs.
1:07.0	There's no women and men-dominated jobs.
1:09.0	You're hearing the voices of young women who are part of girls who code, a non-profit with a mission to close the gender gap in computer science.
1:16.0	The organization was founded by our guest today, Reshma Saljani.
1:20.0	She didn't have a math or technology background herself, but during a run for Congress in 2010,
1:25.2	she visited several New York schools and noticed something odd.
1:28.6	STEM labs were filled with boys, not girls. She lost the election, but it inspired her to make educating
1:35.8	young women in these subjects her life's work. It wasn't just the lack of
1:40.0	female students she saw in coding classes. It was also the national statistics on
1:44.4	the dearth of women in tech. Although women earn about 50% of science and
1:48.6	engineering degrees, they account for less than a third of people employed in those fields, and only a quarter of female
	...

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