Mindy Kaling, Girly Girls, and the Future of Tech

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

Self-improvement, Tech, Note, Npr, Education, Public, Wnyc, Manoush, York, To, New, Self, Radio, Business, Technology, Relationships, City, Society & Culture, Zomorodi, Newtechcity

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2014

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The 'get girls interested in coding' push is growing from techie pet project to mainstream movement. Now it has a celebrity spokesperson. A very girly spokeswoman to be precise.

"For someone like me who does identify as traditionally girly, it’s a good way to trick girls into thinking its fun and colorful and then they stay because they can do other stuff with it."

Actress and TV producer Mindy Kaling of The Office and the Mindy Project is a spokesperson for Google's new Made With Code initiative. And she says, meeting girls where they are is definitely the way to go.

And if you look at the Initiatives and after school projects popping up left and right with names like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Black Girls Who Code... well, there's a lot of pink mixed in with the computer science.

We want to know why? And if it is really necessary to embrace gender norms on the path to bridging the gender divide in tech.

(Listen to our episode 'The Way We Teach Computer Science Hurts Women' for a sense of why this is so urgent).

In this episode:

Hopscotch

Girls Who Code

Toys and Tools in Pink

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City. Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.
0:30.0	All that long worth. This is New Text City from WNYC, the podcast about technology and life. I'm Manouche
0:38.8	Summerodi and this week what does it take to make Georgia, Ariana and Morgan into lean mean computer
0:45.3	programming machines? One strategy? Celebrities.
0:51.6	Hi, I'm good. Hey, Manouche. How are you, Manouche? The other day I was invited to meet Mindy Kaling,
0:58.7	Quick Reminder for you, cord cutters. She's the writer and actor in the office. Well, someone please
1:04.3	explain what's going on here. Since the interesting thing happened till now, so much time has passed. It's like my life is buffering.
1:11.0	Kaling has her own sitcom now, The Mindy Project. It's the first ever to be created by end star and Indian American.
1:18.2	I haven't seen you smile this much as you've found out you were younger than Katie Holmes. That'll bag.
1:23.1	She is beloved by girls between the age of 11 and 18. Give her take a few years. Girls like 14-year-old
1:31.6	Georgia, Ariana and Morgan. You like her? Yes. She's so cool. Very much. Yes.
1:38.9	You like about her. She's so funny. She's so funny. She's so creative.
1:45.0	Mindy Kaling has serious, girly cred, which is why Google hired her to launch its new 50 million
1:52.5	dollar campaign called Made with Code. It's aimed squarely at getting girls psyched about what
1:59.3	computers can do. Because you see, coding is getting a makeover.
2:07.5	As you might have heard, there's a whole let's get girls interested in coding thing going on
2:12.0	with lots of projects and after school programs popping up with names like Girls Who Code and
2:17.9	Girl Develop It. Girls teaching girls to code. Black girls who code. You get the idea.
2:23.1	And the thing is recently, this girl coding push has made the jump from Pet Techie Project
2:30.4	to mainstream mission. That's where Mindy comes in. I had always thought that, you know, in TV,
2:36.4	I get a lot of attention for being minority and a woman doing this and breaking boundaries,
2:42.5	which I love. But I've recently found that coding is one of the only areas where there's even fewer
	...

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