building a pipeline and have taught over 300,000 girls to code, half of which are under the poverty line and black and latina and 10000 girls cross country and we are well underway to create the next generation of leaders and of healers and young girls who will change the world. >> host: why did you focus on the coding aspect of the tech industry? >> guest: you know, my parents came here of refugees and i've had a job since i was 12 years old. in 2010 i found myself running for congress and as part of that i would go to these science classrooms and see lines and lines of boys clamoring to be the next mark zuckerberg or steve jobs and i knew those jobs in computer science pay pretty well almost $120,000 and so to me it did not make sense that i was like where are the girls and where are girls like me who could get a shot at one of these jobs and that is when i decided that i wanted to build a movement and a program to teach girls to code. >> host: are you a coder by trade? >> guest: no, i'm a very weird person to start this movement. major and probably science good indications, i had no excuse of my parents are both engineers but i was terrified of that science grown-up and i thought it wasn't good at it and i really approached the problem is someone who saw it as an opportunity to march into the middle class and i remember the first program i todd with 20 girls in a bio conference room and inviting a friend with the coalition to come in and talk to young women about the plight of an undocumented into asked them to create a piece of technology to help solve or help support undocumented and then we were sitting in the room and i remember the minds go and see the things that they wanted to do and if you put technology in the hands of every single girl you literally solve a bigger problem in the world because if they have a brother who is dyslexic they want to teach a moderate or if a mother they want to help make an app to feed a better and they want to constantly make the world better. i had this moment that even though i did not mike, i could create a generation of young girls the makes the world a better place and using technology to solve real problems. >> host: let's bring rachel into this conversation who is with "the washington post" and covers technology and is based in san francisco. >> thank you so much. hello reshma, great to see you. i was wondering could you chat with us a bit about what age do firstly girls getting sidelined in technology and how early on does this happen? >> guest: we start our girls in the program in third grade but i think it starts young. i wrote a book called brave, not perfect that talks about this and that when girls are little we literally wrap them up in bubble wrap until we tell them to not jump too high, to not take toys away so we don't allow the tinkers to take things apart. we don't ask our daughters to fix the toilet when it breaks at home so they don't get used to tinkering and into creating and building the most thing that happened to me is when i go into a lego store with my son and there is literally nothing that i can buy or not as much as there is for him so it's his idea that you are not a creator you can't [inaudible] we stifle it and girls too young for me we are never too young to learn how to code. with my six -year-old son right now play on scratch or make that so i think if you want to embed it in kids as young as possible. >> do you see that changing at all as your programs and other programs like this grow and we encourage girls to be interested in stem? >> guest: i do because some of which is cultural. girls outperform boys in math and science often forever but it's just a cultural messages that they get. we have a doll that says i hate math so let's go shopping instead. you turn out the movie name girls and she gets in a aftermath tests and she crosses it out for a d because she wants the affections of a boy but when i travel the world and say tell me what a computer scientist looks like, they described him to a t. a guy sitting in the basement somewhere and wearing a hoodie and drinking a red bull and staring at the screen. girls like that image and say not only do i not want to be him but i don't want to be friends with him and every image the girls get weather media and magazines, movies is telling them that computer science is not for them and they are listening and we are literally pushing them out so what we've done it culture code is make a coding school and we started the girls are changemakers and that instead of teaching them how to code we want to teach them how to solve problems and coding is a tool in the toolbox. i really believe if you want to solve climate or covid or cancer from a teach a girl how to code. she will do it. >> i would love to talk about the pipeline because he mentioned that you are helping to build this pipeline of girls who know how to code so they can get into these tech companies and we hear a lot about the pipeline problem but i'm curious how much of this is a pipeline problem and how much a visit of bias issue? i also hear the stories about women getting pushed out of tech companies. >> guest: it is not a tech problem anymore. when i started i was this wide-eyed, you know, organizer who when i heard tech companies say we want to hire women and want to hire people of color and we just can't find them i believe that and so we taught 300,000 girls to code and think about that. when i saw girls who code us in a 2% of computer science majors were women and now any of the top 20 schools that these companies hire from that number is almost at 50% release at 38%. you can't say it's a pipeline problem anymore because we build the pipeline. now when i meet ceos i literally hold a spreadsheet of the numbers of computer science graduates and every one of the engineering department that they hire from because it's simply not true but the problem now is culture. people don't give up power easily and many people that are making hiring decisions are white and asian men who aren't quite frankly hiring these high-performing qualified young women and people of color and so you have to, tech comedies have to have an honest look at themselves to say we have a bias problem in a race problem in the gender problem and we have to focus on weeding out that problem if we want to give the most talented people shot because they are out there but they're not being hired spirit how can they do not? there's been a lot of high-profile examples of this even it just in the last year. we've seen several high-profile women who have been or say they've pushed out of googles apical ai unit we've heard about this for months now so what happens after the training? why aren't companies retaining these female coders and how can they do that better? >> guest: i think of this all the time because of the company was built without us and without our voices can you actually really get them 20 years later and think that the culture can change? let's assume it can and i think that you have to really, i say to companies first everybody needs to go through training and bias. i literally think that you don't really understand or they don't really even want to root out what the problem is because again, if you think about who their talent is, their talents are there engineer and so they have to look at the talent in their company and say we are biased and we will teach you how to be unbiased so there has to be a willingness to have that conversation and to be honest, i think a lot of companies are afraid to do that. secondly, i'm sorry, i will add one more thing. culture does not change until you hit critical mass. you just can't hire one woman one person of color here or there but you have to literally say i am going to look at my engineering department and make sure that 30% are people of color and that's how culture changes. you have to hire an masses and that means you have to be intentional about it. you know, literally these companies have to treat it the way the university treats football teams. they literally have a recruiting arm and they go from city to city, county to county, parish to parish to find talent. you have to be that committed and i don't think that commitment is there in the same way. >> host: reshma saujani, how is girls who code set up? >> guest: yes, set up as a nonprofit and i would say four major things but one we host some emerging programs and inside technology companies and we teach girls to code with the hope that they will major or minor in computer science then we have free afterschool clubs with 10000 clubs from third grade on up and literally every minute that goes by there is a girl who codes club operating here and then we have college loops which again we know that the attrition rate is higher for women than for men in colleges and once they had college they say all major in computer science and engineering and soviet communities that are there to make sure that we support the sisterhood and support you on your way through and if i may, i would say that we lead the movement and culture changing and making coding cool for girls and making it relevant and we write books and ad campaigns and we had a super bowl ad so we are constantly thinking about how do you change culture and how do you make this issue move so quickly because our goal is to reach gender parity by 2030 and we are well under way. >> host: to get support from companies like microsoft, apple, google et cetera et cetera who want to increase their diversity? >> guest: yes, we do. apple is one of our biggest supporters right now. we have over 100 partners and in many ways i would say that we are aligned in wanting to build the pipeline of talent and what we are really doing is not working together to make sure that reality comes through in that they are actually hiring the talented young women that they have invested in teaching. >> i'm curious about that, you spoken before about getting over the hurdle of the tech interview, technical interview stage which can be quite hard and quite intimidating so do you teach women and girls in your program how to get past that hurdle? >> guest: listen, two things, it is not hard and intimidating i would say. i don't know if it's accessible and open but for example i was speaking at an event and i often open up a question in a technical interview about baseball. do you think that's good idea? i think no, i don't watch baseball so if i was doing an interview and yesterday about baseball i would speak out because i was already nervous. it really is examining that process and seeing whether it's really equitable and fair. look, the other thing i will say is in my quest to make all women brave not perfect i talked to a lot of girls about the voice that tells you you are not smart enough or good enough or ready. we even socialize to be perfect and failure is not a privilege for everybody, rejection is not a privilege for everybody. many of us it is about building that sense of confidence and bravery that when you go into the interview you're like i got this and i am fully prepared and ready to shine and take over that company and that's a lot of what we do in our code and sisterhood is that bravery and sharing knowledge and is by moving each other on spirit and has been now ten years so what are you hearing from the girls who code graduates who have moved into the workforce? >> that i've change their lives and there was anything to them and that they have a sisterhood in the community and i just -- listen, i could regale you all day long with the things that my students have built in the change they are making in the world and even at this moment i had a young student who started printing ppp equipment for doctors here in new york. no girls were now that are building tools to help young people with the mental health crisis that has been exacerbated and some of my students were the first activists on climate change. literally when i look at every moment in this country, you know, that has been led by young people it's been led by our alumni and i always say if all girls will hear us and save us and they will lead us and i am so proud to have a small piece of that. >> are they also sharing some of these challenges they are facing in the workforce today of where the next place within tech is to focus on? >> guest: absolutely. nothing angers me more than when the pandemic started and i did a survey and 40% of my alumni had their internships reneged on their offers pulled out. this crisis one would say were all at home and using technology and that people are highly engineered but absolutely not. the talent trained, the impact on girls has been -- i would talk a lot in building this is a plan for moms and that got ignited for me in watching my students and see their mothers in the corners who are working the third shift or going on food stamps and moving in with the parent and we don't have affordable daycare and we don't have structures from eric and families. what's happening to me families is the older child, the girl child that is now doing the daycare for the younger child so what is happening and she's not getting educated and so we have to really, as a country, you know, be committed to our mothers and committed to our working moms and to make sure we are providing the support and we lost 30 years of progress in nine months. our labor market participation is where it was in 1989, you know, so as i'm building this movement to make sure that we get the equity and we are losing so many gains in every other industry including tech. >> host: reshma saujani is the head and founder of a group called girls who code. rachel lerman covers technology for "the washington post" and there are our guest this week on "the communicators". reshma saujani, some would argue that binary code, the ones and zeros and math are not discriminatory in nature. what is your response to that? >> guest: i guess, i guess that's true. they don't see anything equitable, is that when he mean? >> host: yeah, gender-neutral, et cetera. >> guest: yet, i think that's right. but i love about code is that it's about problem solving and about teaching your mind to think and frustration and what an annoying; is in the wrong place and you need to learn to do it again and do it again and it fits with that discomfort and that is why i believe that coding is bravery and his equity and that's why as a non- coder i fell in love with this idea that you could teach something to all of our kids who don't know how to do it may be level the playing field for the first time in our country's history and its opportunity. >> host: you mentioned in the beginning of this interview of the both your parents are engineers so what is your personal experience, or you encouraged to go into stem? >> guest: yes, i was but i was the one, i was the first lawyer in my family and my dad was in the morning take out the math book and throw me math questions when the answer did not come to meet right away so i got into my head that i was not good at it because i never learned how to sit with my frustration. i was like every other girl in this country who learned how to give up before i even so as i got older when i would have to balance my checkbook or make a spreadsheet for my problem class i had that sense of dread and frustration and i really regret that i never worked through it because i think i would've been a great computer science major and so did have that encouragement and that being said my parents were refugees and trying to make it in this country and struggling with all the things that family struggle with, paying the bills, childcare, that i wasn't put into robotic classes in the stem classes and i didn't have all the things that quite frankly my sons will have today. again, that opportunity was there and my home because my parents did it by never really understood what it meant that my father was a civil engineer and my mother was up biomedical and i did not know what they did when they went to work. i think that we do as parents have to do a better job and really explaining for our young people what it means to be an engineer. >> host: rachel lerman. >> heavy learn to code now through the program. >> guest: i have but i would also say i went and where it is a badge of honor as an entrepreneur they did not need to be a coder and that's what i tell people all the time. you literally have so much passion and so much love and that can be coming from a working-class family and knowing that education and opportunity is everything and so you know, part of my, learning to code was again this desire as i got older to learn something new and to sit with my frustration and now my son and i get on scratch and sit there and make these and i'm just proud watching him and also learning alongside of him as a parent. >> reshma, i'm interested in something you said earlier, a set of companies can change this kind of diversity and retention issues that they are having they need to be aggressive about having bias training to help people dismantle their biases that they have had but how would you do that if you controlled the purse of the budget for these big tech companies and how would you approach that? >> guest: i would literally put everyone of my through bias training aggressive and to go through what are the things that are offensive that you say in an interview or what makes women leave and 50% of women in technology under the age of 35 and they are leaving because of the environment and they don't feel welcome or supported or feel like they have upward mobility staff to be honest that something is having me that feels toxic and we have to examine that and there's been a real reluctance because i think silicon valley says there's a bunch of libertarians and nerds are welcome and all nerds are not welcome. it starts being spoken and going person by person and training them in one of the interesting things that i've heard from competent different technology with covid is that when they had to make cuts they basically only hired people of color and women so they know that, as again, we have to get the numbers to over 30% at least to make a change and you can't hire one latino a year or one black woman a year but you have to hire and have to ask have a real honest change. listen, [inaudible] the pushback against organizing was really shameful and one of the things that i tell women all the time is organized. organize, organize, organize. pushing back. >> are you seeing the effects from that? it is been five or six in the big tech comedies have been releasing diversity numbers and saying were committed changing that and is that happening, are they doing enough? >> guest: no, absolutely not. i have so many young women that are talented with 4.0 from mit and i need a list and so no, i am not happy at all with the change that i am seen and i don't think there's enough pressure. we went through and administration to say what are your diversity numbers and why haven't they increased and now you have an opportunity to -- now you can work from anywhere so what is your excuse? they have a couple interesting facts and i would love for the biden administration and the governors and for us as leaders to continue to put the question on because you have couple interesting facts now. when you look at who is graduating for computer science and engineering departments you're getting closer and closer to parity so unlike the 1980s and the 1990s when you did not have the pipeline you had the pipeline and you have the talent and you have no excuse now and secondly, it can't say i just can't -- no one was to move to silicon valley. not true anymore because now you're offering remote work. you literally can hire someone from anywhere and the third thing is we have a lot more data and so i would love to know like goog