Kimberly Bryant

As a little girl growing up in the Deep South, my mother told me that my future lay in my education. And she was right.

Our camps and workshops offer a space where girls of color can learn computer science and coding principles alongside their peers, with mentorship from female role models who have established themselves in tech fields where women, and minority women in particular, tend to be underrepresented.

Gender is not central to coding.

It's critical for girls to see role models like myself that are in technical fields. Looking for ways to come in as speakers or do a career day, or just find a way to connect with students or invite students to their workplaces to shadow them for the day... is critically important.

One of the biggest lessons that we hope to model for several folks, including some of the young women of color who come to me, is the value of understanding your worth, standing up, and demanding the best for yourself and not taking less.

For me, as a woman in one of the less diverse fields - electrical engineering, which is what I studied in college - it was hard to persist and really build a career. Some of the things I experienced were really scary, and they weren't experiences that I wanted for my daughter.

When you've already experienced great challenges in your career, it gives minor setbacks a different perspective.

I definitely think there needs to be more of a focus and movement on getting coding taught in schools. There's really only so much after-school programs like Black Girls Code can do to really drive that change. And those classes shouldn't only take place in high school. We should make sure that we teach kids about coding at an early age.

When I started Black Girls Code in 2011, there weren't any programs that had a foundation in communities of color to teach our kids about technology.

For me, if a company is really committed to diversity, that means everything. That means gender diversity, that means sexual orientation for me, that means race, ethnicity.

I think that if companies build for diversity from the beginning from the ground up, that's definitely the ideal state for how to build diversity into your company.

We like to say we hope to be like the Girl Scouts of technology, having many different chapters in many different states as well as many different countries.