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(dramatic music)
MARISSA SHORENSTEIN: One of the most compelling things
about the company for me, when I started,
was our commitment to community and to education
particularly around STEM fields.
What we found here in New York City was just exposing girls
to those fields opened up a whole new set of options
for them that they never knew about before.
RESHMA SAUJANI: Girls Who Code is a national nonprofit
that seeks to close the gender gap
in computer science and technology.
Our summer emersion program which we put
20 girls in a classroom in a technology company
and then we have Girls Who Code clubs
which are after school programs
that happen all across the country.
You know a lot of people told me when I started this program,
you can’t teach girls how to code,
you especially can’t teach poor girls how to code.
And we showed them that they were wrong.
Year after year these girls are standing up
and I have no doubt that we're going to stand back
twenty years from now and they're going to build
the biggest innovations that our country has ever seen.
MARISSA SHORENSTEIN: On the first day that they arrived
they were extremely shy.
And through the eight weeks they became very close friends
and to see that transformation was really incredible.
ASHLEY W.: I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.
Now I know that I want to be in computer science systems
and focus on that as my major.
I've gotten a pretty good experience from here.
RESHMA SAUJANI: This is the one industry
computer science but there's been a lack of women
and a dearth and women. We aspire to change that.
You know the majority of the jobs are going to be in the
computing and technology related fields.
But less than 13 percent of them are going to be filled by women,
even though we make up 56% of the labor force.
A lot of the young girls that we teach,
they come from really hard circumstances.
When they go through our program they finish,
they get jobs, they lift their entire family up out of poverty.
One of our girls built an algorithm to help detect
whether a cancer is benign or malignant.
We built things that were about changing the world.
ASHLEY W.: After I graduated the Girls Who Code club,
I introduced it to the girls in my own community.
That’s what really makes me happy to know
that I've taught them something that
they didn't know before and they're happy to learn that.
MARISSA SHORENSTEIN: Working with students,
it's really a commitment that is deeply embedded
in the culture of this company,
and that comes from the Chairman on down.
(sonic logo)