READING 3 Girls Who Code

Girls Who

CODE

Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold. 7.5

The first fully developed computer program, which was published around 1843, appeared around a hundred years before the beginning of the modern computer age. And it was created by Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the famous English poet, Lord Byron. Ada achieved this when the world of science and technology was dominated by men such as Charles Babbage, with whom Ada collaborated. Babbage, whose Analytical Engine is regarded by many as the first real computer, was mainly concerned with the calculating power of his machine, but Ada realized that computers would be able to create art, music, and much more.

Fast-forward to the modern day, and women still play only a small part in the world of computer technology. In the United States, where tech jobs are in one of the fastest growing employment sectors, fewer than one in five computer science graduates are women, and the gap between the genders, which has always been large, has widened in recent years. In 1995, for example, 37 percent of computer scientists were women, but by 2017, that figure had fallen to just 24 percent.

This situation is a source of great concern to Reshma Saujani, who founded the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code in 2012. Its sole mission is to reduce the gender gap in technology. In its first six years, the organization reached 90,000 girls from all backgrounds and across all 50 states. Using the Internet, summer camps, and a network of clubs across the country, Girls Who Code works to increase female representation in the tech industry. Despite the 2017 gender statistics, which were an obvious disappointment, Saujani believes that things are beginning to change and that the number of women in the field will be equal to that of men by 2027.

Ada Lovelace would certainly have approved.