Reshma Saujani writes:  The idea for Girls Who Code came about when I was running for office in 2010 in New York City. I’ve always been a policy junky, but when you’re actually on the campaign trail you get to see issues in a much more immediate way. I was visiting schools and talking to teachers and parents across the district and I saw that our kids weren’t learning computer science, and that the gender and socioeconomic divide in tech access was just enormous. With 1.4 million jobs in the computing fields by 2020, I knew we had to do something to close that gap.

At Girls Who Code, we’ve gone from one program teaching 20 girls to reaching 3,000 by the end of 2014 through Summer Immersion Programs and Girls Who Code Clubs. This summer alone we are in NYC, Boston, Miami, Seattle, and all over the Bay Area with programs at Adobe, Amazon, AppNexus, AT&T, eBay, Facebook, GE, Goldman Sachs, Google, IAC, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Square, Twitter, and Verizon.

The most interesting (and inspiring!) part of championing young women in tech is that they really become our ambassadors in the movement. When they graduate from our summer immersion program, they know they’ve learned something special and they go on and teach other girls and start clubs at their schools and libraries.

As far as challenges, I think people just don’t realize how bad the problem is. Jaws drop when I tell people that in 1984, 37% of CS majors were women, and now that number is 12%.