On a chilly Friday afternoon in December, the squelching of winter boots mingled with the voices and laughter of a dozen girls at the Onondaga Free Library. At the front of the community room amid discarded backpacks and coats, Alyssa Newton and a volunteer facilitator passed out coding textbooks, guiding the young girls through their first glimpse into the world of coding.

Newton — a 2013 graduate of Syracuse University’s Master of Library and Information Science program and the assistant library director of the Onondaga Free Library — initiated its chapter of the national Girls Who Code program this past December. Founded by Reshma Saujani in 2012, Girls Who Code has reached almost 90,000 girls in all 50 states, created in part to “correct centuries-long power imbalances across lines of gender, race, sexuality, and more.”

While the Onondaga Free Library’s charter primarily serves the West Hill, West Genesee Central and Onondaga Central school districts, Newton said the chapter has expanded its reach, providing for girls from a variety of educational backgrounds: homeschoolers, charter school students, Syracuse City school district residents and neighboring Catholic schools, as well.

“We had a bigger reach than we should have,” she said. “I only advertised it to the Onondaga Hill community and to my school districts. And to see kids from the Syracuse City schools and from some of the private schools, I was shocked.”

The increased interest in the Onondaga Free Library’s Girls Who Code chapter reflects a cultural shift underway regarding women’s interest and engagement in science, technology, math and engineering fields. But the gender gap in these areas of study still has a significant ways to go.

A 2016 study compiled by the Society of Women Engineers found that slightly more than 21 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science were awarded to women. This discrepancy is only exacerbated for women of color, making up fewer than six percent of engineering graduates.

For young girls taking part in Girls Who Code, coding is more than just a skill set to boast on a future resume. It’s a technical language that immerses students in a world that, historically, has not been made readily available to them.

It’s a sentiment shared by Kahssia Hills, Malaika Howard and Sydney Paul, seniors at SU’s School of Information Studies. As part of their fall 2018 senior capstone project, the three iSchool students partnered with Newton and the Onondaga Free Library, raising $700 to help fund the initiation of the program.

“The Girls Who Code program is so important for young women to learn about coding and computer science, so that they can realize that they are just as capable to enter careers in the STEM field as anyone else,” Howard said in an email. “As a woman in the field, I understand the struggles and I’m so happy that programs like this exist to get girls interested in science and technology from a young age.”

Howard said that Hills initially proposed a partnership with the Onondaga Free Library for their capstone project, after hearing that Newton had plans underway to initiate the program. The money raised through their crowdfunding helped hire another classroom facilitator, provide coding textbooks for students and will go toward an awards ceremony at the end of the ten-week program.

Through restaurant fundraisers, crowdfunding and utilizing their Syracuse network, Paul said they had Newton’s complete support from start to finish.

“We wanted to help a local Syracuse program that is based on women in technology to help spread awareness and make a difference for young girls in the community,” Paul added in an email. “We thought fundraising and spreading awareness for this local Girls Who Code group would be a great way to leverage our skills.”

The success of the program hasn’t only impacted its participating students, but the greater Syracuse community as a whole. The Northern Onondaga Public Library hosted its first Girls Who Code class of the year on Jan. 9, showing that for women in STEM, the interest is only growing.

“Girls are underrepresented in this field,” Newton said. “The biggest thing it’s about is to just keep them excited about computer science, and to know that it’s a field they can go into.”

And those fields, Newton said, extend beyond the traditional ideas of working on computers or for social media platforms. With careers in design and art, she added that the beauty of coding is that it’s a universal language that can be individually tailored.

“There are jobs out there, and it’s just giving them the confidence to know that when the classes do become available in high school and in college, they can take them and know that any career path they’re going into, coding is another language that they can definitely learn and it will apply to their careers.”

As Hills, Howard and Paul prepare for graduation and moving onto their respective career paths, they share the hope that the Onondaga Free Library’s chapter can continually grow and service the coming generation of women computer scientists.

“It felt great to give back to young aspiring girls in the community that are proactive in learning STEM-based skills that will help them in their future,” Paul said. “I think it is important to teach coding skills to young girls, to give them the confidence that they can do anything they put their minds to — no matter what the stigma around it is.”

Published on January 14, 2019 at 8:55 am

Contact Kelsey: katho101@syr.edu | @writtenbykelsey