Google’s Code Girl documentary now on YouTube, inspires women to code

Code girl captures the journey of these girl coders and aims to highlight the lack of women in the tech industry

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Google’s blog post highlights the problem of lack of women role models in coding and computer science fields.

Code Girl, a documentary made by award-winning filmmaker Lesley Chilcott (known for films like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman”) in collaboration with Google had been released for free on YouTube.

The film documents the lives of young women from across countries like Moldova, Brazil, and those in the US, who are participating in Google’s Technovation challenge. The challenge is to build an app that will help their local community and offers a grand prize of $100,000. Google had invited applications from over 5,000 girls from 60 countries for the challenge.

The movie captures the journey of these coders and aims to highlight the lack of women in the industry. According to numbers, over 80 per cent of app developers are male. The glaring gender inequality is starkly visible in the industry given that very few major tech companies have been founded by women or are led by women.

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Code Girl has been released in a number of different languages including Hindi, English and Portuguese. It will be available for free on YouTube till November 5, before it is released in cinema halls.

In blogpost on Google’s official blog, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube and one of the Google’s most important executives, wrote, ” Despite earning the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the US, women earn fewer than 20 percent of computer science degrees, with serious implications for our economy and for women at large.”

Wojcicki adds in the post that she wants to change the perceptions of women and technology, and the idea is to encourage more girls to take up coding.

Google last year had announced the Made with Code initiative to inspire more girls to take up coding and pursue it as career path. Google also said that it would commit $50 million over three years to support programs working to increase gender diversity in Computer science.

Watch the video below

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