Girls Who Code students develop paper prototypes during their New York Times field trip. Sarah Bures/The New York Times
A sea of excited young female faces. A crowded room of high school students fidgeting and waiting expectantly. Taking selfies and snaps from the moment they entered the room. But this is not a gaggle of adolescent fans waiting for a Zayn Malik concert to begin. These are young, ambitious girls exploring the possibility of joining the ever-expanding tech industry.
The New York Times Technology department, in partnership with Girls Who Code, hosted “The New York Times: Reporting Online and Around the World.” The July 28 event gave the 90 10th and 11th grade participants a glimpse into the inner workings of the newsroom, the technology group, and the product development teams of one of the best known newspapers in the world. The girls were shown the roles that technology, innovation and collaboration play in our multiplatform organization.
“We are thrilled to welcome Girls Who Code and the next generation of female tech leaders at The Times,” said Erin Grau, Vice president of operations at The Times and co-chair of the Women’s Network. ”We are so inspired by the work of Girls Who Code, an organization who shares our commitment to closing the gender gap in technology.”
Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization that encourages girls to get into coding and development. Many of the 15- to 17-year olds were already passionate about going to college to study computer science. They were enthused by the program but complained that their schools either don’t offer any programming or computer orientated classes or if they do, that they tend to be male dominated. Development and coding wasn’t considered a future option until Girls Who Code came into their lives. One girl went as far as to say “coding is easy, you just need to know the language and practice.” This is the kind of confidence that programs like Girls Who Code were set up to instill.
Carrie Price, one of the coordinators of the event and a software engineer at The Times, credited her confidence and determination to pursue a career within the tech sector to a similarly early exposure to coding and development.
“Working with a program like Girls Who Code is awesome because we are getting an opportunity to be a little part of these girls’ summers,” she said. “The Girls Who Code program is doing a great job in instilling confidence in these girls really early on.”
Carrie hoped that meeting successful female employees, “doing these things in real life”, would convince the girls that jobs in programming and coding are plausible options in the future.
Teachers in the Girls Who Code program, such as Zoe Bachman, were universally impressed by the girls’ passion, hard work and commitment to the program. Zoe only started coding later in her career. Computer science wasn’t “cool” when she was at school. She returned to college to learn coding and development in order to teach kids the skills needed in the media and arts industries. But she says there still “needs to be a lot of changes in the tech industry” in terms of diversity. This is why Zoe wanted to work for Girls Who Code: “Their mission fits really well into my vision of diversifying the field.” The program introduces “a new image of what a programmer is.”
Software developers Carrie Price, Alex Ording, and Jean Kim welcomed the girls to The Times and then Erin described the mission, history and structure of the newspaper. She outlined the evolving relationship between the newsroom, business and Technology departments. After a short video, Erin quizzed the girls with trivia about The Times, underlining the “boots on the ground reporting” and the determination to “get the story first and get the story right.” The girls were taken aback to discover that The Times produces a Harry Potter book worth of stories every day: and the equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare every week.
Erin described her own journey to The Times. After majoring in journalism and writing for television, she joined the newspaper industry. She described how she’d been told early on that the only measure of performance should be “did you make The Times a better place?” Erin encouraged the girls to “plan rich lives” and emphasized that when planning your career it is essential to know that “you can do multiple things, not just one.” The girls could code during the day and do yoga at night. Erin was as excited about the girls’ futures as they were by the inspirational vision that she presented of opportunity and equality for women in the workplace. One of the teachers observed that Erin was just the sort of role model needed by the girls.
After a tour of the building, where the newsroom and the “cool” Pulitzer Hall were the highlights, the students heard from Chief Technology Officer Nick Rockwell. He spoke about his job, and answered a few questions from the girls.
Three women from the Digital department — Elena Gianni, Rebecca Lai and Shirwah Tam — described their roles in Design (design is “not just about what things look like but much more about how things work”), in the Newsroom (astonishing the girls when she ended her talk by creating a basic website in front of their eyes), and as a software engineer on the Cooking team, respectively. The speeches underlined the crucial importance of collaboration and teamwork. The key message was to “just go out and do it.”
The girls then got a chance to put the skills they had been learning at Girls Who Code to the test. They divided into small groups and carried out a paper prototyping activity, designing an app that gives recipe recommendations from NYT Cooking. Carrie Price hoped the activity would give “the girls time to brainstorm, think critically, think about a problem with different constraints”.
The girls sketched their app designs on a piece of paper and gave them some great titles: “Slice, Slice Baby,” “Quizine” and “We Can Get You Out of a Pickle”. Carrie said she hoped the girls would come away being able to “look at programming from a different perspective, thinking more holistically about software design and what goes into it from beginning to end.”
At the end of the day, the girls were tired but reassured that coding and development is undoubtedly a plausible option for their future: “If I don’t do it as a job, then I will definitely do it as a hobby.”
There is a real skills gap in the technology industry. There’s simply not enough talent coming in. Nick Rockwell described the problem in terms of the failure of the education system, particularly at the high school level, to encourage both boys and girls towards careers in technology. Events like this are helping to rectify this by exposing girls to the job possibilities in the tech industry and giving them a chance to talk to role models.
The New York Times strives to fill the skills gap and increase the number of women working in its Technology group through its Diversity in Digital task force, who are currently in the process of drafting various policies to improve the workplace environment. Carolyn Price believes that this task force has done a great job at “figuring out where the core problems are and trying to address those problems, particularly around recruitment, environment and advancement.”
Erin summed up with two key secrets for success: “outwork everyone” and “build relationships.” She reassured the girls that “you are going to be scared of a lot of things, just do it!”
Angelica Hill is a summer intern in Operations. She will return to Queen Mary University of London in the fall as an English Literature major.