Emily Lindemer And ‘Girls Who Code’ Take On The Gender Gap In STEM Fields

By: 
Gary Boas
May 23, 2016
The Girls Who Code Brookline Club

It’s not every day that a group of young girls gets to pitch their ideas to Google. But that’s exactly what happened last night when members of a local “Girls Who Code” club—accompanied by the Martinos Center’s Emily Lindemer, the group’s mentor—attended their year-end event in Cambridge.

Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in technology and engineering fields. Launched just a few years ago in California, it is now a nationwide program with more than five clubs in the Boston area alone. Lindemer, a graduate student working in the FreeSurfer lab in the Center developing computational tools to study subtle changes in the brain during aging and the progression to Alzheimer’s disease, is the mentor for the Brookline Club, which this year included 18 girls in grades 6-10.

The clubs, which meet for two hours a week after school and are free, offer instruction in coding in Python and JavaScript, and generally in developing software engineering skills. And through it all they embolden the girls to think about and even pursue career paths in computer science and technology.

Lindemer is thrilled to see an organization tackling head on the underrepresentation of women in technology and engineering fields. As an undergraduate, she said, she was one of only ten or so women among a group 200 computer science students in her class. The root causes of this were clear: Most girls simply aren’t exposed to computer science when they are younger, and even if they do develop an interest as they grow up they are too often discouraged by the pronounced gender gap in the field.

The problem runs even deeper than that, though. In mentoring the students in the Girls Who Code program, she discovered that girls as young as the 6th grade are aware of the gender gap. “I can’t tell you how many times one of them told me about an experience where they wanted to do something tech-related but all of the other participants were boys, or they felt that only a certain ‘type’ of girl was supposed to be into computers and coding,” she said.

Presenting their projects at the Google event

Because of this, Lindemer focused on providing the girls a positive environment in which to learn about coding—just as much as on the coding itself.

“I think that the relationships the girls formed with each other as well as with me over the past year is what will stick with them the most—more than how to code a for-loop,” she said. “They’ll remember that there was a time and a place where they could go and learn how to do these things without feeling judged or inferior, and that will make them come back.”

This time and place will surely include last night’s Google event. After presenting their projects, the girls heard from several outside speakers about what it’s like to be a woman in a technology field, broke off into small groups for guided discussions of strategies to overcome the gender gap, and finally were given a tour of the Cambridge Google facility. All of this was designed to bolster the sense of community they have developed in the program over the past year, a community of girls—and women—who code.

Lindemer’s students in the Brookline Club have posted their final projects online. Among these: a Buzzfeed-style quiz, a guessing game or two, and a rather addictive Brickbreaker.