Black Girls Code CEO Is Changing the Face of Tech

On this episode of Fast Forward, I welcome Kimberly Bryant, the CEO and founder of Black Girls Code. At SXSW, we spoke about how diversifying tech companies is more than simply a social good, it is good business and essential for companies to deliver meaningful innovation. We also discussed how artificial intelligence could be handicapped if it's built only by white men.

Dan Costa: You started this organization eight years ago in part so that your daughter, who is in middle school, could go to computer classes, and not be the only girl or person of color in the class. Is she still coding, or did she decide to do something else with her life?

Kimberly Bryant: She actually is still coding. She's a freshman majoring in computer science at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. And really still interested in pursuing computer science and technology as a career path.

Dan Costa: How did you get into technology yourself?

Kimberly Bryant: My background is in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science. I sort of stumbled into this career path. I never really had an aspiration as a young child to be a computer gamer or anything like that. I wasn't into that, I certainly was the Barbie type of kid growing up. But I found myself on this accelerated path in math and science through middle and high school, and it was actually my guidance counselor who said, "You should look into engineering, that's a good career field. There's good pay in this and this is what you might want to consider." And I did. I had to really learn about what this career would entail once I got to college. Very different than my daughter's path or many of the other girls that we work with.

Black Girls Code CEO Is Changing the Face of Tech

Dan Costa: But I think that's telling too, that a lot of kids, we want to help them find their careers and find their way, but a lot of them don't know. And a serendipitous discovery can be just as powerful as something like, "I wanted to be a computer gamer since I was 12 years old."

Kimberly Bryant: Absolutely. For me, one of the differences in my childhood versus my daughter's is that I was really on this gender path, even as young as six or seven. I had an older brother and he would get the things that were more science-y for Christmas, given those opportunities to play video games and things. But not me, I was certainly led to things that were not the things that were more science- and tech-oriented from my familial upbringing. When I got to school, then it became a bit more level.

For my daughter, I was very intentional when she was growing up to make sure she had the Legos and the Lincoln Logs that were all over the house at one time or the other, just as much as I was introducing her to a Barbie doll. It was very important that I did not put any barriers on what she could do or be interested in as a young girl. And I think that's important, it leads to girls finding their place in a more organic way than I did.

Dan Costa: Black Girls Code. Talk to me about how it works. How does the organization close these gaps?

Kimberly Bryant: Black Girls Code is a non-profit organization and we focus on introducing girls as young as six or seven. We stay with them until they're 17. Now, we're starting to work with our alumni in a series of after-school programs and workshops. That could be a Saturday workshop where they're coming in and learning about virtual reality, it could be a more intensive summer program where they're coming in for two to four weeks and doing everything from full stack development, or they could be doing artificial intelligence or blockchain. We try to really reach the girls in a place where it could supplement what they're not starting to see in the classroom. So many schools are starting to teach computer science, but [we want to] give them an opportunity to go a little bit deeper and also be surrounded by a community of girls that share the same interests and background and upbringing, which makes it a bit different from an experiential standpoint.

Dan Costa: How do you find the girls who are interested in this sort of thing?

Kimberly Bryant: Now, eight years later, most of the time they find us. We've had such an extensive community of both parents and educators who will introduce girls to Black Girls Code because they've heard about us in the different cities that we participate in, and the different things we do, like coming to South by Southwest. We don't really have to do a lot of pulling into the organization now, which is a great position to be in. But when we do, we try to partner with schools or other community-based organizations that serve girls. We allow them to find the space that their girls can come into and learn about STEM and technology.

Dan Costa: I've interviewed some people from Girls Who Code, and we've partnered with them at PCMag. Over time, the students that you're training come back to the organization and become mentors. Have you seen that too?

Kimberly Bryant: Absolutely. For this South by Southwest, we brought 14 alumni students from all over the US that are attending colleges or they're about to graduate from high school. And it was really interesting leaving the airport coming over to South By Southwest to check in our hotels. I was sort of eavesdropping and ear hustling on a conversation that was happening in the backseat with one of the college students to the upcoming seniors. And she was asking them, "Where did you apply to college? How's that going?" Just listening to this very organic conversation was so fulfilling, because they were not only mentoring each other, but they really had this sisterhood so easily with each other. And they were just having this fantastic conversation.

But, we also do it on a more formal basis. We have girls that come in as junior camp counselors during the summer. We have girls that come in and do a gap year. My daughter did that and they actually work with Black Girls Code. We have girls that come back and actually become the instructors in the workshops that we do during the weekends. So we have very structured ways for them to give back, but we also love to see the organic pairings that happen, to see the older girls become mentors for the younger girls.

Bryant at the Glamour Women Of The Year 2016 LIVE Summit (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty)

Dan Costa: There have been a lot of reports about how Silicon Valley, in particular, but technology in general is less diverse than many other industries. And it seems like there's something unique to the technology industry that's holding it back, that's preventing this [issue] from moving faster. Do you have any theories for what is wrong with technology in particular that is slowing us down?

Kimberly Bryant: I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the tech. I mean, the tech has no inherent bias, it has only the bias that we build into it. I would say that would be the same meaning for technology companies. When I was just starting college in the mid-80s, there were about 32, 35 percent of women getting degrees in computer science and now it's like 12 to 14 percent. What was happening in '85 to '89 was that was the birth of the PC, that's when Apple was becoming a thing. That was when Intel and solid-state technology was really starting to exponentially grow. And the industry started to change in terms of the dynamics of who was sitting in those chairs, who was building these products.

And they did not include a lot of women, and a lot of women that were veterans in the field began to be pushed out. So, over the next several decades we saw that continue to happen. And we saw women not even aspiring to go into those fields because this image of the male geek became a phenom, and that's what girls did not want to be a part of. I think, now, this cultural bias is embedded in these companies, and it's going to be up to us and this generation and the next to change that narrative.

Dan Costa: PC Magazine's been in business since 1982, and we've got an archive of magazines that goes all the way back to the beginning. The content is wonky, but if you go through the advertisements of these mid-80s PC Magazines, you really do see a lot of the gender portrayals, which would not fly today. But they were built into the PC industry in very early days.

Kimberly Bryant: Very much so. I think a couple of years ago I saw a picture back from the launch of the Macintosh. And it felt like maybe it was [former US CTO] Megan Smith who [pointed it out]; I always learn from her. [She noted that] there were women in that founding group of founders that I've never seen before. And I was like, "Wait a minute, stop the presses. There's women there?" They were certainly there, but all of the images that I had grown up with and seen did not include them. So I didn't even recognize that women were very much a part of that innovation. I only knew Woz and Steve [Jobs]. Except, there were women there, too, and they did important things. I think that it's really important now to make sure that this generation of innovators don't get written out of history.

Dan Costa: It seems like a fundamental point, but I think we should get to the issue of why it is important that these tech companies be more diverse. What does it mean from a social justice perspective, but also, what does it mean from an economic perspective, given the economy that we're living in right now?

Kimberly Bryant: From a social justice and equity perspective, I think it's very important with the shifting demographics, not only in the US but also abroad, that are bringing a change. Such a change in what we look at as far as distribution of demographics in the world, where women will be the majority if we're not already there, and that the nation is really starting to change in terms of composition of who is here and who is in the workforce. It's important that as these products and solutions are being created, they meet the needs of everyone. And that won't happen if only one individual is creating all the solutions. It will miss so many of the solutions and needs that we need to attend to.

I think on the economic side, it's the same argument. Like if you're only building for one class of individual, what about the needs of black women? What about the needs of Latino women? What about the needs of gender diverse categories of individuals? Those voices are necessary right at the start of creation to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to have a solution that meets their needs, and for companies to actually be fiscally viable and be able to serve the population as it looks.

Dan Costa: There's a great example of that first generation of machine vision AIs. We're having a very difficult time recognizing people of color and they go into the data and they're like, "Oh, it turns out that we just didn't have enough people of color in our data sets." So therefore, AI wasn't being trained properly because it had a limited data set.

Kimberly Bryant: Yes. One of my very successful and brilliant mentees is on my team now and is doing a lot of work on this very thing around AI and bias. And I think her work is so vitally important to this work because if we look at AI, the trend of the future, it's going to be important that we have brilliant technologists like her pointing out where there is a gap so that we can structure AI so it doesn't either kill us all off or forget about half of us that are sitting in this space that they're supposed to be recognizing.

Dan Costa: You've got a goal of having one million black girls coding by 2040. How far along are you? Do you think you're going to hit that goal?

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Kimberly Bryant: I absolutely think we're going to hit that goal. Some of it is not about necessarily girls that we are directly touching, but also about these 10,000 students that we've reached to date and how they influence others. One of the things I say quite a bit is if we can teach one girl to code, she'll teach 10 more. There's an exponential growth and an exponential referral system that organically happens by the students that are engaged with BGC, and who they influence when they leave our organization and community.

Dan Costa: How can people who are watching and seeing this video help and participate in the process?

Kimberly Bryant: Well, one of the things that's very unique about Black Girls Code that I'm most proud about is that we're a very small team.There's only about 10 or 12 of us. But we are powered by a literal army of volunteers—over 2,000 each year—that help us deliver these workshops all over the US and abroad. So, if someone really wants to get involved, they can volunteer for one of our chapters as either a technical volunteer or a non-technical volunteer. They can get engaged with their companies and have them sponsor an event, sponsor a chapter, or sponsor a student. Traditionally we are non-profit, so we do take donations. Go to our website, help us to do more and more of this work, and help us spread the word.

Dan Costa: I want to ask you some questions that I ask everybody who comes on the show. Is there a technology trend that concerns you and that keeps you awake at night?

Kimberly Bryant: We already talked about that—artificial intelligence, without a doubt. I don't think we have enough technologists of color that are in the weeds, so to speak, as this is being built. And I think that's where we have the most possibility of getting it wrong. That's the one thing I want to see our girls get more involved in.

On the positive side, the technology that I'm most optimistic about is blockchain. I've really just started to learn more about what the blockchain is, and I see it as such a potential for creating equity in technology. I think it could be utilized as a tool to really correct some inequities in this space.

Dan Costa: And what is it about blockchain technology that you have that faith in? Is it that it's distributed and that you can create an entirely new system?

Kimberly Bryant: It's distributed. One of the things about our industry right now is that we have just a handful of big players that control a whole lot and it's shrinking on a daily basis. Blockchain offers the possibility of shifting control, shifting ownership and distributing it out in a way that, if used correctly, could upend technology industry as we know it. I think that's very exciting. And I think because a lot of us don't understand it, we don't know how powerful it could potentially be.

Dan Costa: Is there a technology that you use every day that still inspires wonder?

Kimberly Bryant: I don't think that there's anything that I use every day that inspires wonder. I think a technology that I use every day that I sometimes wish I didn't was social media. I mean, the good and the bad pieces of it. But it's an opportunity for me to tap into connecting with folks far outside of my local community, and I can see ideas being pushed forward. I think it's a very powerful tool for that reason.

Dan Costa: I think what we're discovering with social media is that as long as we're using it and it's not using us, then there can be a lot of benefits. It's when you sit back and you're allowed to be programmed by the algorithms and by the economic system that funds the platforms, that's where problems start to happen.

Kimberly Bryant: I agree. But sometimes I think we don't even understand how we are being programmed, so I think it's the give-and-take piece of it that we need to figure out.

Black Girls Code CEO Is Changing the Face of Tech