Code First: Girls

Code First Girls is a Not for Profit Social Enterprise that trains women in IT skills and helps companies to develop more female‑friendly recruitment policies.[1]

Code First Girls
TypeNot for Profit Social Enterprise
IndustryHigh tech startups
Founded2012
FoundersAlice Bentinck, Matthew Clifford
Headquarters
London
,
England
Area served
United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
Key people
Anna Brailsford, CEO
Websitewww.codefirstgirls.org.uk

The organisation promotes gender diversity and female participation in the technology sector by offering free and paid training and courses for students and professional women.[2] It also supports businesses to train staff and develop talent management policies.[3]

As of 2020, Code First Girls is reported to have provided in excess of £10 million worth of free coding courses to more than 18,000 women since 2013. [4]

In 2017, Code First Girls announced the launch of the "Code First: Girls 20:20 campaign" with the aim to "train 20,000 women to code for free by the end of 2020". [5] As of 2018, Code First: Girls have announced "2020 campaign partnerships" with the following companies: Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Goldman Sachs; KKR; Trainline; and OVH. [6] The organisation announced Baroness Martha Lane-Fox and Dame Stephanie Shirley as supporting the campaign as ambassadors. [7]

Programs


According to the Code First Girls website, the organisation offers free and paid-for in-person and remote coding courses for women, as well as for companies across the UK and Ireland. It also provides corporate upskilling and reskilling programmes focused on employability for women in the tech workforce. [8]

Free Community Courses - Career Kickstarter & Essentials

Code First Girls runs free part-time coding courses for female/non binary identifying young individuals across the UK and Ireland branded as Career Kickstarter.

Individuals joining courses at a university are required to be a student at the host university. General coding courses are also delivered at corporate locations and are open to women with the following eligibility: Aged between 18-23; or Aged 18+ and currently studying; or Aged 18+ and completed their studies in the past 2 years. [9] After the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown, Code First Girls successfully pivoted to provide all of their courses online through video chat platforms and remote teaching techniques. Since spring 2020, it has also offered free hour-long taster sessions called Essentials. These courses are open to public and serve to introduce programming languages like Python, SQL, or HTML to coding beginners.

Subsidised Professionals Courses - Career Switcher

Code First Girls' Career Switcher women's courses are fee paying. These courses are targeted at female professionals and teach participants web development, data science or python skills in small groups with hands-on attention from expert instructors. These courses are intended to help female professionals upskill within their current role or switch into a more tech-focused career. [10]

History

Code First Girls began in late 2012 as "a nine-week, free, part-time course to get female graduates from all walks of life not only interested in coding, but also better equipped to contribute to technical discussions in high-tech businesses".[11]

Founded by Alice Bentinck and Matthew Clifford, Code First: Girls was created they recognised a lack of female applications for their pre-seed investment programme Entrepreneur First (EF) .[12][13][14] EF supports the development of Code First: Girls.[15]

Bentinck claims that of the first cohort to complete Code First: Girls training, more than half of the women participants now self-identify as "technical" or working in software-development roles.[16]

Amali de Alwis was announced as first Chief Executive Officer of the organisation on Wednesday 8 April 2015, taking over from Bentinck and Clifford. [17] In November 2018, Amali was named to the Financial Times' list of the 'Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.'[18]

Code First: Girls was included in the UK Government's "UK Digital Strategy" policy paper 2017 as a "programmes doing valuable and innovative work to help more women into tech". [19]

Awards

In 2016 Code First: Girls was nominated for a National Diversity Award.[20][21]

In 2017 Code First: Girls won "e-Skills Initiative of the Year" at the Information Age "Women in IT awards". [22]

References
  1. Thomas, Kim (9 July 2018). "Women in tech: the IT firms tackling the gender imbalance". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  2. "Code First: Girls". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  3. McDonald, Clare (29 June 2016). "To create more female engineers, we need to create more strong female role models". ComputerWeekly.com. Retrieved 11 October 2016.
  4. "Learn to code with these classroom-based UK coding courses". techworld.com. 23 January 2020. Retrieved 25 February 2020.
  5. "Code First: Girls launches campaign to teach 20,000 young women to code for free by end of 2020, secures funding from KKR, OVH and others and opens crowdfund campaign". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  6. McDonald, Clare (3 April 2018). "How Code First: Girls uses partnerships to teach girls to code". computerweekly.com. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  7. Lee, Alex (7 March 2018). "Code First Girls wants to teach 20,000 women to code by 2020 - and it could give the UK an edge after Brexit". alphr.com. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  8. "Courses we offer". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  9. "Free Community Courses". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  10. "Code First: Professionals Women". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  11. "Girls-only coding class looks to increase female tech startup presence1".
  12. "Inspirational Woman: Alice Bentinck | Co-Founder of Entrepreneur First and Code First: Girls". 2016-04-29. Archived from the original on 2016-07-02. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  13. "ELLE's Tech Titans: Alice Bentinck". ELLE UK. 2016-09-19. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  14. "Lessons from running a start-up accelerator". Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  15. "London's startup scene is getting more sophisticated". The Economist. 2016-03-10. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  16. "Lessons from running a start-up accelerator". Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  17. "Amali de Alwis joins Code First: Girls as CEO". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  18. "The UK's top 100 black and minority ethnic leaders in technology". Financial Times. Retrieved 2018-11-26.
  19. "2. Digital skills and inclusion - giving everyone access to the digital skills they need". gov.uk. 1 March 2017. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
  20. "I have just voted for Code First: Girls for Community Organisation at The National Diversity Awards, click here to vote for this person". nominate.nationaldiversityawards.co.uk. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  21. "Register Your Interest". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
  22. "Women in IT Awards 2017: winners revealed". information-age.com. 26 January 2017. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
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