Executives and guests of BlackRock and Girls Who Code will celebrate their partnership by ringing Friday's closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
BlackRock hosted twenty junior and senior high school students in the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program. The students were paired with a female BlackRock analyst or associate mentor who has a tech background, or is currently working on a tech-based project. The students learned algorithmic thinking, which is the foundation of all programming languages. They also learned Scratch, Python, JavaScript, jQuery, and the markup languages HTML and CSS.
Girls Who Code was founded six years ago by attorney and activist Reshma Saujani with the mission to build the pipeline of future female engineers.
Computer and information technology jobs are projected to grow faster than the average of all other occupations. The problem is though, even with women representing roughly 47% of the workforce, only 12% of engineers are female.
Six years in, Girls Who Code alumni are entering college. The alumni who have already declared their majors are choosing computer science, or related fields, at a rate 15 times the national average, according to its website.
Girls Who Code have programs for girls starting from 3rd grade, and reaches about 90,000 girls of all backgrounds in all 50 states. It has more than 100 partners, including JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and IBM.
