Kempner: Free tech training (if you’re a girl)

Other Kempner's Unofficial Business columns: http://www.myajc.com/flist/business/unofficial-business-column-matt-kempner/f9y/

The spectacle unfolding on the 12th floor of a downtown Atlanta high-rise might horrify some teenagers.

Nineteen high-school-aged girls have spent much of their summer learning to write code. Six or seven hours a day. Five days a week. Bewildered friends pity them, I’m told.

Many had little or no interest in computer science when they heard about the free (FREE!) tech training programs being offered for the first time in metro Atlanta by Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit.

Coding is boring, right? And too hard. And mostly a guy thing, some thought.

Amaryah Gambol, of Acworth, didn’t like the brief glimpse she got of the kind of IT stuff her dad does at Coke.

“I always thought what he did was lame,” she said. “I went to his job one day and it was all men. I thought being the only girl all day would be boring.”

But she and others, some cajoled by their parents, thought they should at least try the training.

Smart move.

And a promising one, if you think tech might be the kind of tool our economy will continue to value.

I often hear from company officials worried about finding enough young, highly skilled tech workers. (I’ve also heard suggestions that the idea of a shortage is deeply overstated as a way for U.S. companies to get visas to bring in less expensive foreign workers.)

Think of how many more trained tech folks there could be if the number of women in that arena more than doubled, which would be closer to what their ratio in the overall workforce is.

Changing minds

Olivia Podber, a 16-year-old who attends Atlanta’s Grady High School, had been thinking about becoming a doctor. Now, after spending weeks as one of nearly 80 teens in the local summer program, she’s wondering if she might prefer computer science.

She used the word “exciting” to describe coding. (Which made me giggle.) And in her free time she’s been checking out the code used for popular web sites. Just because it’s interesting. “It’s kind of weird,” she said.

Sneha Nagarajan, a Johns Creek 16-year-old, told her disappointed parents she had zero interest in computer science. Now, she said, “I love coding.” (I giggled more.) “It’s actually very shocking how much I love it.”

The girls I spoke with in the program seemed remarkably smart. And ambitious.

For many, tech wasn’t what they expected. One compared coding to learning another language. Others related it to creating art or writing a story.

But many girls – and even plenty of boys — don’t get close enough to trying tech to know that, though more schools have been pushing to add basic tech training.

Much of the tech world has a girl issue, of course.

Women hold more than half of all professional jobs in the nation. Yet they account for only 20 percent of software developers, 18 percent of information security analysts and 12 percent of computer network architects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A friend recently mentioned that he knew there weren’t a lot of women in the field, so when he had an opening for a job on his tech team, he wanted to keep a particular eye open for women applicants. As it turned out, not one woman applied.

Plenty of industry players are trying to recruit more women and find more in the tech field. (A sister company of the AJC's, Cox Automotive, recently launched a tech academy for girls.)

Better balance

Having more diversity on tech teams can result in better, “more balanced and unique” solutions for clients, said Tricia Barlow, Accenture’s program manager for its partnership with Girls Who Code. (Funding and support for the local Girls Who Code classes came from Accenture, AT&T and GE.)

Girls don’t see a lot of role models in tech, Barlow said, and they picture coding as something more for “a guy in a hoodie in his basement.”

“It doesn’t look like an industry that appeals to women,” she said.

So the summer program tries to get participants jazzed about the possibilities. The girls create web sites, gin up video games and dabble in robotics.

They also produce final projects. There are plans for a web site that rates the likelihood of Zika virus in different nations and a proposal for a belt with sensors that could help people who are visually impaired to navigate and avoid obstacles. Another team would share only the vaguest description: a web site to help high schoolers get more experience and skills. They wanted to keep it a bit hush, hush, because they are thinking of making it a real entrepreneurial venture.

They are ambitious, right?

That’s reason enough to delve into tech careers.

“Everybody says this is where the money is and where the future is,” Podber told me. But first she wants to make sure she’ll also love it.