Hillary Stark

We call them coders, programmers, and developers. These are people who speak the languages of Ruby, Python and Scala to name a few. If you’re totally confused, don’t worry, we were too up until pretty recently! These are the people who create and produce everything that goes on in your computer, including the smartphone that you’re probably using to read this article. Really, any type of technology used today involved a person with this skill set in order to make your device come to life (think the man behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz-style), and the job market for tech careers is growing exponentially.

However, as fast as the market is growing, at the same rate the amount of women and people of color holding these positions is decreasing, and it’s predicted that by 2020 there will be one million unfilled jobs in this field. This wasn’t always the case, after all, the first “programmers” were in fact women! Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are credited as being two of the very first computer programmers, and while they look sweet and gentle, they were strong and mighty.

Want to know more? Join the UNT student chapter of ASIS&T, in partnership with the UNT Digital Libraries, for a free private screening of the multi award-winning documentary, CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap on Monday, April 25th, at 5:00 PM.