Episode 2 - Girls Can Code

REBECCA SUTTON: I don’t have a specific career in mind, but when I grow up I want to be involved with technology. 

RACHEL COFFIELD: When I grow up I want to be either a teacher or do something with computer programming. 

CHRISTINA SIVAPRAKASAM: When I grow up I want to be either a computer engineer or a software engineer. 

KAYLA LUCAS: When I grow up I most likely would like to be a pediatrician. However, coding has inspired me to want to be an engineer since there are not as many women as engineers as there are men. 

DIANA MAZZELLA: I’m Diana Mazzella, and you’re listening to Sparked, a podcast from West Virginia University Magazine about the people who are changing Appalachia’s future. We know you’ve heard about the region’s challenges, and just the challenges facing all of rural America. But when you look closely, you start seeing these people. One here. Another there. An entrepreneur. A teacher. An engineer. And you start thinking that something exciting is happening. If you could only connect them. Well, we’re plotting those sparks. And this one stood out to us while we were doing a story about women in technology. In the summer of 2017, we wanted to find out what the future looks like for women who want to go into technology jobs. You can find the story online with this podcast episode on our website: wvumag.wvu.edu. 
One of the people we followed was Ysabel Bombardiere. She’s an engineer who has a daughter in middle school. She knew from her own experience that girls aren’t encouraged to pursue engineering and technology for fun, or a career. But Bombardiere loved math and science. She started engineering classes in her native Venezuela and then graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in industrial engineering. She went on to work in the manufacturing and automotive industries, making oxygen sensors and safety panels for cars and updating infrastructure for chemical companies. There was one field while she was in school that was not accessible. Computer science – it felt like it was harder than it had to be. 

YSABEL BOMBARDIERE: I'm an engineer and I remember taking computer science classes in college and I really didn't like them. That was back in early ’90s, and it was very cumbersome and there wasn't much encouragement. It was hard; it was like the harder…they made it really, really hard. So I would rather take physics and chemistry and calculus than computer sciences. And then a couple years ago, I was in a conference for women engineers and they were talking about all these opportunities for coding for kids and girls, and I start teaching myself how to code again. 

MAZZELLA: Bombardiere knew she wanted to teach coding. Now she just needed to recruit girls. 

FARAH KISTO: Yeah like when Ysabel told us when she came to our school and like when she was like ‘Who's interested in coding?’ And like the whole class, the boys raised their hand and no girls raised their hand, like yeah. And like boys are more interested, but it’s for girls too, and like there should be more girls like who try coding.

 
MAZZELLA: That was Farah Kisto, a member of the Girls Who Code club. Her class wasn’t the only one where Bombardiere saw more interest from boys than girls. 

BOMBARDIERE: When I was advertising this club, I went to couple middle schools, and I talk to some of the parents and they always said, “Oh for my boy, yes,” and they never thought about – They said, “Oh my son would be so interested,” and they would be disappointed when I said, “No, it’s for girls.” I get that answer, and then it was really sad. I went to a sixth-grade class and I mention the club, and as soon as I said, “It’s only for girls, the boys, sixth-grade boys say “Girls cannot code.” Right there, so those are big obstacles we have and the interesting thing and we talk about this all the time is about women who were programmers, like the first programmer was Ada Lovelace.” 

MAZZELLA: There are obstacles between women and computer science long after middle school. 

Bombardiere’s club in Charleston, West Virginia, is a chapter of the national nonprofit Girls Who Code, which says that the number of women in computer science has declined since the 1980s. While 37 percent of computer science degrees went to women in 1984, the percentage of female graduates in the field is now about 18 percent. Computing is a growing field, and yet Girls Who Code projects that of the 1.4 million jobs in computer-related fields that will exist in the United States in 2020, only 29 percent of those jobs will be filled by U.S. graduates. And only three percent will be filled by women. 

When you get to the Kanawha County Extension Service 4-H office, it quickly becomes clear that for these 15 girls from the Charleston area, getting them interested in coding is not an issue. Bombardiere’s club, a partnership with Kanawha County 4-H, is now 2 years old. It meets Wednesday evenings at the Extension office, in the ground floor of a 12-story office building down the river from the state capitol. 
You’ll remember how the room would look if you were ever in 4-H or scouts or a church group. There are tables set up in a U-shape in an all-purpose room that also holds office space. There’s an easel pad with the girls’ names on it, and a paper sheet stuck to the wall with sticky notes listing the tasks the girls have accomplished and the ones they still have left to do. Bombardiere’s in front with a PowerPoint walking the girls through the day’s lesson. But in this club, the girls are looking at laptops. 

I walk over to where the to-do list is stuck to the wall and let Kayla Lucas and Hannah Mullins – both 12 years old – explain how they’re making their web sites and mock apps. 

KAYLA LUCAS: We had to create an app that would reduce our carbon footprint, and so in our app we have different things to do like our login and achievements and a gallery and an avatar once you get so many points. 

HANNAH MULLINS: We still need to do like transitions, so like what would be between the like different pages of the app and some of the things like we’ve already done are the login user screen, the gallery, we’ve done some of the gallery parts and some details. 

MAZZELLA: Bombardiere and mentor Emma Gardner are working with Rebecca Sutton and Rachel Coffield on the main page of their website.

REBECCA SUTTON: The earth or something. I don’t know. 

RACHEL COFFIELD: So maybe a rotating little earth thing. Yeah, we probably have to design it ourselves or get it [at] royalty free websites and stuff. 

SUTTON: Or maybe we should have a footprint. I don’t know because like that’s like our logo. 

COFFIELD: Sure. Maybe we could have a footprint over here that’s just a foot. 
SUTTON: Yeah, that’d be good. 

MAZZELLA: The mentors agree that this exposure to computer code, in this case, the hypertext markup language that creates web pages, will only help them. As a kid growing up in West Virginia, Corey Rodgers was not in a club like this. A career in tech just wasn’t something that was widely encouraged, even for boys. Rodgers, who has a day job in IT, is a mentor in the club and says Girls Who Code is a good move to grow talent in the state. According to Workforce West Virginia, the occupations of software developer and computer systems analyst are expected to be in high demand through 2024.   

COREY RODGERS: With West Virginia being such a rural area, I mean I grew up on a farm myself. I’m the black sheep of the family. Everybody else is still raising cows, and I’m working on computers and I think that teaching them the skills that aren’t necessary as popular in West Virginia not only gives them a shot at a better life in West Virginia, it will help push the rest of us forward as well. 

MAZZELLA: Sherry Swint is the 4-H Extension Agent for Kanawha County and helps Bombardiere oversee the club. She’s also the mother of one of the girls in the club. 

SWINT: I think not only are they learning coding, but they’re developing this cooperative group of ladies that are smart that are very bright that realize that they can indeed do computer science, and coding in particular. Having that confidence has I think really improved their outlook. For example, my daughter plans on taking computer science every year for the next four years, which amazed me, quite frankly, simply amazed me.  

MAZZELLA: Swint’s job as a 4-H agent is in youth development. 

I have to make a disclaimer here. I was in 4-H in middle school and high school, and I loved it. I was 12 when I joined a club in suburban Florida where I learned public speaking, how to run meetings with Robert’s Rules of Order and how to teach skills – like archery, sewing, making paper airplanes. I became a journalist because of a project my senior year. I thought I wanted to be a teacher so I interviewed parents, day care center operators, pretty much anyone who worked with kids. And by the end of it, I found that what I loved most was asking the questions. 

I think what Bombardiere and Swint are trying to do is what 4-H did for me – share with kids an array of possibilities, help them find confidence in themselves and prepare them for the world after high school. And if they share coding with girls, then there’s one more important path they can take. 

SWINT: I think if we can get children, girls or boys involved in a STEM field, I think it gives them a leg up. We are here trying to help our society be successful. Especially in West Virginia we have some very difficult choices ahead as a state, and I think education should always be the priority. And that developing students and children to be lifelong learners I think is a key to success to really improve our state. 

MAZZELLA: Ultimately, the club wants to see more people like Emma Gardner in West Virginia. She’s a chemist, and one of the mentors in the club. She knows that being a chemist – it’s not a common profession for women. And it wasn’t like she was getting messages or extra-curricular activities that pushed her toward chemistry as a profession. She had to nurture her own interests because the system made it harder to see your options. 

EMMA GARDNER: You know when I was growing up in West Virginia, I lived in Mercer county, which parts of it are pretty rural but I lived in Princeton. But it’s an area if you are good at science and you’re good at math, they don't tell you, they’re not like, “You should consider going and being an engineer or going into technology, chemistry.” They’re like, “Oh you would be a good nurse.” Which you know, nothing wrong with nurses, like that’s a really great career path, but I just think there are so many other options. 

MAZZELLA: While Gardner is a scientist, she’s not a coder. So mentoring in Girls Who Code has been a learning experience for her, too. But it’s worth it to learn it and then teach it to others, because really, there’s too much that West Virginians would be missing out on otherwise.

GARDNER: Everyone should get their kids involved in it. Like it really is the future. I was reading an article recently that says that like coding is going to be the next like huge blue-collar job. So like it's where the future is, like we're going to have people doing coding more then we have people building roads and mining coal that sort of thing. Like coding is the future. I think it is definitely an important skill to learn, and if you can start getting your kids excited about it, you totally should. 

MAZZELLA: Bombardiere got into Girls Who Code because of her own daughter. She wants her to know about an important set of skills she may need for several careers. In her own childhood, Bombardiere didn’t have anyone teaching her how to code. But she did have something that she sees in her own students. Whenever someone tells them they can’t do something, they say: Wanna bet? 

BOMBARDIERE: I think it because I just want of prove everybody wrong. I think anytime they told me – I guess some of my girls do that – Anytime a boy says, “Oh you can't do that,” we just go and do it just to spite them. I think a lot of what I did growing was like to prove them because I don't know. Everybody [would say], you look like you could be a teacher or art teacher or you could be art. And I didn't like that because it was putting me in a box before I even knew where I belong. 

MAZZELLA: Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Raymond Thompson Jr. and me, Diana Mazzella. 

Many thanks to the Girls Who Code club in Kanawha County, West Virginia, particularly the girls. At the beginning of the episode, the voices you heard were: Farah Kisto, Hannah Mullins, Rebecca Sutton, Rachel Coffield, Christina Sivaprakasam and Kayla Lucas. 

You can find more podcasts and related content on our website at wvumag.wvu.edu. And be sure to tell us what you think of this episode. Sparked is a production of West Virginia University located in Morgantown, West Virginia.