The Tech Gender Gap is Solvable (again)

like myself. Mary amgem is the founder of I Am the Code, or organization teaches young people computer literacy and coding. According to the Worldwide Web Foundation, men continue to be twenty one percent more likely to be online than women, and they're around fifty percent more likely to be online when we look at the world's least developed countries. That gap represents a huge difference in access acts as to information, access to learning, and engagement with the rest of the world.

We are helping young women to become due to the intelligent. They knew how Instagram was crazy, how Facebook was created, and we help them get into the information where they knew how actually the solution were created. My interview with Maryam jam first Round last year, we wanted to air it again as a bit of holiday inspiration. Mariam's example shows that people who seem to have the least power in the world can make a tremendous difference through sheer

determination and creative thinking. It's also a reminder that smart investments can have a transformative impact on the lives of large numbers of people. My solvable is to get one million women and girls to learn how to code by the year twenty twenty. Mary. Obviously, your efforts to teach girls to code reflects your own experience. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about how you came to this idea. I am from Senegal, West Africa.

That's where I was born. When I was growing up, I didn't have any education, so I didn't go to school. I couldn't read and write until I was sixteen years old, and when I was eleven years old, I was abused by my colonic teacher. My country is a Muslim country, so when I was thirteen years old, I was trafficked from Senegal to France. I ended up in the UK, so I used to do cleaning jobs and working in bars and hotels. I see people in suit and things

like that. And I wanted to find a job. And I remember that, you know, some of the ladies were telling me, you know, we can't find your job because you don't have any skills. We can't put you in banks, or we can't put you, you know, in supermarkets things like that, because you need to communicate. Also you need

to speak English. My English was very, very broken. And then slowly, slowly I started going to a local library and learning how to read, and you know, being very disciplined and focus and every day I'll spend two hours at the library. And then I started learning match and how to imput data on Excel. I started to learn how to code. In that time, Google was born. On

their platform, they had a blog. People can write and then the blog will be converted, you know, so you can write some texts and the text will be converted into into blog. And I discovered that. But in that time I had had so many anger in me and sow me frustration. I was asking myself why I was in the UK, you know, why my mum abandoned us as children. So I had a lot of vucations and then I was looking at BBC and TV and all these channels and then I just saw Bob Geldof and

Bono doing the doing the live aid things. That just really makes me very upset. And I think that the way they came about was like, you know, okay, we are the saviors of Africa. We're going to save the whole world. You were upset because it was it seemed condacn the interial. Yeah, it was really weird because I saw that, you know, like everybody was talking about poverty.

And then I said, well, you know, actually I was this sort of I was this young women in Africa growing up and you didn't do anything about it, and you know, it wasn't their fault really, but I think people could understand my frustration. And then I wrote an open letter to Bono and Bob Geldof for the first time and asked them to back off from Africa. You

wrote to them, just to make this clear. I'm the blog that you created after teaching yourself to read and write, teaching yourself to code, and building yourself at a at a public library. Yeah, my first open letter was to Bob Geldof and Bono. They were just asking them to back off from Africa. And then the Guardiant Pick It Up show it to Bob Geldof. He didn't like it. You know, Bono didn't like it either, and they thought

that I was very ungrateful as an African. And then you know, in the end they actually saw, you know, my point, and that created a one International, which is now Bono's deization. I got called to come in and find a way to help them understand that the message they're trying to portray in Europe is to too different

to what's happening on the ground. It's such an amazing story that after suffering this abuse and neglect, lack of education, sixteen, you taught yourself to do all of these things that people with tremendous opportunities in many cases haven't haven't learned to do, such as coding the way you have. I mean, it raises the question, Marian, whether you're just an extraordinary person or whether you're a model that a lot of other poor people can follow. I get to ask that question.

I don't think I'm special, but I think that the trauma I've lived as a child you know, we'll never go away, still is still on me. And I see that with young girls growing up in refugee comes. For example, when you've been through difficulty in life, and you've been through trauma. You try to find a way to get by. And this is the mentality I have now where I leave day by day. Every days it is another day, and I just think that, you know, I become very

tenacious in getting things done. Why the focus on coding as the skill that can provide this vehicle, particularly for girls, to get out of their terrible circumstances. I mean, presumably there are lots of skills you could learn as a young person that would help you out of poverty, help

give you access to power to the wider world. It started when I started to learn match at the library and then starting reading dictionaries and understanding words, because bear in mind, when I came to the UK, I couldn't understand English. I couldn't decode the information, and so you could put words in front of me, I wouldn't really understand them. I used to pick up books with numbers

and I start coding. Really using XHML was from the beginning, because I could put some numbers, then it will translate on a page. And then I think that what I'm trying to do now is trying to talk to girls about digital skills and many many of the application we use around the world, for example, people don't know how it was made. And I've been always fascinated in how things are made and designed and you know who is

behind the things doing things. And I like to see things being translated in numbers, but also being translated in words, and I see this with refugees now and seeing refugees and people in Lebanon, for example, when you are poor or you've been traumatized you are, you consume information very, very quickly. So I have a photographic memory where I don't forget things. Although that combination have helped me to learn how to code seven coding languages in two years.

And then I had to go back to the agency to tell them, actually, now I'm a coder, and that he didn't understand what I was saying. So so now I'm a coder and I build the websites and I'm a full stack developer. I really like numbers and words. Your organization has the very suggestive and interesting name I Am the Code, which I guess speaks to that pride

in learning it. But also you know, we use the expression cracking the code when you figure something out and it's not just learning to program and write software, but figuring out this larger code of how the world works. Am I reading too much into your in the name

of your organization? No, No, you're absolutely right. But I think there was something else about it, because I think what happened is during the years, I was called to give a you know, a major speech at Devils and I was very very nervous, and I didn't know what to do and what to say. I've never met those influential, powerful people before. And then I said to my son, you know, what do you think I should say? My

son said, well, mommy, you are the code. And what I translated from that conversation was, you know, I'm tenacious. I don't give up. You know, despite the childhood I had, I don't give up. And then despite that, I'm helping all the young women to get confidence. And that then created a massive conversation at Davos because I was the first senegalist who want to teach white middle class women in Guildford where I leave how to code, and now we have many many women coding there. But what I'm

saying is that yes, you are the code. You can learn how to code but at the same time, you have the key to unlucky your life. You have the key to build your life. Despite all the challenges and all the difficulty, you can get this key and go in and open the doors for yourself and for other people. So I am the code is about coding at the same time, it's about giving women and girls power to

go and change their lives. Software has traditionally been dominated by men, and so many of the issues we're seeing now around harassment and abuse online around software encoding discrimination seems to reflect to some extent that it's men who've written most of it. Do you see that as part of the problem you're addressing by bringing women into coding and software design. That's true, men men have done that.

But I think also, you know, women used to crack the code, and they used to decode information, but they never had any visibility or any credit given to them. For many, many years, we had many women inventors who understood mathematics, centers and science. They understood so many you know, how the world was functioning. They actually, you know, if you just look at the GPS was invented by by

a woman. But I think sometimes we just forgot those stories and those inventors who have helped us become who we are today. You know, we're not giving confidence to young women to go for it, not just you know, because they can, but also women have more empathy, they have more compassion and kindness when they designing solutions because they design solutions for their communities and for you know,

the real problems. Men they design things because they you know, it's like cool and they can make money or they can just launch an IPO very quickly. But you know, women design things to you know, to help their communities and help their friends. That's what I saw my young women actually doing. And it's one thing to try to teach women to code and Guildford, it's another thing to try to teach young women to code and Senegal, for example.

There must be a lot of obstacles to trying to set up and communicate what we're trying to communicate in some of the places you're trying to do it. Can you talk about some of those challenges. That's very true. We have a lot of challenges where the women we have in Guildford are totally different through women we have in the Refugi camp in Kenya in Senegal, but I would have learned during the last three years is that

it's not a location problem. Is actually they all smart young women who wants to learn, you know, a different skill. So we have changed the world coding to digital skills. For example, we are helping young women to become digitally intelligent. They know how Instagram will it's crazy to how Facebook was created, and we help them get into the information

where they know how actually the solution were created. And I think that if we start giving young women and girls the power to understand, you know, how wire frames are made and how things are written the code behind is how to edit it and how to review the code and how to make it more empetic for example, or how the AI, how the data was collected and who is involved. We're now in sixty four countries. I've seen so many young women and girls and it's really

not a location problem, but it's a systematic problem. And that's why going and teaching young women and girls mathematics and basic science and helping them understand the global issues like climate change, gender equality, you know, how do you read this inequality and how do you get a bank account? Things like that have a young woman to become very powerful because she knows she's participating. That's how she changed her community, changed her lives, and then there's less abuse,

for example, and she's very very confident afterward. I think the training sessions you run are open to boys as well, although maybe they're more girls than boys. Is there a difference in trying to teach girls or teach boys to code? No, no, there's not a big difference. The reason why we want you to include some of the boys because we when we set up I AM the Code and the mission was to actually get one million women and girls coders. And we find out that when we're doing the clubs,

boys want to be part of it. And if you look into some Muslim countries like in Afghanistan, in Senegal, in Sudan, for example, we need to get the boys involved. And in Mali in ny Air because despite us going and teaching girls how to code, there are some social issues where the young woman is still you know, looked down to, you know, the parents are not very confident

in letting them go. So we get the young boys, you know, who are almost like the brothers and their cousins to be part of the clubs and then support the young women to be part of it. In Senegal, we had to get some of the boys to come and support the young women. And we respect the culture of the countries, but it's very important which young boys gender equality and how to be kind to young women

and girls, and then they usually work together. We just want to make sure that we create exhibit of balance but also help young boys to be part of the I Am the Good movement because I believe that the only way we can achieve gender equality is by educating boys and men to understand women issues. Some of the people you've taught have already started to have meatingful success in their careers and some of them are becoming entrepreneurs.

Is that part of your mission? Are you helping to coach people to start their own businesses, to start their own organizations. Yeah. We we have women millionaires in Senegal, so we have amazing young women who are now entrepreneurs. They do amazing well in their countries. They're building solutions, they're sitting government for example, they sit in telecom companies.

You know, some of our young girls and our mothers, their children are now coming back to the I AM the Code program that I Am the Code idea has been cooking for the last five years and beyond that. So all the young women have been mentoring for the last ten years have now become you know that I am the Code ambassadors. They're taking I Am the Code in their communities. He has almost become this family. Now people are paying back and giving back to the community

and they're now building their businesses. Who are really really important for the Africa tech ecosystem because in the past, we didn't think about women as agent of change or agent of economic development, but we fought many African women and young women were seen as object of development, you know, the NGOs just you know, giving handout and helping them with agriculture programs things like that. But now the women actually designing their own e commerce sites, they're designing their

own souls in Senegal. In Kenya, for example, they are climate change activists. They're using technology to create campaigns. For example, one of our young women in Kenya has done a lot of work on deforestation. So the idea really is to use technology as a way of empowering this young women and girls, but at the same time teaching them skills that will give them job, give them money and ultimately, you know, they become very proud of themselves. That's that's

the goal of im record. You talk about teaching a million girls to code by twenty thirty in just a decade. How are you doing on that goal? And how realistic is that? Oh, it's very realistic. We've done so far fourteen thousand young women and girls are part of the I Am the Core program and we didn't have any

peer in any marketing in sixty four countries. It's really overwhelming to see how the program has reached so many many women, not just in Africa, but across the world in China and Japan is very large now and it's quite a humbling to see young women having their lives changed through I Am the Code. I didn't expect that. So fourteen thousand to a million, you have, by my calculation, nine hundred and eighty six thousand together, How will you finance that? Who will help to support you in that

incredibly ambitious goal. We will reash the goal because we have over twenty seven companies worldwide who have committed to the number already, and so we are working with corporates to get their staff members to become volunteers. We have women calling us they want to become champions, so they want to use their network to help spread the world. Like you know, your program is definitely going to help

us get more visibility out there. And we also have digital clubs, we have hackatons, we have you know, so many boot camps. People are just joining because they can see that it makes sense. Now we have young girls actually coming to work for I Am the Code. Where am I No Listeners are hearing you talk and asking what they can do to help support your efforts and the goal general. What are some of the things that people listening might be able to do to advance the goal.

They can definitely become mentors to the girls. They can become ambassadors of I Am the Code. They can run their own hecatons, they can provide space for us, they can be part of the you know, the movement to get young some of the young girls coding. We have many corporate organizations, for example, who are giving us space. They're giving us some hours to volunteer for I Am the Code, and they're opening their offices to have digital club and they're also traveling with us to meet the

girls in a most difficult places around the world. We are the first organization to go into refugee camp in Kenya where the two hundred thousand people live in the refugee camp, eighteen thousands of them are women and girls. And they're the first young women and girls in a refugee camp to learn how to code. And we in slams within five US in Brazil. We are in places where I grow up as a young girl. And the reason why I'm going back there is to tell the

world that those people they matter. By going back and holding those young girls and and helping them to be confident and to also gain a skill, I believe that coding is the future. If they can decode information and build the website or build an app, and get some skills to help them get money, they wouldn't be trafficked, they wouldn't be young prostitutes, they wouldn't be abused because they have to depend on someone else. So I'm trying to change society problems at the same time giving young

women skills so they don't end up like myself. And how about here in the United States, Mariam, is there a role for your organization to play here? Are you active here? We have some major banks who won't support I am the code and hopefully we're going to go to deprived communities. Because our content is free. People can use them in prisons, they can use them in places. In the UK we go to prisons and places where we can rehabilitate people. So we're hoping that by the

beginning of twenty twenty. I'm in the United States. It's such an odd, dacious idea to say someone who's been a victim of trafficking should be writing software. Have you seen other women who followed the kind of path that you did and had that extraordinary transformation? Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. I've seen many women who so many women who've been trafficked and had difficulty in their life, but mainly they go into the activism world and share

their stories with other people around the world. But for me, that's not enough, and my pioneering system change. That's what I do. I change systems in countries and in government. And I believe that the reason why I was trafficked from Senegal and the reason why my mother actually abandoned us as children, and you know, I was abused and rapped by my chronic teacher in my country in Senegal, and ultimately traffic from Senegal is because the system of

the country was broken. And so what I tried to do if I am the Code at the same time is how do you fix systems in countries? How do you educate government and the private sector to understand that actually, you know, if you mess up one child's life, you know, just messing up her life, but you're messing up the entire community's life. For example, we don't have birth certificate.

We totally are incunito in Senegal. And I see this today in the refugi camp where you know, the worst is just watching things happening to two million, millions of women and girls from Senegal to Nepal. So unless someone come up with something very ambitious and very ruthless like I am the Code, nothing will happen. And I've seen change happening from Buenden areas to Senegal, just because I dare to be visible and I dare to tell the world.

If you don't want to find out any more women being traffic and taken away, you have to change the system in the country. You don't want to have any more immigrants in Europe or in the United States, change the system in their countries, give them the skills, and as soon as you do that, they wouldn't need to

come here. That's why I want young girls who have the skills in their countries and build their businesses in their countries, and if they want to travel they can have they can travel in a very legal way without being insulted. I'm just trying to fix some of the problems the world has failed to fix. Miriam jem is the founder of I Am the Code. Be sure to check out our show pages for ways that you can get involved with I Am the Code and learn more

about coding and poverty eradication. This interview was edited by Chalk and Blade. Solvable is produced by Camille Baptista, Jocelyn Frank, Catherine Girardoo and Mia Lobell. I'm Jacob Weisberg.