Google, Twitter and eBay Support Summer Camps Teaching Girls The Power Of HTML And App Development

By Donovan Jackson | Aug 17, 2012 11:40 AM EDT

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Gender roles have been around for years and have prevented males and females from acquiring certain positions they were qualified for in the job market.

To combat this sexism, a handful of summer camps are erecting around the country whos main objective is to teach young girls the art of coding html and learning to develop modern day apps.

This field is currently dominated by men. One program called Girls Who Code is an eight-week New York summer camp that teaches 20 high school girls and gives them tech training. Eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, the young women learn about a wide variety of tech topics from robotics to website design.

The young women are also embraced by the presence of top level people in the business. Guest speakers include an eBay executive, a venture capitalist and a technology entrepreneur among some other in-the-know tech personalities. 

The students get to go on non-conventional field trips to places like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The final project for these prospective tech savvy young ladies is far from the normal research paper that most students are used to. Girls Who Code students must develop and present an app as a final project.

"All the field trips have been so interesting and I can always find myself relating to parts of the topics presented," said 15-year-old Mahlika George, who's heading into her junior year at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School.

Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani said the organization hopes to get more girls interested in technology and consider the field as a real career possibility.

"I think young girls really internalize that sense that we're not good at math and science," Saujani said. "I don't want a young girl to feel that way."

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, just 24% of women hold STEM jobs -- occupations in science, technology, engineering or math. Only 12.7% of bachelor's degrees in computer science, computer engineering and information were received by women in the 2010-2011 school year, according to the most recent data from the Computer Research Association.

It's a gender gap that businesses are longing to fix. Women are more active Internet users than men, according to data from Pew, and they are far more engaged in social media.

That's precisely why Twitter has become involved in the tech summer camp. As a partner of the program, the microblogging site admitted in arecent blog post that it has invested in rallying young women into technology, because "having more female engineers on staff leads to having an even better working environment at Twitter."

This program could prove beneficial in the future for women and their abilities to earn tech jobs.

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