“Race is a very sensitive topic, so I think gender has been an easier and safer topic to discuss.” “There has been a lot of attention on gender diversity the past few years, longer than we have been focusing on racial diversity as an issue in the industry,” says Bianca Gandolfo, a cofounder of Telegraph Academy, at which 85% of graduates have been people of color underrepresented in tech. It is worse than underrepresentation at Amazon, Apple, and Intel. That’s about the same rate of underrepresentation as at companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Course Report’s survey found that just 1% of coding-camp graduates are black (18% identified as Asian-American, 63% as white, and 17% as “other”). “So when you see pictures of our graduates in our marketing materials, the precedent has already been set that anyone can go to our school.”Īs much relative success as coding bootcamps may have had promoting women in their programs, they’re still generally pretty dismal at including underrepresented minorities. “From the outright, we’e had diversity,” Fazulak says. Hackbright’s marketing materials intentionally show women at events and interacting with mentors to avoid this perception. “Girls are told if they’re an extrovert, then they don’t belong in engineering,” she says. “We have gotten it right since day one, which makes things a lot easier than starting off on the wrong foot.”Īngie Chang, the VP of strategic partnerships at Hackbright Academy, a coding school for women in San Francisco, also sees this marketing aspect as a boon for more gender diversity among coding bootcamps. “The typical CS programs with male-dominant classes are indirectly marketing that not everyone can code,” says Aaron Fazulak, a cofounder of Designation Labs, a UI/UX design bootcamp in Chicago where about 64% of graduates have been women. “Bootcamps offer more of a meritocracy, and that attracts people of all kinds.”Ĭoding schools are also relatively new, and many of them have made including people with diverse backgrounds a goal from the start. “We don’t have ‘standard’ prerequisites: special schools, degrees, ages, standardized testing, or even past careers,” says Diane Hessan, the CEO of the Startup Institute, an eight-week program in Boston where 41% of past graduates have been women. Bootcamps, meanwhile, typically base admissions on aptitude tests and interviews. Requirements like previous coding experience, or even the need to make the decision to major in computer science at an early age, might limit the number of women who apply to traditional programs. Current students at Designation Labs, a coding school in Chicago.Īs technology companies and universities scramble to correct embarrassing gender imbalances-providing bias mitigation training, hosting women-focused events, establishing internships that focus on underrepresented groups, and investing hundreds of millions of dollars-it’s worth asking how, exactly, coding schools have made more effective moves towards gender parity.