Video: Meet the Next Tech Entrepreneurs: Young Women
Researchers from Berkeley National Lab mentor girls at at the East Bay session of the 2012 Technovation Challenge. Berkeley National Laboratory
The Technovation Challenge hopes to equip girls with the skills to make it in the tech industry.
There is a gender gap in the technology industry. Women make up only about 30 percent of the workforce of major technology companies. A similar gap exists in government IT jobs.
Since 2010, about 5,000 girls from 45 countries around have taken part in the Technovation Challenge, a program that hopes to change those statistics.
"For a period of three months, girls learn how to identify a problem in their community and then create a mobile app that solves it," said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Iridescent, the nonprofit that runs the Technovation Challenge. "But most importantly, they actually launch a business or a startup."
Participants have created apps that help students give feedback on school assignments and diagnose concussions.
"When we actually looked at the apps on the market, we saw they could've been a lot more developed and a lot better than they were," said Emma Yang, who recently participated in the program. "So we decided to create our own one."
Previous coding experience is not required to take part in the challenge. Instead, mentors focus on entrepreneurial skills like making a business plan or pitching ideas.
Recently, the Technovation Challenge conducted a survey on former participants who are now in college. They discovered 50 percent of the girls intend to major in computer science.
To learn more, check out the video below from CNET:
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