Ladies learning to crack the code

Course aims to expose women to introductory web programming

Heather Payne remembers what it felt like to be 13, feeling the pressure to act dumb in math class.

Although she shook it off and graduated from business school, the 25- year- old understands why girls seem to lose interest in science, technology and math as they approach high school.

They don’t seem like girl things.

With that in mind, last year Payne founded Ladies Learning Code, a Toronto- based non- profit organization set up to teach introductory web programming to women, and Girls Learning Code, directed at a younger cohort.

After a successful year, the project is coming to Vancouver, with workshops in HTML/ CSS coding held today and Saturday at tech start- up space Launch Academy.

Payne recognizes women are under- represented in IT jobs.

“My team and I, we’re just doers,” the entrepreneur said in an interview. “Ladies Learning Code might not even solve the problem of women in tech. I don’t know that yet. But what it does is expose all these women to the technology, and at a minimum, that’s a great thing. We don’t bring a lot of theory into it.”

The classes are designed to make students feel comfortable with the technology, Payne said. “The confidence thing is one of the biggest pieces of what we do. A lot of people have the skills, or they could figure it out. And they just need a little boost to really feel confident diving in.”

Ladies Learning Code started with a tweet, when Payne was searching for a female- focused coding class and, frustrated, found nothing. So she organized her own, with partners Melissa Crnic, Breanna Hughes and Laura Plant.

One workshop on the basics of coding languages HTML and CSS became a dozen workshops for 1,700 participants on several different coding languages, as well as video editing and Adobe software applications, all taught by volunteers.

With tuition set at $ 50 per class, all have sold out — including the Vancouver event. The workshops aren’t “girlie,” — no pink colour schemes — but they are held in airy spaces with a healthy lunch provided, and have a 4: 1 ratio of students to instructors, all of which appeal to women, Payne said.

Women outnumber men in undergraduate university programs, but only a third of science and engineering undergrads are women.

And although total enrolment in those fields has increased, the proportion of women is stable or dropping, according to the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Yet IT professionals are in high demand, with men in that field outnumbering women about four to one.

That’s a statistic that educator and programmer Pearl Chen, 31, knows first- hand.

“The entire time I’ve been working as a web developer, the only time I’ve worked alongside a female developer was once — and it was because I helped hire her,” said Chen, who led the first Ladies Learning Code coding class in Toronto last year, and will lead the Vancouver classes this weekend.

Sonia Ryan, a recruiter for tech start- up A Thinking Ape, enrolled in this weekend’s workshop to better communicate with the computer engineers and designers she works with.

She said she was attracted to the non- competitive vibe and hands- on focus — a nice contrast to programming’s hypermasculine reputation of guys “grunting, eating pizza and coding all night.”