Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women And Minorities

Dave SmithJun 27, 2014, 17:58 IST

GoogleAvni Shah, Google's director of product management, speaks to the crowd at the 2014 I/O developers conference.

Google is offering vouchers to any women and minorities interested in learning how to code, CNET's Seth Rosenblatt reports. In a blog post from Gregg Pollack, CEO of the Code School, Google is paying for three free months for any women and minorities interested in tech to expand their skills. The offer is part of Google's $50 million "Made With Code" initiative, which aims to help close the gender gap in tech. While Google is also offering the same vouchers to the women in attendance at its annual I/O developers conference this week, the search giant has released an online application that's available to women everywhere. Google says its available vouchers for women number in the "thousands." This new initiative comes just days after Google published a diversity report that revealed only 30% of its employees are women, while African Americans and Hispanics only comprised 1 and 2% of Google's tech employees, respectively. Google said the current state of its company diversity is "miles from where we want to be." Google did say at its I/O keynote Wednesday, however, that there were twice as many women in attendance compared to last year. Beyond Google, the Labor Department says only 20% of software developers in the U.S. are women, while only 12% of computer science degrees today go to women. Megan Smith, vice president of Google's X division, said the company's initiative to encouraging women in tech is all about "debugging inclusion." "We shouldn't feel guilty about our biases," Smith said. "We should wake up and do something about them."

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Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women And Minorities