| Company type | Limited company |
|---|---|
| Industry | High tech startups |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founders | Alice Bentinck, Matt Clifford |
| Headquarters | London , England |
Area served | United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, USA, Switzerland, The Netherlands |
Key people | Anna Brailsford, CEO |
| Website | codefirstgirls |
Code First Girls is a social enterprise that provides free coding courses to women and non-binary people across the UK, Ireland, the USA, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The organization helps companies recruit more women into the tech sector by connecting them with newly trained female developers. Their community of coders, instructors, and mentors is one of the largest in the UK. According to the organisation, as of 2022 they've trained over 50,000 women.[1]
The organisation's stated goal is to "promote gender diversity and female participation in the technology sector by offering free courses for students and professional women who are wanting to re-train."[2] They also support businesses to train staff and encourage levelling-up for female staff within organisations.[3]
As of 2020, Code First Girls is reported to have provided in excess of £10 million worth of free coding courses to more than 18,000 women since 2013.[4]
In 2017, Code First Girls announced the launch of the "Code First: Girls 20:20 campaign" with the aim to "train 20,000 women to code for free by the end of 2020".[5] As of 2018, Code First: Girls have announced "2020 campaign partnerships" with the following companies: Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Goldman Sachs; KKR; Trainline; and OVH.[6] The organisation announced Baroness Martha Lane-Fox and Dame Stephanie Shirley as supporting the campaign as ambassadors.[7]
- ^ Thomas, Kim (9 July 2018). "Women in tech: the IT firms tackling the gender imbalance". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- ^ "Code First: Girls". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 2016-10-11.
- ^ McDonald, Clare (29 June 2016). "To create more female engineers, we need to create more strong female role models". ComputerWeekly.com. Retrieved 11 October 2016.
- ^ "Learn to code with these classroom-based UK coding courses". techworld.com. 23 January 2020. Retrieved 25 February 2020.
- ^ "Code First: Girls launches campaign to teach 20,000 young women to code for free by end of 2020, secures funding from KKR, OVH and others and opens crowdfund campaign". Code First: Girls. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- ^ McDonald, Clare (3 April 2018). "How Code First: Girls uses partnerships to teach girls to code". computerweekly.com. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- ^ Lee, Alex (7 March 2018). "Code First Girls wants to teach 20,000 women to code by 2020 - and it could give the UK an edge after Brexit". alphr.com. Retrieved 20 November 2018.