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8 Organizations Helping Girls & Women Build Careers in Tech

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8 Organizations Helping Girls & Women Build Careers in Tech

Landing a job in tech can be a thrill — but it can also feel intimidating, like you’re asking to join an exclusive club or sit at the cool kids’ table. If you identify as a woman or a non-binary person, this experience is heightened, because you may not see people like you represented in the industry very often. Fortunately, there are organizations around the world working hard to address gender disparities in tech.

Even better, there are lots of ways to get involved, whether you’re new to tech and looking for mentorship or you’re more established in your career and want to pay it forward. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’ve rounded up a few awesome organizations helping girls, women, and non-binary folks break into tech, foster relationships and community, and ultimately build successful careers.

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Who they’re for: Latinx people working in tech or pursuing technical careers, as well as allies who support the Latinx community

What they do: Latinas in Tech hosts virtual and in-person networking events and a popular annual summit with a competition that awards Latina-founded tech startups. Studies have shown that when Latinx entrepreneurs start a business, 70% of their funding comes from personal savings because they often lack the resources and the network to access capital. Latinas in Tech aims to change that: “Latina entrepreneurs are not only capable of working in the tech industry, they are innovators that have proven themselves to be creators of tech as well,” Rocio van Nierop, CEO of Latinas in Tech, said in a release.

Latinas in Tech also has a members-only job board that’s focused on full-time tech roles in an effort to diversify the tech talent pipeline. The nonprofit organization covers various roles within the tech ecosystem, including Engineers, Cybersecurity Experts, Data Scientists, and more.

How you can get involved: There are local Latinas in Tech chapters that you can join around the world to meet other Latinx tech professionals. Regardless of your career level, you can volunteer to mentor another Latinas in Tech member and provide professional and leadership development tools.

Who they’re for: Women hoping to rise the ranks in their careers and increase their financial literacy

What they do: Ladies Get Paid is a network of 100,000+ women where people join to take online courses, attend events, and connect with peers and mentors — all in service of growing “your career and your bank account.” As founder Claire Wasserman puts it in an interview with the Get Together podcast, “It just blows me away how amazing these women are. But I think the success of all of this is that they feed each other.”

How you can get involved: You can either get a free membership, which includes access to the community platform, or pay for a membership that will give you access to their video library, virtual events, and coaching with Wasserman.

Who they’re for: Girls and non-binary students in elementary and middle school all the way through college

What they do: Girls Who Code offers a range of courses, from after-school and summer clubs to college programs, that teach participants core computer science and programming skills. They also provide workshops where students can build websites and applications that help address issues in their communities, like climate change and cyberbullying. Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2012 to help nurture the next generation of leaders:

“Young girls are change agents,” she tells “The Daily Show.” “When they have technology, they’re looking at their community, they’re looking at the world, and they’re saying, ‘How can I use technology to make it better?’”

How you can get involved: Want to sign up for a Girls Who Code program? Click here to find the right one for you. Or, if you’d prefer to help support Girls Who Code, you can start an after-school club, form a corporate partnership, fundraise, and/or campaign. (The organization also has a great  Instagram, full of coding memes and profiles of interesting women in tech.)

Who they’re for: Youth and adults of marginalized genders, including non-binary, gender nonconforming, and female-identifying, with an emphasis on racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, and those from low-income communities

What they do: ChickTech provides learning opportunities and technical education in 15 countries around the world.

Their high school and college programs offer skill-building workshops and help connect participants to professional networks with formal and informal mentorships. Plus, their signature adult program, Advancing the Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W), helps professionals develop their technical and leadership skills with career coaching and national conferences.

Janice Levenhagen-Seely, founder and former CEO of ChickTeck, explains how she formed the organization to help welcome girls and women into the tech industry:

“I started ChickTech to give girls and women the support and sense of belonging that I didn’t have when I was a Computer Engineer. We focus on high school girls because so many of them are still not encouraged to be engineers and programmers, and they rarely even know what a career in tech would look like.”

How you can get involved: If you’re a high school student looking to break into tech (or want to nominate someone who is), click here to register for their virtual high school program. Or if you’re further along in your career and want to use your expertise to mentor students, reach out to your local ChickTech community and inquire about leading a workshop. You can also speak at one of their ACT-W events or even become a member of ACT-W+.

Who they’re for: Girls and women of all ages, from kindergarteners to established professionals, “at the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, and other historically marginalized identities”

What they do: NCWIT’s AspireIT program provides technical education and scholarships for girls in elementary, middle, and high school. Their Aspirations in Computing (AiC) program rewards women who showcase strong leadership and entrepreneurial skills with scholarships, internships, and other professional opportunities.

NCWIT also helps illustrate the impact and successes of women from marginalized groups with their Color of Our Future programs, which include their Modern Figures and TECHNOLOchicas podcasts that feature notable professionals in STEM.

As Dr. Telle Whitney, Co-Founder of NCWIT, put it:

“For young people, there’s often this voice inside of them saying, ‘Oh no, I’m not good enough; I can’t do this; this isn’t me; they’re going to find me out.’ The most important advice is to go for it. Listen to that voice and say, ‘OK, but I’m going to go for it anyway.’”

How you can get involved: Check out NCWIT’s programs to find the right one for you. You can also participate or sign up to be a guest speaker in one of NCWIT’s workshops, volunteer to review award applications virtually, and take part in the organization’s annual celebrations.

Who they’re for: Women in business and technology

What they do: WITI is a network of over 3 million professionals who seek to create a more inclusive and innovative workplace. They offer networking events, professional coaching, career fairs, courses, and webinars that teach participants how to advance in their careers.

“As women, we need to be more proactive to help male (and female) leaders of companies understand the business value for incorporating women at every level of the organization,” Carolyn Leighton, founder of WITI, tells The Huffington Post.

How you can get involved: Explore WITI’s upcoming virtual events and register for whichever one catches your eye. You can also become a member of the WITI community to lead webinars and classes, present at events, and even take on a mentor to contribute first-hand to their professional development.

Who they’re for: Women and gender-expansive adults, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, and those from low-income communities

What they do: Named after famed programmer Ada Lovelace, ADA offers a unique, immersive experience for women looking to break into tech. Their free, 6-month training program teaches participants the core skills they’ll need to launch careers in software development, like the fundamentals of computer science and programming with languages including Python, JavaScript, and SQL.

“We aim to reduce the economic barriers to a career in software development by making education and career preparation as accessible as possible,” explains Elise Worthy, co-founder of ADA. “Because many of our students are switching careers and already carrying student loan debt, it would be untenable to expect them to assume an even greater financial burden while taking a year off from earning a full-time salary to pursue a whole new career.”

How you can get involved: ADA asks that aspiring students complete their preparatory curriculum before applying to their program. You can also volunteer with ADA to help promote the growth of new technologists as a private tutor, teaching assistant, industry mentor, mock interviewer, or admissions volunteer.

Who they’re for: People who identify as women who “champion innovation in their work”

What they do: Women in Innovation is a network of over 4000 professionals in cities including New York, San Francisco, and London. Their workshops cover everything from leadership and entrepreneurship to professional growth and development. And they also host less structured, more intimate dinners where women in executive roles discuss the intricacies of their fields.

“Our goal is to close the gender gap in business and thought leadership in the innovation industry,” Alfia Ilicheva, Co-Founder of WIN, explains in an interview with Forbes. “We recognize that women add fundamentally different and unique and a very powerful contribution to creating new ideas, new products, new services.”

How you can get involved: Join the WIN Hub — for free! You can also sign up for their mailing list or even become a partner to host or sponsor an event.

This blog was originally published in March 2022 and has been updated to include additional organizations that support women in tech.

Job search 101

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Job search 101

Welcome to another brand-new Career Chat series. Over the next several issues, we’ll be talking about searching for a job in a variety of circumstances, such as changing careers or returning to work after a career gap. But first, let’s spend some time taking a big-picture look at the broad steps for finding a job.

It’s important to remember what’s in your control and what’s out of your control when getting a job—particularly one you want. Some aspects, like role availability and competitive hiring pools, are out of your control. This series will help you focus on how to maximize your potential for success with the pieces that are in your control.

What you can do is set yourself up for success every step of the way. And if you’ve already started building your skills, you’re well on your way to success.

Here are the broad stages of any job search:

1. Clarify your career goals. You may remember this from our resume series—the same rationale applies here. Knowing what you want to do, where you want to be, and why can make it easier to focus your job search efforts.

2. Identify your key job skills. Based on your career goals, check out open roles on LinkedIn and grow your network to learn about opportunities available to you. Get a feel for the companies that are hiring and the skills you’ll need to land a position.

3. Write your resume. Think of this document as your first introduction to potential employers. If you want more guidance on formatting and what to include, revisit our resume series for a section-by-section breakdown, learn how to use ChatGPT to write your resume, or check out SUNY Online’s 5-hour course, How to Write a Resume.

4. Apply for jobs. Job listings will typically outline everything you need to submit in order to be considered for a role. Be sure to follow instructions exactly as stated. You can typically expect to fill out online forms, upload your resume, write a cover letter, and submit work samples, depending on your desired role. If you are able to apply directly with the recruiter or hiring manager, take a look at our tips for writing a stand-out job application email.

5. Ace your interviews. Interviews are your opportunity to find out more about a position and show off what you can do. We’ll offer more concrete interview tips in an upcoming series, but for now, check out our best interview tips.

6. Follow up. It’s a good habit to send recruiters and hiring managers a follow-up email after an interview. At the very least, you can thank them for their time—but for roles you’re really excited about, it’s an opportunity to reiterate your enthusiasm and gather more details to make your decision.

7. Refine your process. A job search can take time, so it’s important to keep building skills, updating your resume, and reflecting on your goals. Set up job alerts to stay up-to-date on new job listings. Take time to consider and incorporate feedback you receive from recruiters. If you’re feeling stuck, here are some ways you can expand your job search, be that online, through networking, continuing career prep, or seeking a counselor.

If you’re feeling stalled on any one of these steps, it may help to examine the step directly before it in addition to the step you’re stuck on. For example, if you’re applying for jobs and not getting any interviews, take a closer look at your resume and make sure it’s optimized for the positions you’re applying for; or if you’re uninspired throughout the interview process, consider whether the jobs you’re applying for really align with the job you want.

Where to begin

We’ve linked to step-specific resources above, but here are a couple recommendations to encourage forward movement at any stage of your job search:

To strengthen a variety of in-demand skills, try the University of California, Irvine’s Career Success Specialization. Here, you’ll explore skills employers are looking for like project management, communication, negotiation, and problem-solving.

To figure out your next career move, check out UC Santa Cruz’s The Career Design Lab: Change your Job, Change your Life course. As you progress through the modules, you’ll clarify what you want in your next role and how you can go about getting it.

To present yourself as you want to be seen, try the University of Michigan’s Personal Branding: Stand Out and Succeed course. In 10 hours, you’ll learn how to translate your values into a personal brand that moves you closer to achieving your goals.

If you’d like additional tips for any of the steps above, let us know in the comments and we’ll try to offer more resources. Remember that the Coursera Community is also there for you to help navigate roadblocks.

Next week, we’ll offer tips for applying for entry-level roles. See you then!

Coursera Launches Course Builder: Organizations Can Now Quickly Create and Launch Custom Courses at Scale

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Coursera Launches Course Builder: Organizations Can Now Quickly Create and Launch Custom Courses at Scale

By Shravan Goli

In a fast-changing market, organizations will need to create, update, and deploy learning resources that keep pace with the rate of change. We’re excited to launch Coursera Course Builder, an AI-assisted authoring tool that enables any business, government, or campus customer to easily and quickly produce custom private courses at scale. 

Based on a few simple inputs from a human author, the tool auto-generates course content including outlines, descriptions, and learning objectives, dramatically reducing the time and cost of content production without sacrificing quality. Authors can seamlessly blend modules from participating world-class industry and academic partners on Coursera with content from experts in their own organization. 

With step-by-step guidance, authors can:

  • Develop new private courses, tailored to specific needs and available only to their learners
  • Review relevant content from Coursera’s catalog with AI-assisted recommendations
  • Blend expert items or modules from participating Coursera Partners into a custom course
  • Add custom university or organization-specific content alongside experts from Coursera’s catalog
  • Build assessments with editable AI-generated questions
Author uses Course Builder to create a course outline.

Private and public sector employers can quickly create and launch organization-specific courses tailored to their unique needs, making employee learning more relevant and productive. L&D teams can combine world-class content from leading industry and academic experts with relevant business context, use cases, and internal expertise. They can also tailor core learning resources for specific career levels and job roles. 

“Course Builder allowed us to quickly create custom courses for our Trade team on data analysis and decision making that incorporated both our own private content and material from leading industry experts on Coursera,” said Trina Lima, Global Learning Strategy Lead at Sanofi. “We saw course enrollments surge within the Trade team as a result of this personalized approach, which motivated us to extend access to the AI-assisted authoring tool for L&D leaders to adapt training for specific teams across the organizations.” 

For higher education institutions, time-saving authoring tools can empower faculty to create custom courses and keep learning resources relevant and up-to-date at the speed and scale students and employers now expect. It can also help to bridge curriculum gaps by adding guest lectures and context to university courses. 

“We have a remarkable opportunity to innovate in our blended master’s programs by using Coursera’s cutting-edge technology, specifically Course Builder,” said Jessica Vlasica, Manager of Learning Environment Design, Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC). “This integration streamlines curriculum design, enriches students’ educational journey with content from world-class experts, and equips them with the skills needed to tackle global challenges, affirming our commitment to innovation and academic excellence.”

To learn more about how to get started with Course Builder, visit our websites:  

6 Programming Languages & Tools for Cloud Engineers 

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6 Programming Languages & Tools for Cloud Engineers 

Thanks to an increasingly data-filled world, many companies are relying on cloud computing to store and analyze data instead of buying their own servers or hard drives.  And by extension, that means they need Cloud Engineers. Ahead, we’ll break down what a Cloud Engineer does, the top programming languages they use, and the skills they need for the job.

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What does a Cloud Engineer do? 

A Cloud Engineer is a Software Engineer that focuses on migrating data from local servers to cloud-based services. Once those systems are up and running, Cloud Engineers keep them maintained and updated. Cloud Engineers often write front-end or back-end code, but they also need to be familiar with cloud computing tools and concepts like: 

  • How to structure a cloud-based application for performance and security  
  • The best practices for engineering in the cloud  
  • A strong understanding of AWS, GCP, and/or Azure 

Want to learn more about cloud computing? Try our platform-agnostic course Intro to Cloud Computing to learn about cloud computing fundamentals, different deployment models, and the pros and cons of the major cloud platforms. 

Top programming languages for Cloud Engineers 

Some languages are more popular than others for creating applications that run in the cloud, and learning one or more of those languages will give you an advantage in landing a job as a Cloud Engineer. Here are the best languages for cloud development: 

Python 

Python is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages today, so it makes sense that it’s one of the top languages Cloud Engineers use. Google also offers Python-based tools for Google Cloud, so it’s a great choice for cloud development. 

Python’s extensive libraries and cross-platform support make it easier to write software for and manage all the diverse parts of a cloud environment’s development life cycle. Python is also a multi-paradigm language that can be used to write in a procedural, functional, or object-oriented programming style, giving it a lot of flexibility.

Go 

Golang, or Go, is programming language developed by Google and is the newest programming language in this list. Despite its relative newness, its capacity for speed and performance, along with its standardized APIs, make Go great for cloud development. 

Golang is a low-level language, like C or C++, but it has high-level features that make it easier to use and less verbose than other low-level programming languages. It supports concurrency, package management, parallelism, and garbage collection. And because it’s low-level, it’s also faster and has much smaller executables than other languages on this list. 

Ruby 

Ruby is a popular beginner-friendly programming language that’s secure and supports many features. It’s so popular that there are over 60,000 frameworks and libraries in the language, so creating an app with Ruby is a straightforward process. Compared to many other languages on this list, you can deploy an application to the cloud with a lot less code using Ruby. 

Java 

As Java users say, “Java is everywhere” — and that includes the cloud (as you can see in Microsoft’s Azure). Java is a general-purpose, object-oriented language that you can use for many programming tasks. 

Java is also a highly portable language, meaning that you can take the Java code compiled on one system and run it on another, as long as you have the Java Virtual Machine installed on the other machine. This makes it an extremely useful language in a distributed, cloud-based environment. 

C# 

C# is a popular language in the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s the most popular language used in Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET is used to create dynamic, robust web apps that run on Windows Server. 

Recently, C# has become a cross-platform language that can also run on Linux and Mac OS using the .NET Core framework. This change has made it even more popular for cloud development, especially on Linux. 

Node.js and JavaScript 

Node.js, first released in 2009, implements server-side services using JavaScript. It quickly became popular because it allowed front-end developers that traditionally used JavaScript to write back-end code without having to learn a new language — which means front-end developers can use Node.js to create complete cloud applications. 

How to start your career as a Cloud Engineer 

While you will need some training to build your skills, you don’t need a computer science degree (or any degree at all) to get many of the cloud engineering jobs out there. What’s most important is to have problem-solving skills, a grasp of some of the programming languages we mentioned, and an eagerness to learn.  

Fortunately, you can start learning today. Check out the courses below to get started with the languages we covered in this blog. All of these courses are great for beginners and will teach you the fundamentals of programming, as well as the ins and outs of the specific programming language. And with Codecademy Pro, you’ll able to earn a certificate upon completing each course, giving you more material to add to your portfolio or LinkedIn profile so that you can land a job as a Cloud Engineer.

Weekly Student News Quiz: Primary Elections, Apple, ‘Dune’

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Weekly Student News Quiz: Primary Elections, Apple, ‘Dune’

Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed this past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you’ll find the answer.

Have you been paying attention to current events recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.

Do You Have a Hard Time Saying ‘No’?

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Do You Have a Hard Time Saying ‘No’?

Teachers: Be sure to preview the article to ensure it is appropriate for use with your students.

Your friends want to hang out but you had planned to work on a project for school. Someone wants to borrow your favorite shirt but you’re afraid you won’t get it back. You were saving the last doughnut as a treat for later but your brother asked if he could have it. In each of these situations, you want to say “no.” But do you?

How often do you agree to doing things that you would rather not? Does saying “no” stress you out, or is it not that big of a deal for you?

In “The Mind-Boggling Simplicity of Learning to Say ‘No,’” the writer Leslie Jamison reflects on her struggle to turn people down:

When I was 25, I took a job at a bakery in a small college town in the Midwest. I worked front and back of house, pulling espresso shots at the bar and running into the kitchen to grab my (often burned) sugar cookies from the oven.

My boss and I had agreed on a weekly schedule — I wanted desperately to be a writer and was trying to carve out time to work on my novel — but it seemed like she was always asking me to take on another shift, or stay late, or come in early, and I found it difficult to refuse. If I said no, I worried that I would be leaving her in a jam, or that she might decide I wasn’t worth keeping on the staff at all. (My skills in the kitchen hardly justified my presence.)

One afternoon I was venting about it to my stepfather, expecting his sympathy, and he just shook his head, vaguely amused. Then he offered one of the best pieces of wisdom I’ve ever received: “She has the right to ask the question, and you have the right to say no.”

This was mind-boggling in both its simplicity and its radical reframing. The requests that I’d experienced as acts of violation were really nothing of the sort; it was not only my right but also my responsibility to draw my own boundaries, rather than expect another person to draw them for me.

Ms. Jamison goes on to describe how keeping a “Notebook of Noes” helped her think about her refusals differently:

On every page, I wrote down an opportunity I had decided to decline: a speaking gig, a magazine commission, an invitation from a friend. Then I drew a line across the page. Underneath, I wrote what saying no had made room for: more time with my partner. More time at home. More time to write. More time to call my mother and ask about her day, and tell her about mine.

Because I was a writer, it helped me to list my own refusals in a notebook. It was as if, in their accumulation, they could create a meaningful text: the story of learning to live a different way.

As I gathered more of these noes, I learned that, even after I’d uttered the word, the world continued just as it always had. The people I’d been anxious about disappointing? They were OK. The fear of losing something for good? It often came back, or something else did.

More than anything, however, the Notebook of Noes helped me see absence as a form of presence — instead of lamenting the ghost limb of what I wasn’t doing, I could acknowledge that every refusal was making it more possible to do something else.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

  • Do you see yourself in any of Ms. Jamison’s anecdotes about saying “no”? Do you have a hard time with turning down people, plans or opportunities? If not, have you seen others struggle with those situations?

  • Ms. Jamison reflects on why, when she was younger, she found it so hard to decline an offer. “Often it was the fear of disappointing someone, not being able or willing to meet some need,” she writes. “But it was also often the fear of permanently losing something — a chance, an opportunity, a connection.” What is your reaction to that statement? If you have a difficult time saying “no,” why do you think that is?

  • Ms. Jamison also says that most of the women she knows have told her that they have difficulty with saying “no.” Do you think that this challenge affects women and girls disproportionately? If so, why? If not, why not?

  • Suppose you had your own “Notebook of Noes.” What is one “no” you might record in it — a time when you declined an offer, didn’t act on a suggestion or turned down an opportunity? What did this “no” create space for instead?

  • Ms. Jamison writes about her stepfather, who gave her advice that helped her realize she has a right to say “no.” Has anyone helped you with this situation? If so, what advice did you receive? If a friend who gets stressed out at the prospect of saying “no” approached you for advice, what would you say?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Concerts

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Concerts

Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour began last month just outside Palm Springs, Calif., and her fans came dressed for the occasion in purple, fishnet stockings and combat boots.

Do you have tickets for this tour? What will you wear?

If not Ms. Rodrigo, whom would you most like to see live in concert — whether a band or musician who is currently touring, or from decades ago? What do you imagine the experience would be like?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn — and see — more.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Picture Prompts here.

Word of the Day: inconspicuous

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Word of the Day: inconspicuous

The word inconspicuous has appeared in 26 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on June 7 in the guest essay “What Owls’ Silent Flight Tells Us About the World” by Jennifer Ackerman:

Owls may be easy to recognize, but they’re not easy to spot. In the day, they often hide right under our noses, camouflaged against the bark of trees or tucked into tree hollows, and in the night, sail off into the darkness. “Finding owls is hard,” said David Lindo, a bird guide known as the Urban Birder. “It’s often a question of diligence. You’ve got to commit yourself to it. You’ve got to try and work out where they are and then religiously search the trees.” If you’re quiet, still and patient, like owls themselves, then you may have the privilege of seeing one.

Owls are hard to observe for some of the same reasons we love them. With their inconspicuous presence and almost soundless flight, they point to the value of not standing out in the world but fitting into it.

Can you correctly use the word inconspicuous in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

If you want a better idea of how inconspicuous can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com. You can also visit this guide to learn how to use IPA symbols to show how different words are pronounced.

If you enjoy this daily challenge, try our vocabulary quizzes.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

The Word of the Day is provided by Vocabulary.com. Learn more and see usage examples across a range of subjects in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary. See every Word of the Day in this column.

10 Empowering Books By & About Women in Tech To Read Next

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10 Empowering Books By & About Women in Tech To Read Next

March is Women’s History Month, where we celebrate and pay tribute to the women who’ve played a vital role throughout American history. Within the tech industry, women have always been at the forefront of innovation and progress — although nowadays, women make up only 28% of the tech industry workforce.

To shed some light on the unique challenges that women face in the tech industry, we’ve compiled a list of book recommendations about women working in tech over the years. From a biography of a woman cryptanalyst during World War II, to a memoir from a software engineer in Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, there are so many moving stories to add to your want-to-read list. 

Reading these books will help you better understand tech’s “herstory,” and hopefully inspire you to work towards gender equality in your own professional life. 

Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon, MBE, is a Computer Scientist and Co-founder of the organization Stemettes, which provides support for girls, young women, and non-binary people who aspire to have STEAM careers. In She’s in CTRL, Anne-Marie stresses that everyone should understand and appreciate tech’s impact on society — regardless of your profession or background. By promoting inclusivity and broadening tech literacy, the book advocates for making collective decisions that benefit the greater good, rather than serving only a narrow demographic. Buy it here.

In her book Artificial Intelligence, acclaimed Computer Scientist Melanie Mitchell delves into the captivating and tumultuous history of AI, exploring recent successes, hopes, and fears surrounding the field. She addresses big questions you’ve probably wondered about on your own, like how “intelligent” are the best AI programs? And what are their limitations? With clarity and wit, she navigates the gap between AI hype and reality and offers an essential guide to understanding its impact on our future. Buy it here.

Journalist Kara Swisher’s new memoir chronicles her impressive career starting from the early dot-com days in San Francisco when tech news was “filled with dull geeks and technical who-cares,” she writes. If you’re a fan of Kara’s New York Times column or listen to her go toe-to-toe with power players on her podcast, you’ll be hooked reading her reflections of the tech industry past and present. Buy it here.

Part memoir, part collection of essays, veteran programmer Ellen Ullman’s most recent book paints a vivid picture of what it was like to be a woman engineer during the early days of the dotcom boom. Life in Code is packed with fascinating anecdotes (like the time the Google co-founders offered Ellen a job at a party and she turned it down) and meaningful reflections about the power of programming. BTW, if you haven’t read her hit 1997 book Close to the Machine, you should definitely add that one to your list, too! Buy it here.

Learn about the history of the internet through the lens of the pioneering women who built it. From the 19th century to present day, the book Broad Band spotlights women who had a lasting impact on the internet, like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC Six. You don’t have to be a history buff to appreciate this fascinating collection of stories. Buy it here.

Whether you’re an engineering apprentice or are managing a team of developers for the first time, you’ll find workplace wisdom in this book by Raji Rajagopalan, Director of Engineering at Microsoft. Raji shares stories about her own experience being a first-generation immigrant in America and navigating being a woman of color in tech. She also shares practical advice that helped her along the way — like how to cope with public speaking nerves and get better at storytelling. Buy it here.

You might remember seeing the news headlines about Ellen Pao in 2015, and the gender discrimination lawsuit she filed against her employer, a prominent venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. The case was a lightning rod for discussions about sexism within tech. In this book, Ellen, who is the former CEO of Reddit, shares her story about being a woman of color and whistleblower in a predominantly white male industry. Buy it here.

Though it was published nearly a decade ago, this powerful book of essays and first-person anecdotes written by women in STEM is still relevant today. Each chapter is a separate crowd-sourced essay by a woman whose work involves innovation and entrepreneurship, including some big names in tech, like Megan Smith, former Google VP and Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Kim Polese, who was the founding product manager for Java, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Heidi Roizer. Innovating Women sheds important light on the meaningful contributions women have made in the tech industry, while also acknowledging the realities of gender bias. Buy it here.

If you’re learning about data science or working towards a career in data science, this book is a must-read. Invisible Women breaks down all of the ways in which gender bias and discrimination against women is ingrained in data that drives crucial decisions in our modern world. Though the findings are eye-opening (and downright maddening), reading this book will motivate you to pay attention to diversity in datasets that you interact with in your own work. Buy it here.

This is a fascinating true story about Elizebeth Smith, a woman who went from studying languages and Shakespeare to becoming America’s first female cryptanalyst. Elizabeth was highly skilled in “code-breaking,” which is a process of decrypting code or cipher messages to uncover hidden information. She worked as a cryptanalyst during both World Wars, and went on to work for the U.S. Navy, Treasury, Coast Guard, and Army. Buy it here.

Want even more tech books? Codecademy has tons of recommendations for riveting and useful reads. Check out this list of tech books written by Black authors, books that make great gifts for technologists, and more.

This blog was originally published in March 2023 and has been updated to include new book releases by women in tech.

How I Went from Medical Doctor to Data Engineer in 3 Years

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How I Went from Medical Doctor to Data Engineer in 3 Years

Learning to code so that you can land a job in tech can feel daunting. That’s why we’re sharing inspiring stories from Codecademy’s community — to show how people like you (yes, you!) can embark on a learning journey and end up with a totally new career. We hope these stories serve as a reminder that there’s no single path to a more fulfilling work life.

Today’s story is from Santiago Caraballo, a 33-year-old Data Engineer living in a city outside Buenos Aires, Argentina. Read more stories from Codecademy learners here — and be sure to share your story here.

Why I chose to learn to code

“Before my first job in tech, I was working as a Medical Doctor. In my second year of med school, I had a professor who was working as a researcher, and he used tools like Rstudio on Python. He showed us the tip of the iceberg of what Python can do. I found Codecademy for first time, because I was looking all over the internet for resources to learn Python 2 for free. It was kind of a hobby, and it was always there. But I didn’t imagine myself working as a Software Engineer until Covid.

Here in Latin America, being a doctor is really tough; you don’t have the support from the government or the healthcare companies. I have three kids, and with the Covid pandemic, we were working like 90 hours per week. It was insane.

Learn something new for free

I saw a quote that said, ‘You have to fight to spend more time with your family than with your boss,’ which felt like a knife to my heart. I thought, I have to switch careers and move on and do something else. I was looking for a job that I really like, and I can do from home.”

How I made time to learn

“I wake up at almost five in the morning, do two to three hours, then go to the hospital. I work in the hospital. Sometimes I have free time in the shift of the ambulance. I’d read short articles or whatever I can finish in a few minutes. After work, I would try to continue to study, and my wife was a huge support for that.”

How long it took me to land a job

“In February 2021, I got a job at a telecommunication company. All of my friends told me that the biggest achievement is getting your first job — after that, it’s always easier. Being outside the IT world, I didn’t believe that. I was on LinkedIn looking for all the junior job vacancies. If the job description said I had to learn Swift to code the iOS application, I started to learn Swift. I did the same with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and whatever I needed to get my first job.”

How I got in the door

“One of my friends is a Software Engineering Manager at Amazon and had some connections here in in Argentina. He told me that there was a job search for a Data Engineer at this telecommunication company, and he pointed me out to one of the heads of the data analytics teams. I added him on LinkedIn, and we started talking. It was difficult because the job description was like, this unicorn person who must know everything about everything. And I thought, I can’t do this job.

When the head of the company interviewed me, he told me that this was for a semi-senior role. I was in my first job as a new Data Engineer, and I lacked [work experience]. At that time, I had knowledge about Git and GitHub, but on the theoretical side of things — not in practice. I was super afraid of that because there was a three-month trial period for this semi-senior role, and I have all my family on my back. I was like, Should I do it or not?”

How I nailed the interview

“It’s all about attitude, like showing yourself with your weakness and saying, ‘I don’t know, but I can learn.’ You have to show that you could learn almost anything if you needed and that you are motivated. I sold myself in that interview so much. I thought, This guy has to hire me, there’s no other option.”

How I evaluated the offer

“At this moment, I’m pretty comfortable with my company. The salaries are not even near what you can make in the US, but the career path they have is really good. I have impostor syndrome like everyone, and I have a lot of knowledge gaps that I need to solve. So now I’m pursuing that knowledge, not the high-paying job. Perhaps in five years, I will look for something that meets the adrenaline that I need for my personality and provides new challenges.”

How day one and beyond went

“I had the study mentality from med school, so I would wake up two hours early for work and read all the things I had in my notebook. I’d write down a lot of terms that I didn’t understand to look up later. Everyone was talking about the ‘data lake’ that it was ‘on-prem’ and ‘cloud’ — I was like, what does that mean?

The first month was difficult, because you have to pick up the language, learn how they write code, and read documentation. One of the best things that I learned was to read the documentation and code. Sometimes we really hate documenting our code, but it’s super useful to know how to do it and try to use the rubber duck to talk about what your code is doing.”

Come across a tech term you’ve never heard of?

You can look up definitions to common coding terms and concepts in our open-contribution resource Docs. BTW, “on-prem” is short for “on-premises,” and it refers to a centralized place where businesses store large data repositories.

What I wish I knew before I started learning

“Technology is a super huge world where you can do almost everything. I wish I had researched more about which fields I really liked and enjoyed. I wish I knew about data engineering sooner, because it’s a mixture between software engineering and data. If I would have known that this was the role that I wanted, I would’ve put all my effort mind in that direction. I wouldn’t be like jumping and hopping between languages at the very beginning.”

Not sure where to start? Check out our personality quiz! We’ll help you find the best programming language to learn based on your strengths and interests.

Want to share your Codecademy learner story? Drop us a line here. And don’t forget to join the discussions in our community.

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