Supporting and helping LGBTQ women learn how to code.
About this project
Why The World Would Be A Little Bit Better With Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship Fund:
Imagine:
How much more diverse Silicon Valley would be, if every startup had one queer woman coder on their team.
How much more inclusive everyday apps would be, If they were built by LGBTQ women and women of color.
How much more powerful the tech workforce would be, if women made up 50%, not 20%.
How much more influential women would be, if we made up 50% of tech start ups, not 5%.
We want to invest in creating this future, imagined.
And we want to start by providing queer women with coding scholarships, through the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship Fund.
How the magic happens:
We raise $100K to send 11-15 queer women to coding school (and if we raise $150K, we send 20 queer women to coding school, and $200K would send 25 queer women to coding school!)
Through an application process, we select our next round of 2016 coding scholars
Each scholar chooses and applies for the coding school or bootcamp of their choice
Upon being accepted, Lesbians Who Tech, through the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship Fund, covers a minimum of 50% of each scholar’s tuition
In addition to tuition coverage, scholars are also provided with a network of lifelong mentors to support their journey
Coding scholars go on to likely get recruited and hired through their programs, and in turn, begin making the world a better, techier, queerer, more feminist place.
We continue the process; the more money we raise each year, the more queer women continually learn how to code
Changing a woman’s life and impacting the world, has never been this simple as just making a donation.
The more money we raise, the more queer women who learn how to code:
The average cost of a coding school or bootcamp is $18K
By raising $100K to cover 50% of each scholar’s program, we’ll be sending 11-15 queer women to coding school
In 2015, we received over 200 coding scholarship applications– sending 11-15 girls would mean accepting less than 6% of our applications
Which means theres a serious desire and need for this program, and $100K is just a start, but nowhere near enough
The more money we raise collectively, the more queer women we can teach to code,collectively.
And this happens when you teach queer women how to code:
The percentage of women in tech (23% total; 5% asian; 3% black; 1% latina) go up.
We have greater tech advancements, as women are already 17% more likely to be early tech adopters than men
There are more successful, women-owned companies, as women-led startups are 7% more successful than male-led ones
Which means overall, a better world for women and men, of all backgrounds.
We’ve done this once before, and we know it works.
In 2015, Lesbians Who Tech raised $40K
We sent 6 queer women to learn how to code
100% of our first class of coding scholars were women of color
The programs chosen by our scholars include Hackbright Academy, Fullstack Academy, Dev Bootcamp, and General Assembly.
Not only are we making history, we’re preserving a legacy.
We chose to name our coding scholarship fund after Edie Windsor for her work fighting against DOMA and being a technical leader and computer programming pioneer, especially as an out woman and member of the LGBTQ community.
This scholarship fund will not only make history by sending more queer women to coding school, but it will also preserve the legacy of one of our community’s greatest trailblazers.
So help change the world with us, $1 at a time.
Lesbians Who Tech is a community comprised of over 15,000 queer women and allies.
That means, if you donate just $5, we can hit our goal of $100K.
Take that donation one step further by sharing and following our campaign on Facebook andTwitter.
Rewards:
No donation goes without a thank you– we’ve got perks for you!
$5 – Virtual High Five!
$10 – Thank You Tweet
$25 – Sticker Pack
$50 – Lesbians Who Tech Mug
$100 – Choice of 5 Lesbians Who Tech T-Shirts (See below)
$250 – Invitation to our scholarship launch party
$500 – Private lunch with Lesbians Who Tech Founder and CEO, Leanne Pittsford
$1K – Private Influencer Event in New York or San Francisco
$2,500 – Host a Coding Bootcamp event at your office
$5K – Score a table and a speaker opening at our Future of Bootcamps Conference
$5K – Private dinner with Edie Windsor and Robbie Kaplan
$10K – Private, invite-only, recruitment or leadership dinner with Lesbians Who Tech and Leanne Pittsford
“Queer Women Code” T-Shirt
“Queer Women Hustle” T-Shirt
“Edie Windsor Taught Me How To Code” T-Shirt
“Bring A Lesbian To Work Day” T-Shirt
#Lezbro T-Shirt
About Edie Windsor:
Edie Windsor is an LGBTQ rights activist and and technology pioneer. She learned coding and systems programming while earning her undergraduate degree in mathematics, which led her to be an innovator in writing original code, and thus go on to be one of the first women Leading Software Engineers at IBM in the late 1950s as well as the recipient of the first IBM PC in New York.
Edie was also an LBGTQ activist and was involved in multiple LGBT organizations in New York. When she lost the love of her life, Thea Spyer, her partner of 40 years, she went on to file the famous case, United States v. Windsor, a monumental event that played a significant role in legalizing same-sex marriage.
Edie Windsor is a coder, an activist, a lover, and a woman who who paved the way for queer women today to be unapologetically active in the STEM fields, especially coding and programming. It’s important for us, as LGBTQ women, to protect our history. By naming this scholarship after Edie, we’re doing just that. We honor her with this fund and to all those she inspires with her legacy.
About Lesbians Who Tech:
Lesbians Who Tech is a community of over 15,000 queer women and allies across the tech industry. Our organization exists because LGBTQ women in tech exist, and we provide a platform for our voices to be amplified and new opportunities to be discovered and shared amongst each other.
As Seen In:
Risks and challenges
We wish we could say teaching queer women how to code is risky business, but it truly isn’t! The only challenge we hope to face is not raising enough money to accept each and every coding applicant that applies!