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Who are the women that inspire our community? The Girls Who Code organization on campus spent Fall 2021 semester learning about women who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Who are the women that inspire our community? The Girls Who Code organization on campus spent Fall 2021 semester learning about women who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Reshma Saujani
09/16/21
09/16/21
Brave, not perfect. Reshma Saujani uses these simple but powerful words to inspire women and girls around the world to be brave, to try not things, and let go of their fear of failure. Reshma is the Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code!
Reshma began her career as an attorney and activist. She first caught the attention of the public when she became the first Indian American woman to run for Congress in 2010. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, Reshma came third in the primaries - but her work did not stop there! In some ways, this failure is where the next steps of her career really took off. While visiting New York schools as a candidate, Reshma noticed a large gender gap in computer science classrooms. This inspired her to learn how to code herself and started Girls Who Code in 2012.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
10/7/21
10/7/21
Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American entrepreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of Bumble, a social and dating app, launched in 2014. She was also an early executive at Tinder. Wolfe Herd was named as one of 2017's and 2018's Forbes 30 Under 30, and in 2018 she was named in the Time 100 List. In February 2021, Wolfe Herd became the world's youngest current female self-made billionaire when she took Bumble public. She also became the youngest woman to take a company public, at age 31.
Robin Maxkii
Robin Maxkii
10/14/21
10/14/21
Robin Maxkii got her start in computer science and technology through blogging and writing. She taught herself HTML in order to make her blogs more beautiful. Robin is incredibly passionate about increasing diversity in tech, especially among Native Americans! As part of Roadtrip Nation, Robin and her friends documented a cross-country trip to interview underrepresented communities in technology in a project called Code Trip website.
Grace Murray Hopper
Grace Murray Hopper
10/21/21
10/21/21
Grace Murray Hopper’s career was fascinating and varied. She earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale and taught at Vassar. She worked at the Harvard University Computation Laboratory, and she became a rear admiral in the Navy.
Admiral Hopper died in 1992, yet her impact endures. She argued that programmers should share their work so that computers could evolve faster. She helped assemble computer compilers, systems that can translate programming languages and codes. She also labored to make programming more understandable to non-experts. As a result, more businesses were able to utilize computer technology.
Chieko Asakawa
10/28/21
10/28/21
At the age of 11, Chieko was involved in a swimming accident where she injured her eye. At 14, she lost her sight completely. She now found herself having to ask others for help to complete what was once a simple task. Chieko did not let this deter her way of life and worked to create technology to help her gain independence.
Brittany Wenger poses with first place trophy at the 2012 Google Science Fair
Brittany Wenger
11/4/21
11/4/21
Brittany Wenger, 18, high school senior, brilliant young scientist and Grand Prize Winner 2012 Google Science Fair, for her project "Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer" talks about how she came to science in Research and Inspiration. She currently studies at Duke University.
Melanie created an industry unicorn, the venture capital industry's term in describing a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion.
Melanie Perkins
2/10/22
2/10/22
Melanie Perkins is an Australian technology entrepreneur who is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Canva. Perkins is one of the youngest female CEOs of a tech start-up valued at over A$1 billion. As of May 2021, Perkins was one of Australia's richest women.
The shaping of Canva started when Perkins was at the University of Western Australia. Then 19, she used to teach students how to use a design software. It was then she realized how long it took them “to feel remotely confident while designing something basic.” The idea behind Canva was to make the future of design simpler. Along with her partner, Cliff Obrecht, Perkins decided to test the idea by launching Fusion Books.
“It was the idea of Canva, but for the very niche market of high school yearbooks in Australia,” she says. Securing funding, however, was a big challenge. It took her three years from her first conversation with an investor to get her first cheque. “I even woke up at 4am to catch the train to Silicon Valley for a breakfast meeting. I heard the words ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ many, many times but whenever I did, I listened to their questions and made our pitch deck stronger,” she says.
Adena Friedman
2/16/22
2/16/22
Friedman joined Nasdaq in 1993 where she served as the head of data products and as Chief Financial Officer.
She left Nasdaq in 2011 to join private investment firm Carlyle Group as Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director, a position she held until 2014.
Friedman returned to Nasdaq as president and Chief Operating Officer. She became CEO in January 2017. Forbes considers her an engine for capitalism and is considered by many in the financial industry to be one of the most powerful women.
Got a woman who we should spotlight?
Got a woman who we should spotlight?
let us know on our instagram or email us at purdue.girlswhocode@gmail.com!
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