At the young age of 16, Japnit (Class of 2019) founded the non-profit organisation The Girl Code. The Girl Code aims to bridge the gender gap in the tech community by inspiring young girls to learn programming. Based in New Delhi India, the United States and Singapore, Japnit and her team host workshops in schools and universities that provide women with an introduction to this programming. Through their platform and intuitive curriculum, they aspire to instil confidence in girls and give rise to a new generation of female programmers set to take the world by storm. Find out more about The Girl Code at https://thegirlcode.co/.
What inspired you to start The Girl Code?
Back in New Delhi, a year before I came to Singapore under the MOE scholarship, I was part of the computing club of my school. I had been the only girl in my computing club for the past 5 years and I became the Programming Executive of that club. I tried to organise a lot of recruitment campaigns for girls to recruit them into the club but it didn’t work and I was still the only female member there. When I had to fly over to Singapore for JC, I didn’t want to leave the club in its current state without any girls.
I talked to the 5 girls who had previously participated in the club’s recruitment program but chose not to join to find out the reason why they left. I wanted to know why they dropped out of the month-long program within the first 2 weeks even though they were so excited to join when they first started.
It turns out that this was because the girls felt that they didn’t have anybody to direct their questions to and they were afraid to ask the seniors who were guys. This confused me because there were around 15 other guys who applied for the program as well and all of them were bombarding us with questions every other second without hesitation. All of the 15 guys eventually became members of the club while the 5 girls didn’t. This made me realise that the girls might have faced some sort of a confidence issue, or it could be because the girls didn’t have enough role models to reach out to.
So that’s when we decided to establish The Girl Code and host workshops for girls.
Initially, we were planning to just have these workshops in my school to recruit more girls into the computing club, but we soon realised that other schools in my town back in New Delhi had the same issue of there being a lack of girls who did programming. So I thought, why not extend these workshops to other schools as well?
Japnit (Founder of The Girl Code) teaching at a school in Delhi as part of The Girl Code.
Why do you think it is important for girls to pick up coding as a skill right now?
The tech industry is booming right now, and in the future there’s going to be a lot more jobs and opportunities in this industry, so to address the gender gap I think that it is important for girls to know that this is a potential career option for them.
Some gender stereotypes are still ingrained in our society, and girls are traditionally not seen to be suitable for jobs such as programming. And I feel that as women, there are often times when we are less confident than others around us. (This observation has been supported by research. For more information, see https://youtu.be/zGhu4iaBqtk by Vox.) This is something I’ve experienced myself, because back in the computing club in India, even though I knew the same things as my male friends, I would always second guess myself and doubt my abilities. So for the first 2-3 years in the club I just kept quiet at a corner, listening and observing instead of speaking out. I wanted to contribute and say something, but I just had these mind battles. Should I raise my hand? Should I answer this? Should I not? The environment was just never comfortable for me to raise my opinion, and I didn’t feel like there was someone who wanted to listen to me.
So, I feel that it is necessary for girls to have a comfortable space where they can explore the field of programming. At The Girl Code, we are not trying to make every girl passionate about programming, but rather we just want to expose the girls to this emerging field and get them to know that this is a career option that they can pursue in the future. We started this Women in Tech talk so we get people like NUS professors and alumni from Stanford to speak to our girls and show them that they are definitely capable of finding a fulfilling career in tech.
How did you continue running The Girl Code after you left New Delhi for Singapore?
Right after I founded The Girl Code in New Delhi, I had to move to Singapore to start JC in NJ. So I got a team ready and a co-founder in India to help out with the operations back there.
In Singapore, I had to accommodate the schedule of my team members and the time zone differences between Singapore and India, so when I was in the NJC boarding school, I used to wake up at 3am to work with the team and then go back to sleep for a few short hours before heading to school, and it was crazy back then. In the boarding school, I would often come downstairs at ungodly hours to work and the security guard would often catch me and ask me why I was downstairs again.
After settling down here, I started a chapter of The Girl Code in Singapore. I found some contacts and I managed to coordinate with NUS ALSET (Institute for Applied Learning Sciences and Educational Technology) who agreed to let us host a workshop at the university.
I remember that once I had to rush out of school during my break to the Starbucks at Coronation Plaza to meet one NUS Student working in the NUS ALSET team and there was a fire drill going on in school on that day. I was so late for the drill that I just ran straight from Tan Kah Kee to the parade square in school. My class was the only one still standing for roll call because I was missing.
For our very first workshop in Singapore that was held in NUS, we had about 60-70 participants. Following that, we also held 2 other workshops at CHIJ Katong Convent and UWSEA Singapore.
Even after moving to Singapore, the workshops still continued in India and I tried to coordinate everything online while my team members there were physically present to conduct the workshops. But I still try to go back to India to host workshops during breaks like the Chinese New Year and December holidays.
The Girl Code’s first workshop in Singapore that was held in NUS back in 2018.
Has the current COVID-19 situation affected your operations? Were there any significant problems that you faced when shifting from a physical to virtual workshops?
We had a workshop planned with NTU in Singapore this year, but the pandemic happened, so we had to move it online for now.
One of the major challenges that we faced back in India was regarding our workshops that we had planned for the government schools. Government schools in India are very different from the ones in Singapore, because in India students who attend government schools are usually underprivileged and the school is the only place they can get proper education from. While these public schools have computers on campus, most of the students attending them don’t have any laptops or computers at home. Due to the current situation, the workshops for these children got cancelled because we couldn’t provide them with access to such technology at home.
So, we decided that if we can’t teach them about programming, at the very least we could still give them a good introduction to technology, because these kids lacked exposure and knowledge in this area that you and I take for granted and are privileged to have. We converted our curriculum to Hindi, which is the national language of India, since most of the students don’t know how to speak English. In place of the initial programming workshops, we hosted workshops where they did not require a laptop and only phones were needed, which most of them had. It was quite a challenge for us because we were all used to teaching these topics in English, so we had to adapt to the new way of teaching. But we still managed to pull through and conduct the workshops successfully.
How did you manage to juggle both your academics and The Girl Code responsibilities when you were in NJC?
When I first came to Singapore, it was really scary because A levels was an entirely new system for me and differed from the one I was used to back in India. To tell the truth, I was scoring Cs and Ds in the first few months in JC. As a scholar, I felt this added pressure to do well in exams. Physics and Math used to be some of my strongest subjects back in India, but in NJ I was barely passing. It was very disheartening.
At that time, I still had to manage the running of The Girl Code back in India, because I had a team of around 10 people who were relying on me and I had to follow through with this new organisation that I had set up. Due to the time differences between Singapore and India, I had to wake up at around 3am regularly to meet my team online. That was why in the first 4 or 5 months after coming to Singapore I didn’t manage to start a Girl Code chapter here and host workshops locally.
I’m not sure how I managed to pull through then, but I guess the reason I did what I did was because The Girl Code was a cause that I was truly passionate about, because it was the perfect intersection of my two passions: technology and feminism.
Others around me have said things like “Oh, you’re doing this for your resume just to get into a good university.” If I was really doing this for the sake of getting into a good college, I wouldn’t have stayed up until 4-5am and put my school studies at risk because of it. I did this because I was passionate about it. I did this because I didn’t want anyone to face the same trouble as I did in my computing club, and I wanted to make a difference. It was something I just had to do. I did this because I didn’t want anyone to face the same trouble as I did in my computing club, and I wanted to make a difference. It was something I just had to do.
What were some highlights of running The Girl Code?
I used to email 50 schools and get 1 reply back, but I would be so happy that I got the single reply. What motivated me the most was when the girls who joined our workshops came back and contacted me.
There was once I picked up a phone call from an unknown number, and it turned out to be from one of the participants of my workshop. She said, “I don’t know if you remember me but I got introduced to programming through your workshop. I studied a bit more into it and participated in a computing olympiad and got the bronze medal.” After hosting workshops for underprivileged girls in India who did not know much about technology, they were enthralled and excited to learn about the things that we had taught them. The girls telling us how much we impacted them is very rewarding.
A workshop organised by The Girl Code at UWSEA Dover, which had over 70 participants.
What are some of your takeaways from The Girl Code?
I realised how privileged we are in Singapore. One of my chapter leaders of The Girl Code was in Lebanon recently, and due to the unstable situation there she could not continue hosting workshops with us because she didn’t have Wi Fi. She was really disappointed because she was about hosting the workshop previously, but the unexpected situation made it difficult for her to do so. This really made me think about how privileged we all are, because there’ll probably never be a day where we have to worry about whether or not we can get internet connection in Singapore.
What advice would you give to your juniors who are aspiring to start such non-profit organisations to give back to the community?
My advice would be not to do it just for your university applications. If you are doing it for such reasons and you aren’t passionate about it, you wouldn’t put in the effort. Just because some people have an organisation, this doesn’t mean that everyone must have one too. Focusing on your studies is important, but if you have a passion for helping people and you have a cause that is very close to your heart that you definitely have to do something about, then start working on addressing it.
At the start it’s going to be really scary and you’ll have a lot of doubts. Have a good team to back you up because it’s not easy to do everything on your own.
Being a perfectionist myself, I would say let that perfectionism go. Focus on what you can do and not excessively on the quality and nitpicking. It’s important to make your ideas happen rather than just planning for them forever and not actualising them.
The ideation to conceptualisation of The Girl Code took around a few weeks, and I remember 2-3 weeks before our first workshop we didn’t have a running website and I didn’t know web development. So I had to learn quickly within those few weeks how to make a website from scratch. I was working on it day and night, designing the website. I remember the night before, and even on the day of the workshop there were issues with the website, so I had to teach during the workshop while fixing the website on the go. I think that perfectionism cannot be achieved, so as a perfectionist I try to suppress that part of myself.
Time management is also important, especially in SH1 and 2. You can definitely make full use of your breaks or time spent travelling on the MRT to something you are passionate about, schedule meetings and discuss ideas over texts with your team.
In short, if you are passionate about something good, just go out there and do it.