Code First Girls is a Not for ProfitSocial Enterprise that trains women in IT skills and helps companies to develop more female‑friendly recruitment policies. The organisation promotes gender diversity and female participation in the technology sector by offering free and paid training and courses for students and professional women. It also supports businesses to train staff and develop talent management policies. As of 2020, Code First: Girls is reported to have provided in excess of £10 million worth of free coding courses to more than 17,000 women since 2013. 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". 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. The organisation announced Baroness Lane-Fox and Dame Stephanie Shirley as supporting the campaign as ambassadors.
Programs
According to the Code First Girls website, the organisation offers free and paid for in-person coding courses for women, as well as for companies across the UK and Ireland. It also provides corporate upskilling and reskilling programmes focused on employability for women in the tech workforce.
Free Community Courses
Code First Girls runs free part-time coding courses for female/non binary identifying young individuals across the UK and Ireland branded as Career Kickstarter. Individual joining for courses at a university are required to be a student at the host university. General coding courses are also delivered at corporate locations and are open to women with the following eligibility: Aged between 18-23; or Aged 18+ and currently studying; or Aged 18+ and completed their studies in the past 2 years. Since spring 2020, it has also offered free hour-long taster sessions called Essentials. These courses are open to public and serve to introduce programming languages like Python, SQL, or HTML to coding beginners.
Code First: Professionals
Code First: Professionals women's courses are fee paying. These courses are targeted at female professionals and teach participants to make a website from scratch.
History
Code First: Girls began in late 2012 as "a nine-week, free, part-time course to get female graduates from all walks of life not only interested in coding, but also better equipped to contribute to technical discussions in high-tech businesses". Founded by Alice Bentinck and Matthew Clifford, Code First: Girls was created they recognised a lack of female applications for their pre-seed investment programme Entrepreneur First . EF supports the development of Code First: Girls. Bentinck claims that of the first cohort to complete Code First: Girls training, more than half of the women participants now self-identify as "technical" or working in software-development roles. Amali de Alwis was announced as first Chief Executive Officer of the organisation on Wednesday 8 April 2015, taking over from Bentinck and Clifford. In November 2018, Amali was named to the Financial Times' list of the 'Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.' Code First: Girls was included in the UK Government's "UK Digital Strategy" policy paper 2017 as a "programmes doing valuable and innovative work to help more women into tech".
Awards
In 2016 Code First: Girls was nominated for a National Diversity Award. In 2017 Code First: Girls won "e-Skills Initiative of the Year" at the Information Age "Women in IT awards".
