Politics & Polls #133: Women of Color in the Digital Space Featuring Kimberly Bryant

Apr 04 2019
By B. Rose Kelly
Source Woodrow Wilson School

The technology sector is an important part of the economy, yet there exists a dearth of women in the field — especially females of color.

Joining this episode to discuss breaking through these barriers is Kimberly Bryant, founder and CEO of Black Girls CODE, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “changing the face of technology” by introducing girls of color (ages 7-17) to the field of technology and computer science.

Bryant’s organization will host a workshop for young girls who want to explore artificial intelligence this Saturday, April 6, in New York City.

Prior to starting Black Girls CODE, Bryant worked for over 20 years in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as an engineering manager in a series of technical leadership roles for various Fortune 50 companies such as Genentech, Merck, and Pfizer.

Since 2011, Bryant has helped Black Girls CODE grow from a local grassroots initiative serving only the San Francisco Bay Area, to an international organization with fourteen chapters across the United States and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Black Girls CODE has currently reached over 7,000 students and continues to grow and thrive.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton will publish his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.