How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani

Reshma’s house was vandalized with “Go back to your own country,” and she was violently beaten at 13 for being Brown. Watching her father quietly scrub racist graffiti and refuse to complain convinced her she would never be silent. That moment catalyzed her identity: she led a march at 13, founded her first prejudice-reduction group, and ultimately built large-scale movements like Girls Who Code. Practically, she shows how reframing painful experiences—from something to suppress into fuel for advocacy—can set a lifelong mission.

Determined to gain credibility as a woman of color, Reshma applied to Yale Law School three times, eventually earning degrees from Yale and Harvard—and about $300,000 in debt. That debt forced her into a high-paying Wall Street law job instead of civil rights work, leaving her miserable and stuck for a decade. Her story underlines a trade-off: elite credentials can grant access and insight into power structures, but without conscious planning the financial burden can delay or derail purpose-driven work.

Running for Congress at 33 against a powerful incumbent, Reshma faced smear campaigns, racism, and media trivialization (the New York Times profiled her shoes instead of her policies) before losing “spectacularly.” She let herself grieve intensely for about a month, then forced a structured post‑mortem—reviewing mistakes, reading her father’s brutal feedback email, and extracting lessons. She points out that campaigns mirror startups: hiring, fundraising, messaging, and shutting down fast. Using those skills and the ‘chip on her shoulder,’ she then launched Girls Who Code.

When Reshma started, only 0.4% of girls were interested in coding and most imagined a lone white male ‘brogrammer’ in a basement. Girls Who Code embedded learning inside tech companies, anchored projects to social impact (build something that changes your community), and made alumni seed local clubs. This produced 10,000 clubs worldwide and nearly half a million girls through programs. Parallel cultural work—books, media, campaigns like a Doja Cat collab—helped make “girl coder” a cool, visible archetype. The model: meet young people where they are socially and culturally, not just academically.

Reshma describes Girls Who Code as her religion and admits she expected similar devotion from staff, often getting the praise–criticism balance wrong and assuming others viewed the job as a calling. At the same time, she worked unsustainably: flying constantly, taking red-eyes, and refusing to cancel key events even immediately after being told a pregnancy had no heartbeat. In hindsight, she sees this as a toxic blend of girlboss culture and martyrdom. Her correction: hire people smarter than you, reward and protect them, and treat your own health as non-negotiable infrastructure, not a luxury.