“Seeing the confidence and community girls build over a week at Camp or even a day of Coding Clubhouse shows that we need to push for more girls-only space in STEM. They need the chance to find their STEM identity at a young age so they can build on it as they grow older. That’s how we will narrow the gender gap in STEM careers.”
- Brian Moran, Co-Founder of Boolean Girl
Computer Science is about using computational thinking to solve problems that occur every day. Taking these STEM courses during and after school doesn't mean you need to commit to a job writing code. The lessons learned in computer science will be useful in a wide range of careers and industries, especially as AI continues to impact our world. Yet girls are less likely to be interested in Computer Science and to pursue these courses in school. Why?
Code.org just launched a first-of-its-kind national campaign to help drive enrollment of high school girls in computer science, and one of their key findings hit on the feeling of belonging. According to their study, "Feeling personally connected to computer science is by far the biggest driver of students feeling as though it’s an important subject. And for girls (particularly middle school girls), the key opportunity is to understand how computer science is related to other things they’re interested in, and to feel as though CS is for someone like them."
While many careers are not as directly STEM, artificial intelligence or computer science-focused, you can find jobs within nearly every industry that utilize these skills. Some examples include:
One of our STEM Ambassadors last year was Siân Gordon, the Director of Product Innovation at lululemon labs. After earning her PhD and working in Sports Technology, she transitioned to product innovation, where she works to develop clothing and gear for men and women to integrate into their lifestyles.
Advancements in sports technology and performance monitoring technologies help athletes jump higher, run faster, and compete longer. Scientific and analytical backgrounds are becoming increasingly important as athletes work hard to improve without overtraining. In 2025, the University of Virginia women’s swim team won their fifth consecutive NCAA Championship, a feat they attribute to the data science techniques used to improve stroke mechanics
Video, music, and game design and production have come a long way over the last century. Careers in these industries range from the more traditionally creative to those centered around STEM subjects such as sound engineering, data analytics, and even virtual reality development.
Artificial intelligence is also impacting the arts world, from helping writers and artists come up with new creative content to telling shoppers what books, music, or other products they would like to buy.
Like our partnership with Sustainability Matters, computer science and the environment go hand-in-hand, from monitoring and tracking populations of pollinators to analyzing our impact on Earth. Environmentalists use AI to identify plants and animals as well as data science to understand data collected with sensors.
There are many routes in the business world for people with STEM backgrounds and interests. Engineering skills help entrepreneurs and business leaders innovate new products and services. Analytics inform creative direction for marketing and advertising campaigns. Computer science experts are key resources at most companies. New technologies lead to new products, operations, and opportunities.
We have found through years of teaching computer science and engineering to young girls that their interests drive their creativity and ultimately the projects they work on in our camps and classes. At Boolean Girl, students are encouraged to pursue their creativity, whether by developing animated stories of their own creation, websites featuring their passions, or new inventions inspired by the world around them. It is less about writing code than about what you do with that skill, how you take your abilities and translate them to the world around you.
At Boolean Girl, we also focus on building community, because having friends and a support system that grows with our girls on their STEM journey helps them see that they do belong in these fields. Confidence and belonging are intrinsically linked. Ruling Our Experiences (ROX) published a report on girls in STEM that detailed why introducing girls to STEM early on, giving them opportunities to try, test, and fail, providing mentors who look like them, and helping them build their STEM community are vital to lead more women to pursue careers in STEM. According to STEM Next, 73% of students who participated in an after-school STEM activity like Boolean Girl’s Clubhouses reported a more positive STEM identity. In fact, Million Girls Moonshot surveyed Boolean Girl campers in 2023 and found that 69% of them reported a higher STEM identity which encompasses a sense of belonging, competence, and connection to STEM fields.
Read the full Code.org report here:
https://csiseverything.org/white-paper/perceptions-of-computer-science-education