Girls Who Code’s mission is to close tech's gender gap by getting girls interested in coding. And one of the clearest displays of this gender disparity is in the gaming industry. Almost half of all gamers are women. And yet 77% of game developers are men. As a result, female gamers are stuck with a gaming experience and culture marked by misogyny, gender imbalance, and harmful portrayals. So how do you get young, aspiring female coders to see themselves in an industry that often alienates them, or worse, objectifies them?

The goal was two-fold:

1. Provide girls with a fun, creative entry point into coding, so they can see themselves in an industry that doesn’t authentically represent them.

2. Draw attention from gaming companies to the fact that if more women coded video game characters, they'd look like real women.

With Girls Who Code Girls, we created the first experience that lets girls literally change the game by coding fully licensable gaming characters that look just like them.

Girls and young women were invited to code their character’s body type, skin tone, facial features, hairstyles, outfits, accessories, personality, and identity details. And they did this all while learning 4 different coding languages - CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Python. Over 624 BILLION character combinations were possible, providing unique, diverse representation we’ve yet to see in gaming. We then collected the data from the experience, and shared it with Epic Games, Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft, equipping them with the data to improve their characters and change the future of gaming forever.

How do you get GenZ girls interested in coding when it's literally at the bottom of their interest list? Talking with our GenZ panel, girls across the country told us they don’t think about coding because they don’t see its relevance to their lives. And while 48% of gamers are women – we wanted to show millions of girl gamers how they can turn their passion into a career that can change the future of gaming. With over 624 BILLION possible character combinations and over 454,000 coded interactions from the experience, we were able to see the codeable traits that girls desired most when building a game character. We set out to quantify significant data points and patterns, so we could use our learnings and share to continue pushing change in the gaming industry. And from that, we unanimously found that girls are looking for more diversity in video games.

Girls Who Code Girls is the first coding experience that allows females & non-binary individuals to code licensable gaming characters in their own image. We used graphic and UX design to create an easy-to-use experience that teaches girls to code, while providing them with diversity in character features and identities. We also took coding and translated it to mobile, where our target audience lives.

Users coded a range of character attributes including body types, facial features, hairstyles, outfits, & other identity details. All while using CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Python.

We collected the data & shared it with major gaming companies, equipping them with the code to give female characters in games a much-needed update.

Girlswhocodegirls.com lives on its own website on desktop & mobile. We shared on social & enabled users to license and mod their characters into real games. The work launched in December 2022 & is still running.

Upon launch, Girls Who Code Girls was an immediate success in terms of interaction, reach and response.

The experience had:

- 145k site visits

- 78k minutes spent coding

- 454k interactive coded actions

- 226M earned media impressions.

- 55K engagements from organic content and microinfluencers.

- An average of 6 minutes & 13 seconds spent coding and creating.

And with over 624 BILLION possible character combinations, we unanimously found that young girls are looking for more diversity in video games–further proving the importance of Girls Who Code’s mission of closing tech’s gender gap.

Some key findings:

- Over 33% chose gender neutral pronounces

- Over 62% chose black/brown skin tone

- 3% chose hijab

And most importantly, we introduced countless girls to coding and the resources that Girls Who Code provides. From 2021 to the end of 2022 Girls Who Code saw an 8% increase in brand awareness.