The gaming industry is booming and showing no signs of slowing down. But gaming has a glaring gender problem -both in its workforce and in character representation. And with Girls Who Code's mission to close tech's gender gap, we set out to change the future of gaming by inviting girls to code their own fully licensable characters. Ones that actually looked like them. We then took the data from the coded characters, and shared it with top gaming companies, showing the power and importance representation can have to better improve gaming’s glaring gender imbalance and misogyny. Short term impact: We showed a new generation of women the fun and creative opportunities coding can offer, and the resources Girls Who Code provides. Long term impact: We showed gaming companies, and the world, that if there were more women video game coders the industry would get the update it so desperately needs.

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.

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. 77% of video game developers are men and only 27% of all characters are women. And while 48% of all gamers are women, we don’t see them represented in game development. As a result, what we do see is a gaming experience catered to the white, male gaze that alienates some of its most passionate and diverse fans. So how do you get young, aspiring female coders to see themselves in an industry that often alienates them, or worse, objectifies them?Girls Who Code Girls invited girls and non-binary gamers to choose their character’s body type, skin tone, facial features, hairstyles, outfits, personality, and more – all while using 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 all of the data from the coded characters, and shared it with top gaming companies, showing the power and importance representation can have to better improve gaming’s glaring gender imbalance and misogyny

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 nearly half of all 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.

So we invited girls to code fully licensable characters that actually look like them. We embedded a Coding 101 lesson within video game character development, and showed girls everywhere that coding and culture are one in the same—and that their passions can be turned into a culture-changing career.

We also collected data from the experience & shared it with gaming companies showing the power representation can have to improve gaming’s gender imbalance.

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.