Data was the entry point, goal, and result of the entire project. It was the crux of Girls Who Code Girls's success. The glaring data points of gaming's gender imbalances and misogyny informed the strategy, ideation and execution of Girls Who Code Girls. The data collected from the experience was then analyzed and shared with top gaming companies to equip them on how to improve their characters, gender representation within their workforce, and ultimately change the future of gaming forever.

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. Tens of thousands of girls invested over 78,000 minutes coding how they want to be represented in video games through our platform. We partnered with data scientists to create a comprehensive report detailing our learnings and shared it with every major gaming player 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.

48% of gamers are women. And yet 77% of game developers are men. So to get young women interested in a gaming career, we created the first-ever experience that lets girls code licensable characters that actually look like them. The goal was then to take all the data we learned from the experience and drop it in an exciting way to do two things: 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. All of the data from the experience was collected and shared with Epic Games, Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft, urging them to use the data to improve their characters and change the future of gaming forever.

Data played a massive role in Girls Who Code Girls. Not only did the lack of representation in female gaming developers inspire the idea but the results that came out of the experience were even more telling. Such as 62% of users coded brown and black skin tones. 45.7% of users chose a "small" chest size, in contrast with current female characters. 75.1% of users coded small and medium hip sizes, as opposed to the small-waist-big hip characters we tend to see in other gaming characters. The experience resulted in over 226MM Earned Media impressions, 145,000 page views of GWCG, 55K engagements from organic content and micro-influencers, 335 Press Engagements and most importantly, tens of thousands of girls learning to code culture in 4 different coding languages.