Life at Intuit Girls Who Code’s Reshma Saujani Aims for Bravery, Not Perfection Many women aspire to be like Reshma Saujani, the 42-year-old former lawyer and founder of Girls Who Code. After an unsuccessful bid for New York’s 14th congressional district in 2010, Saujani realized that she couldn’t go back to the private sector – she just wasn’t passionate about it. So she looked for where she could Written by Karen Weiss Published Jul 27, 2018 - [Updated Nov 7, 2022] 2 min read Many women aspire to be like Reshma Saujani, the 42-year-old former lawyer and founder of Girls Who Code. After an unsuccessful bid for New York’s 14th congressional district in 2010, Saujani realized that she couldn’t go back to the private sector – she just wasn’t passionate about it. So she looked for where she could make the biggest impact and found that there were no coding programs for girls. Never mind that she herself had no coding experience. In 2011, Girls Who Code launched with its first class: 20 high school girls in New York, most living below the poverty line and all having an amazing experience in the program. Saujani realized that this is the way she could build an entire generation of changemakers. Today, Girls Who Code has taught coding to 90,000 girls across the U.S. This includes 100 who have participated in the 7-week Summer Immersion Program at Intuit for the past five years. Intuit’s Mountain View campus became a classroom for 20 girls entering their junior or senior year in high school, where they learned computer science through fun projects like building apps, websites, video games, and robotics. Saujani has been thinking about bravery a lot these days. It’s the topic of the book she’s been writing for the past two years, “Brave, Not Perfect,” due out in February 2019. That’s also the title of the weekly podcast she’s hosted for the past six months. Her stance is that for girls, perfection is valued more than bravery. Parents are usually more concerned about the cleanliness of their little girls than their little boys. Girls tend to be coddled and protected more than boys, so while boys are taught to be risk-takers, girls develop a fear of failure. And they grow up to become perfectionists. But Saujani believes that you can unteach perfectionism and replace it with bravery. She found her own bravery in her 30s, when she lost miserably in her congressional campaign but, as she said, “I didn’t die.” All this achievement makes Reshma Saujani a great role model for women who want to effect positive change. Previous Post “There’s So Much to Learn” – A Look Inside Intuit’s… Next Post Intuit Ranks on People’s 50 Companies That Care! Written by Karen Weiss Karen Weiss is a corporate storyteller at Intuit with expertise in translating Geek to English. She’s passionate about written and visual communication, and she makes it her business to instill that passion in others. Her latest adventure is living as a Modern Elder. Browse Related Articles Taxpayer Empowerment Homeownership is falling out of reach—more needs to be done to change this Social Responsibility Shop small, shop sustainably Taxpayer Empowerment Simplifying Family Tax Credits: Why it Matters and What Can Be Done News Intuit UK Gender Pay Gap Report Innovative Thinking Intuit Survey: U.S. High School Students Want Financial Education at School Social Responsibility Building financial confidence for today’s generation Social Responsibility Intuit partners with The Farmlink Project to address climate change and combat food waste Life at Intuit How to become a better trans+ and non-binary ally Life at Intuit Here’s how women at Intuit inspire inclusion Taxpayer Empowerment Powering prosperity for women means addressing gender inequities in the tax code