A San Antonio senior wants girls to see themselves in code

The name is a pun, and the pun is a statement of purpose. PyGirls is a nonprofit for girls who want to explore science, technology, engineering and math.

Varsha Shashishekar launched PyGirls in 2023 while at Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio’s North East Independent School District. The San Antonio Report profiled her as a senior. The group is aimed at girls in grades 4 through 12, which is a wide net. A fourth grader and a high school junior do not need the same lesson, and the group builds its offerings to match.

Those offerings include blogs and newsletters, interviews with STEM students and professionals, workshops, summer camps and hackathons, among them a Youth Code Jam. On social media it also shares the history of women in STEM and statistics on how few women are in the field, which is a gentle way of explaining why the group needs to exist.

The team is more than 40 volunteers. Shashishekar told the Report that recruiting and outreach were tough at times, “but the rewards have been more than worth it.” Her own reason is personal: “Coding opened up a world of doors for me.”

PyGirls also has adult backing. Its advisory board includes Rita Mitra, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Turquoise Richardson, a doctoral candidate there studying digital forensics. Mitra told the paper, “We are inspired by PyGirls to do more, be more and give more.”

This is a small, local effort, and that is part of its appeal. There are plenty of national coding programs for girls. There are fewer run by a student who can say, from experience, that the first hour of a first program is the hardest. The Report noted that Shashishekar plans to carry PyGirls with her beyond graduation: “I’ll be taking PyGirls with me every step of the way.”

PyGirls lists its links through linktr.ee/pygirls.