Young, Geeky and Black: Memphis
James Fletcher travels to one of America’s poorest cities to meet a passionate group of people working hard to get young, black women into technology and tech jobs.
Memphis, Tennessee is a majority black city and the poorest metro area in the United States. It’s also home to a group of organisations and passionate individuals working to get young, black women into technology and tech jobs. Presenter James Fletcher meets some of the girls involved in Black Girls Code and Code Crew, and their teachers and mentors who feel that coding and tech offer Memphis a path out of poverty.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google - all billionaires, all heroes of the tech world, and all white men. Around the world the booming tech industries are a prime source of jobs, money, and cultural power. But they’re largely filled with white, middle-class males - at Twitter, Facebook and Google, fewer than 2% of workers are black. Over the course of three programmes, the Young, Geeky and Black series visits three cities around the world where black coders – and women in particular - are challenging that status quo.
(Photo: Anaya Neal building a Lego NXT robot at the Black Girls Code Memphis Robot Expo 2015. Credit: James Fletcher)
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From poverty to coding entrepreneur
Duration: 02:12
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- Tue 1 Dec 2015 00:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service except News Internet
- Tue 1 Dec 2015 03:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Americas and the Caribbean
- Tue 1 Dec 2015 05:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Online, South Asia, Europe and the Middle East, East Asia & UK DAB/Freeview only
- Tue 1 Dec 2015 07:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Australasia
- Tue 1 Dec 2015 19:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service except Australasia & News Internet
- Sat 5 Dec 2015 22:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service except News Internet
- Sun 6 Dec 2015 11:32GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Australasia
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100 Women
Looking at the lives of women around the world