Women IT coders inspire young Hong Kong girls to follow in their footsteps

Priyanka Kogta has already decided her future. The 16-year-old will study computer science at a "US, Canadian or Hong Kong" university, learn to code and land a job at Google. The reason? "Because technology is going to take over the world one day, and programming is the basics," she said.

Kogta is not alone in her ambition, but she is unusual for her gender. In 2008, a group of female Google engineers in Israel decided to tackle this disparity with an initiative called Mind The Gap, organising trips to the Google HQ for young girls and encouraging them to pursue more typically right-brain subjects as maths, science and technology. Twitter followed suit with its Women in Engineering group, saying "we want there to be more women who pursue careers in this field". And in 2010, Reshma Saujani, a former New York hedge fund lawyer who ran for Congress, albeit unsuccessfully, founded Girls Can Code, a now global movement sponsored by Twitter, Google and eBay that runs workshops aiming at getting girls hooked on programming.

The initiative arrived in Hong Kong last weekend, in partnership with the Women's Entrepreneurs Online team, also a Google pursuit. At an "app jamming" session in Tin Hau, Kogta and 30 other girls gave up their Saturday to learn the languages of fallen-over "Vs", where a misplaced comma can bring a website down.

The workshop was structured on a curriculum developed for Stanford University and taught by Michelle Sun, a former Goldman Sachs banker who was a student at one of the first-ever women-only programming boot camps in San Francisco.

"I always liked maths and science, but the thought never crossed my mind to study computer science," the University of Chicago economics graduate said. "It was only when I started working with firms like 10 Cent and Alibaba at Goldman that I realised how technology could change people's lives."

Of the 30 young girls from schools around Hong Kong learning to code at Sun's event, most are studying technology - even if they remain in a gender minority in the classroom. Minnie Yip Ming-yuen, a 15-year-old pupil at the Diocesan Girls School, for whom mastering languages like CSS and Java could be as important as being fluent in Mandarin in the job market, has taken programming lessons at school. She believes it is becoming less surprising for women to be interested in coding. "I would love to make an app that changes people's lives," she says.

While the apps created at Girls Can Code events are basic - for example, the morning was spent on an app that lets a user pat a kitten on the head - Sun, a self-taught coder, says the idea of such events is to inspire girls to look for resources elsewhere so they don't fall behind their male counterparts who are historically more prone to spend free time in front of a computer screen.