The WIT Project (TWP)

We’re here to challenge how tech works.

Ending the systematic exclusion of underserved women in STEM requires a reimagining of how we form community and deliver tech education. If we do not restructure how we think about tech education, 49.6% of the global workforce will remain underutilized and excluded. 

At The WIT Project, we strive to create opportunities and remove barriers to help women underserved become leaders in tech and in the world. 

We believe that through community, we can unleash young women as agents of change. We do this by providing social impact opportunities for college-aged women and then connecting them with career professionals close in proximity. 

In expanding our programming globally, we can serve more women and girls to harness their potential in the digital world as agents of change while also building pathways to inaccessible careers as social impact tech entrepreneurs.

Women continue to leave tech roles at a 45% higher rate than men. Black, Latinx, and Native American women make up only 4% of computing degree recipients and the current tech workforce. 

Although forecasts predict that there will be 149 million new digital jobs by 2025, only 21% of women feel they believe the technology industry was a place they could thrive; that number falls precipitously to 8% for women of color. 

And despite being 49.6% of the global population, only 37% of women pursue higher education and of those women, only 3% pursue careers in computer science. Once women begin to enter the workforce they are set up for failure. 

Women are lacking role models in leadership positions, environments encouraging authenticity in the workplace, and policies ensuring gender and racial parity. 

As such, women are 2.5x more likely to drop tech roles compared to other roles by the time they turn 35, and workplaces that lack tools to facilitate inclusive environments net worse results. 

Women are also paid only 80% of the median salary of their male counterparts, furthering disillusion and inequality in the field. This problem continues to be exacerbated by challenges presented by COVID-19.

TWP theory of change begins with amplifying women’s agency to create an impact in society.

We do this by offering digital educational and community-building networks. 

By providing connections, real-world experience, mentorship, community, and a support system for women of color, students become agents of change in technology with our flagship programming, the fellowship. Additionally, we offer educational programming and mentorship coaching across the communities we serve. 

In our fellowship, students cultivate a suite of technical and professional skills and experiences through an 8-week technical training bootcamp and 16-week software engineering project for which they are the lead. Our programming is entirely virtual and relies on basic technology infrastructure and open source technologies to operate.

Our solution is unique in how we emphasize community building with a longer-term fellowship program. Research supports high-touch, leadership-oriented internships, especially for women of color. Research also confirms that women of color are hired on work experience and not potential. 

As such, we seek to close the gap, increase the representation of women in tech positions, and build a community to facilitate retention and longevity.

Historically, only 5 percent of companies’ philanthropic giving went to programs with an explicit focus on women and girls in tech, with only 3% of that funding allocated toward college-level programs. 

Our work at TWP is primarily focused on reaching women historically underserved at colleges that lack the resources to support these women on their journey to tech careers. In doing so, we’ve learned that each institution takes a different approach to tech education, with programs varying from very rigorous and traditional to more interdisciplinary and specialized.

We identify underrepresented schools utilizing acceptance criteria around student body socioeconomic backgrounds, majors, makeup, school funding, and job placements. We have established a recruitment pipeline out of the NYC-based City University of New York (CUNY) and are expanding to similar institutions in Boston and New Jersey. 

For TWP fellows, we support women who identify as: 

• First through third-year college students 
• Women (cis and trans), and nonbinary individuals 
• Black, Latina, Asian, Native American 
• First-generation college students or non-citizens

Our program prepares fellows to excel in recruitment pipelines, despite their unique academic experiences shaped by their institutions. We work closely with our program fellows to understand their strengths and opportunities to best support their success in entering the digital workforce. TWP meets the specialized needs of each cohort by placing students on projects that strongly align with their interests and career goals. 

Program organizers collect feedback from all fellows before entering the program, after every lecture, program milestone, organized activity, and after the program to maximize the value of the experience we provide for each participant. Once fellows become alumni, they play an important role in developing a presence of the wit project community on their campuses, curating events for alumni and current fellows, as well as providing mentorship to fellows.

We also engage the wider community of women historically underserved by hosting public events addressing the interests and challenges they face, partnering with local organizations reaching similar communities, and providing informal mentorship to individuals outside of the program to learn how to best support them.

TWP’s unique approach creates widespread change by partnering with universities, nonprofit organizations, and industry leaders to forge a path for diverse young women to lead social change through technology, mentorship, and community. Our solution provides these women access to the necessary resources and experiences enabling them to succeed in entering the digital workforce and thrive there.

Today, TWP addresses 3 out of 4 dimensions of the Digital workforce challenge, with the fourth being prioritized in the next stage of development. Our organization serves three key stakeholder groups: 

1. Underserved groups through paid digital training and mentorship opportunities to enter the workforce

2. Companies with partnership opportunities to reduce inequalities by investing in improved hiring and retention practices and employee engagement.

3. The greater digital workforce volunteer opportunities by bolstering wellbeing, leadership skills, and community engagement, accessible anywhere virtually. 

In supporting TWP, ServiceNow is investing in an innovative and scalable framework designed to prepare the workforce of the future.

In the last two years of piloting the TWP fellowship program, we’ve tuned into the feedback collected from participants (students, nonprofits, volunteers, and industry advisors) to maximize our community’s ability to enter the digital workforce - and stay there. 

In scaling our program by 200% in 2021, TWP tested the second iteration of its program with college-aged women of color at CUNY and NJIT, resulting in successful outcomes across our community. In its 3rd year, TWP is expanding its programming to reach communities beyond NYC that would benefit from our mentorship. 

Our virtually distributed model has empowered teams to collaborate in smaller groups, engage with the wider TWP community, and connect one on one, instilling values fundamental to bridging the opportunity and digital skills gaps.

The main focus of our organization is to create better conditions for women of color in STEM. 

This mission extends from undergraduate degree programs into early career development. 

Of our current alumni makeup, 

• 100% of fellows identified as Asian, Latina, and Black,
• 31.5% identified as Black or Latina,
• 15/19 fellows (79%) are first-generation college students,
• 9/19 fellows (47%) are the first woman in their families to go to college.

As we grow our organization we fully intend to maintain our commitment to supporting women of color entering the tech workforce with better tools and support to succeed. We are also committed to ensuring that the workplaces we help our fellows enter will be committed to inclusivity through an initiative we are developing on intersectional mentorship. 

We will use the prize money to support our fellows. The money would serve as stipends to 14 students, who would be able to complete our fellowship program without financial hardship. We believe that in our commitment to creating more equitable work opportunities we must remove the financial barriers that disproportionately affect people of color.

Our program was founded to address a pipeline that was not fulfilling its promise to get more girls in tech and keep them there.

Unlike other programs, TWP focuses on: 

1. Building community
2. Approaching the nuances of economic or ethnic diversity amongst women
3. Empowering corporate partners to bolster their employees’ wellbeing through volunteer opportunities and intergenerational mentorship

Our approach relies on embracing intersectionality in the female identity while also supporting individual struggles through presenting technology as a mode of change. We've realized that empowerment begins with having the agency to create an impact in society - we teach our fellows they can transform tech, starting with socially impactful projects and one-on-one mentoring to build skill sets and confidence. 

We also operate one of the longest tech fellowship programs for undergrads, so that we can cultivate a community. We’ve found that this community has been sizable in how it has influenced our alumni with 95% of alums affirming that this community is the most important group they’ve been in thus far of their STEM careers. 

TWP also emphasizes intergenerational mentorship to empower the digital workforce to give back while prioritizing their mental health. With 94% of people who volunteer say that volunteering improves their mood, access to digital volunteer opportunities is especially critical in the wake of Covid-19. At each stage of a student’s experience in the fellowship program, they engage with their chosen mentor from their industry of choice to provide professional guidance.

Our solution relies on being able to successfully train undergraduates in the newest trends in web development, cloud technology, and machine learning. Once we complete training, we then need to be able to scope and deliver socially impactful technology projects into the organization. Two core technologies underpin this: LMS tools and virtual collaboration tools. 

For delivery of our technology education courses, we are beginning to focus on delivery through an LMS. We have moved away from virtual lectures because we’ve found that virtual courses enable fellows to absorb content within their own learning styles. Additionally, we are excited about utilizing an LMS system, so that we begin offering varying versions of our technology bootcamp courses to students outside of our core fellowship program. 

In order to operate our programs, we rely heavily on zoom. We host talks, lectures, office hours, and social gatherings all virtually. In addition to this, we use slack to keep everyone up to date and manage community communications on a day-to-day basis. 

In delivering sustainable solutions with low barriers to entry, we rely on GitHub, VS Code, and AWS to enable collaboration during software development to enable quick project turnarounds. We focus on core tooling that all nonprofit organizations can access and maintain at little to no cost. 

For all the technology we use, we’ve tried to be conscious of the resilience of technology that has low barriers of entry and enforce our principles of further democratizing technology access and education.

TWP’s framework for scalable mentorship of historically underserved communities to prepare for, access, and prosper in the digital workforce are based on efforts made by colleges and nonprofit organizations that improved outcomes for underserved communities pursuing careers in STEM fields.

Colleges that have focused on increasing the representation of women in computing have seen tremendous success in short periods of time. For example, Carnegie Mellon increased the percentage of women entering their computer science program from 7% to 42%. Universities including Columbia, Stanford, and Berkley have also seen rapid progress.

Research by Accenture also supports that if undergraduate women are part of a community that celebrates authenticity, models inclusive culture, and fosters meaningful relationships, then they are 89% more likely to feel that they belong and 85% more likely to pursue a tech role after college. The same study shows that these women go on to be 77% more likely to advance to managerial roles. 

Other organizations such as Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) and YearUp have proven that programs designed to empower historically underserved communities through curated training and apprenticeship opportunities in partnership with industry leaders and higher education can lead to extraordinary outcomes.

SEO’s long-standing professional development program supporting Black, Latinx, and Native American undergrads has resulted in 80% of participants receiving full-time job offers from SEO corporate partners. YearUp reports a similar success rate, with 80% of participants employed and/or enrolled in postsecondary education within 4 months of program completion.

Although programs exist supporting women or people of color, initiatives specifically focused on empowering historically underserved women are few and far between. TWP draws wisdom from these trailblazers and applies its own lens supplied by its founders and its constituents, in its unique approach to position historically underserved women at the forefront of the digital age.

Our main risk factor lies in making sure access to our programming remains equitable towards the populations we originally intended to serve. Scale brings challenges of maintaining oversight into the quality of programming delivered and ensuring that volunteers and populations served to remain within our targets and core values as an organization.

Since 2019 we have built a fellowship program that has reached 19 fellows, mobilized 30+ volunteers, and spread general career-building knowledge to hundreds more. Of the members of our direct community, we have been able to develop tightly knit support networks to engage young women in stepping outside of imposter syndrome. Our fellows' performance in pursuing STEM degrees and careers in addition to the diversity of communities served exceeds the current makeup of the field 400x.

This year, we intend to take on 30 new fellows while maintaining programming for the 19 alumni we have of our program. Our 30 new fellows, will receive 24 weeks of hands-on training, networking opportunities, and mentorship. Our 19 alumni will receive ongoing career development support and community-building opportunities. We will also launch a virtual curriculum that we plan to deliver to hundreds of students virtually. Lastly, we plan to mobilize an additional 30+ volunteers, training them in inclusive mentorship and community building. 

Five years from now, we plan to have sustained growth of 2x YoY, bringing our fellow intake to 960 in 2026. We will have a robust alumni network of upwards of 1,500 fellows. We will also have a network of ~2000 volunteers.

TWP’s top short-term goals are the following: 

1. 100% of fellows who identify as ethnically or economically diverse women

2. 100% overall retention of fellows and alumni in technology career paths

3. 2x YoY rate of growth, or ability to scale up TWP fellowship to meet the exponentially increasing demand for TWP support

TWP’s top long term goals are the following: 

1. 100% of fellows who graduate pursuing careers in STEM

2. 100% of fellows graduating with STEM degrees 

3. 100% of fellows who want to remain in technology careers 5 years post-graduation

Since 2020, we’ve supported nearly 20 students in the NY metro area, with the program applicant pool growing by 350% YoY. After graduating from the program, 100% of alumni received internship and fellowship opportunities for the summer of 2020 and 2021, and one alumni transferred majors into computer science. 

In surveying alumni, 100% self-identified as Subject Matter Experts in the technologies of their project such as full-stack development and Data Science. TWP’s nonprofit partners YearUp, Urban Institute, and Child Care Aware of America have all reported more effectively meeting their goals since introducing the innovative strategies and solutions developed by TWP fellows. 

Through this experience, fellows go on to pursue full-time tech careers with a community committed to creating social change and instilling a more inclusive culture in the workforce. We believe that we can scale strategies around retention to fit programs nationally and internationally.

We measure and track against our goals by conducting surveys and feedback sessions with fellows and current alumni. We track the following markers YoY and hope to expand on our ability to measure long-term retention goals for STEM as our programming becomes more mature. 

• Representation Markers:

  • Racial/ethnical identification of fellows

  • High education opportunities within families 

  • Economic opportunities for students, i.e.  working full-time jobs, FAFSA recipients  

• Career Markers: 

  • Desire to enter software engineering post-program (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

  • Desire to enter computing career (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

  • Desire to remain in STEM (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

  • Degree transfers (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

• Technical abilities:

  • Identification at SME (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

  • Skills confidence overall (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

• Achievements: 

  • Internship acquisition (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

  • Confidence in internship process (1 month, 6 months post-fellowship)

• Community building: 

  • Reliance on the network (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years post-fellowship)

  • Impact of mentorship (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years post-fellowship)

  • Overall retention in roles/career path (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years post-fellowship)

We are a completely volunteer-led organization. We have:

• 2 part-time (founders)

• 3 advisors

• 4 program managers

• 30 mentors (for programming)

The team working on this project will be the co-founders Shylee and Juliana. Shylee and Juliana are two Latinas with untraditional tech backgrounds who founded TWP because they were troubled by the limited access they experienced as they embarked on their careers. In navigating these difficulties, they realized that community was the most effective way to stay committed, celebrate authenticity, and most of all, create a sense of belonging for themselves and other women in this field. 

Together, they bring a wealth of understanding of the complexities of the problem and continuously work on advancing their knowledge of the problem space. Both founders have 4+ years of experience working in STEM. Jules and Shylee both worked as software engineers before transitioning to product management roles. Shylee specializes in AI/ML and complex data areas while Jules specializes in web application development. Additionally, both founders are very close to the population they are serving. Shylee is a first-generation college student who has used that experience to more effectively design TWP’s program to be more inclusive of targeted populations. Juliana spent 4+ years as a tutor within a public university system (CUNY) as well as worked in NGO organizations, and has used those learnings to focus on how to build a supportive educational space for the fellows within the bounds of social impact delivery.

The problem we are trying to solve is extremely personal to both the founders of the organization. Both of the founders of the organization identify as queer and Latina. We believe that proximity traveled is one of the most important attributes of leadership for our organization. We work with vulnerable populations of girls that need to see role models and leaders that look like them and understand their journeys. Our entire leadership team meets a pillar of representation that we seek out for our fellows. When we bring in mentors, cohort leads, or volunteers we provide extensive training on how to mentor and connect with people from marginalized backgrounds. 

In our leadership team we look for those who are: 

• People of color - Black, Latina, Asian, Native American

• Have worked in tech/STEM 

• Attended a historically underrepresented university 

• Is an immigrant or first-generation US Citizen

• Is a first-generation college student 

• Experienced working with any of the above groups 

We find these values important so that our community serves as a place to weave together those who have been systematically left out, and can share in a coalition of changemakers in tech. 

We have also begun developing a program on intersectionality in intergenerational mentorship. As we’ve built our program we’ve come to understand the complexities of seeing representation at the most senior levels of the digital workforce - thus we must better position those in power to effectively lead and hear the needs of incoming underrepresented talent.

We are applying to this challenge because we believe that this specific challenge can help our organization change the way we think about retention pipelines in technology careers. We need a program with a global reach to help make this vision a reality, and we know that through ServiceNow's support, we will gain access to the resources we need to overcome points of friction within our current growth model.

We currently operate in the US out of New York City. Within NY we operate our remote fellowship program, which pulls in undergraduate students from NYC, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. We work with nonprofit organizations based in the US as a volunteer partner.

Our partnership goals rely on our focus on shifting into a growth-focused organization. We need help with our business model because we have most struggled in finding the narrative of our business model that is most appealing to funders and sets us up for longevity. We have also struggled with achieving credit as a legitimate organization. We feel that through a focused PR campaign, we will be better positioned for corporate partnerships.

There are several organizations we’d like to partner with (in priority order): 

1. Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) - SEO has served as a standard for helping young people of color break into transformation careers. As the workforce is shifting, SEO needs to adjust the types of careers it funnels students into. We would like to work with SEO to tailor programming to influence the successful outcomes of students who want to enter technology careers. 

2. Breakthrough Tech (BTT) - BTT is at the top of the funnel for our target students. We would like to work with them to identify students at risk from churning out of STEM and feed them into our program. 

3. Annie Cannons - Annie Cannons is admired by our organization for scaling up tech boot camp with a massive social impact. We’d love to receive guidance from this organization to understand how the complexities of community building scale up. 

4. Black Girls Code - We’d like to work with Black Girls Code to facilitate community building of women of color in STEM before these girls have declared their intent to study STEM. We want to know more about what is making recruitment and retention into technology hard at the pre-college levels.