What is the name of your organization?
Ada Developers Academy (Ada)
What is the name of your solution?
Changing The Face of Tech
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Ada supports low-income and BIPOC women and gender expansive people in accessing economic power through AI-enabled careers in tech.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Seattle, WA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Technology is a critical socio-political driver that is determining our future across many sectors – these are the jobs of the future. Yet women represent only 26% of the computing workforce and 11% of senior leadership roles in tech. Some of this is an educational pipeline labor supply problem, and some is a retention problem; women’s quit rate in tech is over twice that of men, and 31% of women feel stuck/unsupported in their careers. On top of this, BIPOC women face compounding barriers and structural racism that impede upward mobility and professional advancement. Only 3% of computing professionals are Black and there are zero Black or Latinx women CEOs of Fortune 500 tech companies. There are numerous barriers to entry for women, gender expansive, and BIPOC people interested in careers in tech:
-Traditional CS degrees are expensive and take too long, and are often unwelcoming environments for women
-Bootcamps are expensive and the environments are often not welcoming and supportive of women of color and gender expansive people to effectively learn
-Families lack access to childcare and basic income needed to go through retraining
-Traditional educational models and competitive classrooms don’t work well for women from historically underrepresented communities
What is your solution?
We are seeing major diversity implications in the rise of AI-enabled products which allow developers to dramatically increase their productivity, creating instances where individual developers are able to deliver a volume of output that used to require several people. Ada responded to this shift by building AI instruction into our curriculum to give Ada graduates a leg up, and we developed a new upskilling curriculum for tech companies seeking to retrain existing employees into new engineering and AI-enabled roles. In this way, Ada will help support underrepresented, BIPOC & low-income women and gender expansive people leverage AI to secure high-paying software development jobs. Ada’s solution is able to uniquely address the problem of un- and under-employment of women through a one-year program that leads participants to careers with a high level of flexibility, excellent benefits, a significant increase in wages, and the distinct opportunity for longitudinal career growth. We also have a rare opportunity to move the needle on gender and racial representation if we can prepare Ada graduates to become highly competitive AI-enabled junior developers much sooner than their counterparts in 4-year Computer Science degree programs.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Ada works to address gender and racial gaps in tech by preparing women and gender expansive folks, especially people of color, to secure high paying jobs in the country’s highest growth industry. Our mission is to prepare women and gender expansive adults to become software developers, while advocating for inclusive and equitable work environments. Through our programs, we provide cost-free training in software engineering, primarily serving and addressing the needs of Black, Latine, Indigenous Americans, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander, LGBTQIA+, and low-income people. All of our participants are women or gender expansive people, 30% LGBTQIA+, 79% People of Color, 45% racially underrepresented in tech, and 86% low-income.
Our immersive, mission-based coding program fast-tracks participants into high paying software developer jobs in one year, through 6 months of tuition-free coding instruction and 5.5 months in an industry internship. We holistically support students through our preparatory program, wraparound supports, internship stipends, coaching, and career services. Ada also provides social justice workshops, trainings and ongoing partnership to our company sponsors with the goal of helping them become more inclusive, and continuing education for alumni. Our programs provide an equitable model for workforce development, and for shifting the culture of tech towards inclusivity.
