Girls Who Code breaks the internet with their latest “Missing Code” campaign
By Joe Colquhoun on Monday, December 7, 2020
Girls Who Code have launched a new digital campaign called “missing code” designed to illustrate how broken the internet would be if it weren’t for the valuable contributions of females working in the computing industry.
At present, 26% of computing jobs are made up of women – a statistic that largely goes unnoticed. This campaign was designed to break down our perceptions of what a programmer looks like and address the gender gap as a whole.
Included alongside the 60-second video is a website that features an interactive portal where visitors can surf an alternate, dystopian internet. The portal shows homepages of top platforms—including Teen Vogue, Sephora, and Adidas — reprogrammed to show how crucial women are to the field.
The campaign was made possible by the support of Lyda Hill Philanthropies’® IF/THEN® Initiative and created in partnership with a women-led team at independent agency Mojo Supermarket.
“We needed something that grabs attention and changes the way people see this industry,” explained Mo Said, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Mojo Supermarket. “Everyone thinks of coders as nerdy guys in loose-fitting hoodies. We wanted to engage teens and actually change that perception. How do you show that the internet needs women coders? By showing just how much it would suck without them.”
