Born: 14 January 1967, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Kimberly Bryant founded Black Girls Code in 2011 to create pathways that she didn’t have in the 1970s, and that she didn’t see for her own daughter decades later. An engineer herself, Bryant sent her ten-year-old daughter to a game development camp where she was one of few girls, and the only person of color. Not long after, Bryant attended a conference for female entrepreneurs where panelists discussed the relative lack of qualified women to take on jobs in tech.
“I wanted to create an organization that would feed this pipeline,” she later said.
And so Black Girls Code was born in San Francisco, a non-profit offering free and low-cost workshops and summer camps in programming, robotics, web design, and mobile app development to girls as young as seven. Over the following decade, BGC established chapters in 15 cities across the country and internationally in cities like Johannesburg, South Africa serving more than 30,000 Black girls. The organization built relationships with tech giants like Google, Oracle, and Microsoft, and participants often tackled social justice problems alongside programming ones, like designing apps to fight domestic violence among teens.
“We’re creating this new breed of techies who are going to be the ones starting the tech companies of the future,” Bryant said in 2014.
Unlike many of the women in this book, Bryant did not have a happy ending with Black Girls Code. She was ousted from the organization in early 2022, shortly after filing a federal lawsuit claiming her suspension in late 2021 had been unlawful and accusing board members of wanting to use BGC funds to invest in businesses in which they had controlling interests. Meanwhile, the board claimed that Bryant had been accused of pushing staff too hard and speaking harshly to them. As someone who worked in non-profits for well over a decade, it certainly seems irregular to me that a founder was suspended without warning on the basis of things like telling employees, “you’re not living up to my expectations of what you should be.” While I cannot speak to her management style or skills, nothing I found about the situation would warrant that extreme of a response, particularly to a founder. Employee criticisms like claiming she was absent from daily operations while seeking promotional opportunities seem biased given that she was literally the face of the organization and promoting it would have been a major part of her job.
“I think there are a lot of imperfect leaders trying to do their very best, and I believe that the story is about systemic complexity that is popping up for leaders of color,” said Karla Monterroso, an executive coach who had begun working with Bryant shortly before the suspension. “And not about any one organization or individual, it’s about the poor conditions that exist for our leaders and our teams to succeed with their dignity intact.”
Bryant herself opined on Twitter following her termination,
Ten+ years of founding and building an organization to a $40M+ international brand which fundamentally changed the course of an industry and ousted without not a penny of severance offered. Sounds like retaliation?
Let me break this down more; no severance offered, no healthcare assistance offered, and non-payment of banked vacation. Sure not all of the above is “mandatory” but we definitely offer it to others and vacation payout is mandated by law. So.
A year and a half later, Bryant announced an “amicable resolution” had been reached and she had moved on to found Ascend Ventures, a venture capital firm that would invest in startups led by underrepresented entrepreneurs.