Girls in Tech

» see girlsintech.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

February 2007 was a good month to start this. The industry was expanding, the diversity conversation was about to become a board-level item at every large tech company, and a nonprofit that could put a recruiting pipeline in front of those companies had something they wanted to buy. Adriana Gascoigne founded Girls in Tech in San Francisco that month and within a few years it was a Valley fixture with corporate partners lining up. None of that machinery reached my working life in Ankara, where the problem is real and the apparatus around it is not American. This grave is about an American funding model.

It grew into the structure that name suggests. More than fifty chapters across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, each one run locally. Programs stacked on top: Global Classroom as an online STEM platform, the Amplify pitch competition for women founders, mentorship matching, a campaign called Half the Board that set a target of gender parity in tech boardrooms by 2025. The organization put its reach at more than 250,000 people over its lifetime, with 35 chapters in 30 countries at the point the Washington Post counted them. Headquarters moved from San Francisco to Nashville in 2022.

On 8 July 2024 Gascoigne told the membership the organization was closing after seventeen years, for a reason stated plainly: a lack of funding. The chapters went with it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

The money had one source and it was always going to be the vulnerable part. Girls in Tech ran on corporate sponsorship, which meant its budget lived inside the diversity line item of companies that had no obligation to keep that line item. Through the 2010s nobody questioned it. After 2022 the questioning became the point, and the sponsorship conversations that used to be a formality turned into conversations that did not get returned.

Gascoigne looked for a way out that was not closure. She took the idea of merging with Women Who Code to her board, a group with a nearly identical mission and much heavier corporate backing behind it, Microsoft and Boeing among the names. Days after she raised it, Women Who Code announced that it was shutting down too. The lifeboat went under before anyone could get in. Girls in Tech followed it inside three months.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement reached 130,000 members in July 2024 and the tech press covered it as a one-day story. The Washington Post went back to it on 19 August with a longer piece about what was happening across the whole category, and the Girls in Tech closure sat in the middle of that article as the clearest single example. Organizations in that space were laying off staff or rebranding away from the word diversity. This one folded.

What travels out of this is the funding shape rather than the cause. An organization that exists because other organizations find it useful to be seen funding it has a specific kind of lifespan, and the end of that lifespan arrives as sponsors who stop replying. Seventeen years of chapters, and girlsintech.org now fails at the DNS layer. No parking page, no redirect, no record at all.

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