After hearing about the book ban, Reshma Saujani, founder of the Girls Who Code nonprofit organization, shared her thoughts with Business Insider.
“I was just shocked,” Saujani told Insider. “This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls and what info they have access to.”
She added: ”In some ways we know that book banning has been an extreme political tool by the right—banning books to protect our kids from things that are ‘obscene’ or ‘provocative’—but there is nothing obscene or provocative about these books.”
According to the website associated with the Girls Who Code organization, the goal is to “change the face of tech” by closing the gender gap in new entry-level tech jobs.
While shocked by the news of the ban, Saujani said the “Moms for Liberty” organization is responsible for it.
It was founded by two former school board members, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, who say they witnessed how “short-sighted and destructive policies directly hurt children” and now seek to “stoke the fires of liberty.” The conservative group aims to ban books that focus on topics like critical race theory, sex education, and inclusive gender language.
The Girls Who Code books are used to reach children and encourage them to code, but because of how “liberal” they seem due to the diverse characters and the message that girls can do anything, conservatives are looking to ban them.
Saujani noted that removing the books not only hinders visibility for women in technology fields but also diversity in the industry, as most of the characters in the series are people of color.
“You cannot be what you cannot see,” she said. “They don’t want girls to learn how to code because that’s a way to be economically secure.”
But Saujani refuses to let the ban get to her. Instead, she took to Instagram this weekend to express how she feels and highlight the support the books have, despite the ban.
“I woke up this morning to a news alert that our @GirlsWhoCode middle-grade book series was banned by some school districts as part of the Mom for Liberty effort to ban books,” Saujani wrote in the caption of a post on Instagram. “To be honest, I am so angry I cannot breathe. This series was our labor of love, our commitment to our community to make sure that girls—all girls—see themselves as coders. You cannot be what you cannot see, and this was our effort to get more girls, girls of color interested in coding. And it worked!!”
In addition to sharing her thoughts on social media, Saujani has also reached out to the Central York School District board president and several teachers in that area of Pennsylvania to understand why the books ended up on the ban list, Insider reported.
“This is an opportunity to realize how big this movement is against our kids and how much we need to fight,” Saujani told Insider. “This is opportunity to start more clubs, get more girls to code, and get more girls to become economically free.”
In addition to Girls Who Code, other books banned across the country include children’s classics like Where’s Waldo?; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? ; and popular books The Hate U Give and The Kite Runner. A list of other popular books, where they are banned, and why can be found here.
According to PEN America, books were banned in 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students in 32 states between July 2021 and July 2022. About 41% of banned books on the list had LGBTQ+ themes or characters who are LGBTQ+. The other majority of banned books featured characters of color or addressed issues of race.
