A group of University of Minnesota students recently founded Lovelace, a startup company that seeks to address the gender gap in the STEM field by making coding more enjoyable for young girls.

Lovelace emerged from Entrepreneurship in Action, a two-semester University course that provides students with the opportunity to launch a startup under the guidance of experienced entrepreneurs, attorneys and bankers.

Anna Pedrick, a fifth-year computer science major, serves as Lovelace’s Chief Executive Officer.

“We all kind of explored different problems,” Pedrick said. “ In the middle of October, we came together and started honing in on the gender gap and then more specifically coding.”

Pedrick said she personally experienced feeling minoritized as a woman in computer science. She cited an upper-division class in which she was shocked by the lack of female representation.

“It was all men that were coming in, and so I counted, and it was eight girls to 75 males,” Pedrick said.

Pedrick said she considers this not only a problem for the women deterred from and marginalized within the field, but also for society at large.

“Tech affects everything. The companies that you buy from … when you go on Google what information you see … every single facet of society,” Pedrick said. “Not having equal representation has a negative effect.”

According to Lovelace’s website, “the majority of STEM products don’t align with a young girl’s interests: social, collaborative, creative and building things that don’t just live on a computer.”

Pedrick described how many educational products related to coding are biased towards traditionally male aesthetics.

“[They’re] very male focused, and then even when it’s like ‘gender neutral,’ it still has male undertones, so it’s like a robot,” Pedrick said. “We also found a lot of research that showed that girls engage better when STEM is presented to them in a collaborative and creative environment.”

Pedrick cited research that concluded gendered stereotypes decrease a sense of belonging for girls in the computer science field.

In Lovelace workshops, participants are invited to construct a board with colored light bulbs and code various patterns. Throughout the three-hour workshops, the participants are led in eight to 12 coding challenges. Additionally, the workshops provide participants with the opportunity to connect with the Lovelace team.

“Something that we didn’t even anticipate either is being role models,” Pedrick said. “A lot of times in these workshops, they’ll ask us basic questions about college and our jobs, when we graduate or just really basic questions that you would ask an older sister.”

Ellie Burkholder is 15 years old and recently attended a Lovelace workshop.

“I did know what coding was prior to the workshop however I had no experience,” Burkholder said in an email to the Minnesota Daily. “It was so much fun! My friend and I got to work together on learning how to code and got to create a design. Both of our names start with an E, so we programmed the board so it would light up with an E and change colors … After doing the workshop I signed up for an intro to computer science class for school next year.”

According to data collected by Lovelace, 90% of girls expressed an interest in coding after attending a Lovelace workshop. Speaking about the company’s success, Pedrick said “I don’t think [the Lovelace team] or our Professor could really anticipate the responses we got on the first day of the first workshop.”

Lily Yang is a third-year entrepreneur management and marketing major and she serves as Lovelace’s Chief Operations Officer.

“I think honestly it’s really empowering to see us making a difference because in the beginning we didn’t know what we were going to do, and if it was going to make a difference at all,” Yang said. “Every time it’s like a reinforcement what we’re doing really does matter, and this does have an impact on these girls’ lives.”

The company is named after Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer who lived in the early 1800s. Pedrick spoke of Ada Lovelace as a testament to the capacities of young women in the STEM field.

“If you’re interested in something, do it, even if you walk into a room and it’s all males,” Pedrick said. “If you are good at coding or you’re good at whatever you’re doing, do it and pave the way for someone after you.”