Finance committee  That's a good question. We've actually been hired out of Toronto by a few of the post-secondary institutions to teach their students or their faculty to code, but we do benefit across the country from in-kind sponsorship of space from a lot of universities and colleges because th

Finance committee  Yes, definitely, and in ours as well, because we need to get women through the rest of the pipeline to become developers.

Finance committee  Yes, we already have about half a million dollars committed from those partners.

Finance committee  That's a good question. We don't have those stats. We do track, and it is a selling feature for companies. There's a lot of mobility, which is interesting for people. I know anecdotally that people have gone to work for Telus and Scotiabank. That's definitely a selling feature a

Finance committee  So far, our work is definitely extracurricular. We are having conversations with ministries of education across the board to start piloting curriculum even younger. We teach kids as young as four years of age. High school is important, but it's a tough group of girls to engage. W

Finance committee  That's a good question. We have a wide range of experiences. On the adult side, our largest group, the vast majority of women are looking to upgrade their skills. They are taking on additional opportunities at work and taking on more responsibilities. We do have another group, a

Finance committee  We could do that next year, 2017. We've done a lot of evaluation, and there are a lot of metrics. There is an annual report I can also give you. We've built this mechanism, we've scaled up really scrappily over the last few years, and we have private-sector support as well as par

Finance committee  You mean other coding organizations or in general?

Finance committee  I think the idea is that we don't know what the jobs of the future are yet, but digital skills and technology are pervasive. We know that 42% of the Canadian workforce is up for replacement through automation, so technical skills are the next frontier. It's a language, and it tak

Finance committee  Yes. We wanted to expand our programming at Ladies. We've asked for $3 million.

Finance committee  As an organization, we run a lot of different programming, and it's for anything from young girls to kids to educators to adult women. We specifically want to grow programming for our adult women and young girls, and we're focusing on expanding that, which is the most under-repre

Finance committee  Putting it simply, it's the language you use to get a computer to do something for you. For anything from an app to a website, a language is used to communicate with a computer. It's about giving a set of instructions to the computer. There are lots of different languages, not un

Finance committee  I think I'm probably preaching to the choir now about technical skills, but I think they're really important. For us, we would argue and advocate mostly for teaching coding and the broader concepts of computational thinking. It's this idea of teaching our youth problem solving, i

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, members of the committee. Congratulations to you all for celebrating your first electoral anniversary today. My name is Melissa Sariffodeen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ladies Learning Code, which is a Canadian not-for-profit organization