Cracking The Code

When she’s not busy modelling, KARLIE KLOSS is working on her other passion: helping girls learn tech.

- Chioma Nnadi

“Do you think they can see me?” says Karlie Kloss. The supermodel is doing her best to hide, crouching behind one of numerous bookshelves dotted around the Beaver Country Day School in Massachusetts. It’s the first time that Kode with Klossy, her summer camp for teenage girls in-terested in tech, has come to the Boston area, and the 15 or so students—“Klosstons,” as they’re calling themselves—are taking a five-minute movement break from their HTML tutorial, bopping along to ‘Cupid Shuffle’, the popular line-dancing anthem. Pretty soon the jig is up: Someone has spotted Kloss’s Kelly-green Céline pants peeking through a row of textbooks. “Karlie’s here!” screams one of the girls. Pandemonium ensues. Kloss leaps to the front of the class with her hands in the air: “Surprise!”

Computer science doesn’t have a reputation for being fun, especially not among high school girls, but Kloss is hoping to change that. Over the course of just four summers, her camp has grown from an intimate classroom of 20 in New York to a nationwide programme offering scholarships to 1,000 young women across 25 cities. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, women account for only 18 per cent of computer and information-science graduates and are largely underrepresented in Silicon Valley as a result, making up about 30 per cent of workers in the tech industry as a whole. That sentiment is echoed by Reshma Saujani, lawyer and former deputy public advocate for New York City, whose nonprofit organisation Girls Who Code paved the way for initiatives like Kloss’s. “This one-dimensional image of what a coder looks like has got to end, and pop culture can help with that,” says Saujani.