History & Origin
One woman’s vision
Achieving gender equity in tech isn’t a new goal, but it’s an increasingly urgent one that demands systemic changes that confront the root causes of gender disparity. Our founder and CEO, Dr. Judith Spitz, former CIO of Verizon, recognized that driving gender equity in tech would require innovation beyond the corporate sector. Her goal was to connect the supply and demand sides of a city’s tech ecosystem and to create opportunities for college women and gender non-conforming individuals with an emphasis on Black, LatinX, Native American and low-income students.
Early days in New York City
Break Through Tech’s journey began in 2016, under the name WiTNY, or Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York. With support from corporations, like Verizon and Accenture as founding sponsors, we partnered with the City University of New York to increase the number of women graduating with degrees in computer science and related tech disciplines, serving as a model for cities nationwide.
Our Sprinternship™ program was born: a micro-internship experience designed to break down the barriers that so often keep diverse college women and gender-non-conforming students from landing the coveted tech internships essential to securing entry-level jobs in tech.
From 2016-2019, CUNY made significant progress toward the goal of doubling the number of women majoring in computer science–seeing an increase of 61.6% of women declaring computer science and related disciplines as their major. Based on program outcomes from Break Through Tech New York and similar programming, the number of CUNY women graduating with bachelors degrees in computer science and related disciplines increased by 94.5%.
Growth and expansion
In 2019, encouraged by our success with CUNY students (including a 50% placement rate in the first cohort of students who participated in a Sprinternship™ and sought a tech internship that summer), we began expanding our programming model in other cities. WiTNY became Break Through Tech, and with investments from Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, the Cognizant Foundation, and Verizon supporting our ambitious vision.
- 2020: We launched our Computing Program in Chicago in partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities, a like-minded organization working at the city level to build a more inclusive future in tech.
- 2021: We expanded our Computing Program to the Washington, DC metro area, in partnership with the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and George Mason University (GMU).
- 2022: We launched our Computing program in Miami in partnership with Florida International University (FIU). We also introduced our AI Program, which focuses on the fastest-growing areas of tech: data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Break Through Tech AI is now the largest program of its kind in the United States and is currently hosted in Boston at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, in Los Angeles at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and virtually outside of these metropolitan areas.
- 2023: our computing sites collectively increased the share of women in computing by 38%. Over 6,000 women from nearly 300 universities across the country participated in our programming.
Our journey to changing the path to power has transformed the early tech talent landscape, and yet it is only just beginning. 2024 marks the first year of offering virtual participation for all of our offerings, allowing students the opportunity to break through tech without limits.
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What’s next
Inspired by our students and their breakthroughs in tech, we are excited to keep learning, iterating, and growing. If you’d like to be part of our next chapter, we’d love to hear from you.