History & Origin
One Woman’s Vision
Addressing the nation’s need for tech talent – especially AI talent – while leaving half of the available talent pool sitting on the sidelines is a math equation that simply doesn’t work.
Here’s the reality: Close to 60% of the undergraduate population are women and we need to get more of them off the ‘bench’ and into the tech workforce if we are going to meet the ‘moment’ and be competitive in a tech and AI-enabled world. Our founder and CEO, Dr. Judith Spitz, former CIO of Verizon, recognized that addressing this challenge in tech would require innovation in higher education, in industry and in the white space between these two ‘systems’. Her vision was to deliver innovative ways to connect the supply and demand sides of the nation’s tech ecosystem and democratize access to the tech talent pipeline. Her strategy was to focus on undergraduate students who attend colleges and universities that are most often overlooked by industry – students who have enormous potential but none of the privileged access to get their foot in the door of a tech career.
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 (CUNY) to design and deliver an innovative ‘Computing Program’ with the goal of increasing the number of women graduating with degrees in computer science and related tech disciplines and supporting those students in their efforts to land their first internship or job in tech, serving as a model for cities nationwide.
Out of these efforts, our Sprinternship™ program was born: a micro-internship experience designed to break down the barriers that so often keep less privileged 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 getting more women ‘off the bench’ and into 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 and similar programming, the number of CUNY women graduating with bachelors degrees in computer science and related disciplines increased by 94.5% and the percentage of CUNY women in tech landing paid summer internships increased 10-fold.
Nationwide Growth and expansion
In 2019, encouraged by our success with CUNY students we began expanding our Computing Program model in other cities – partnering with large public universities across the country and casting a wide net to encourage undergraduate students to enter the tech academic pipeline. WiTNY became Break Through Tech, and with investments from Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, the Cognizant Foundation, and Verizon, our programmatic platform, industry partnerships and student community continued to grow.
In 2024, Break Through Tech built a national team to expand direct access to more undergraduate students across the United States. This intentional shift away from a place-based delivery model enables us to achieve greater scale, efficiency, and impact as well as a more efficient and sustainable delivery model.
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- 2024: We began to offer fully virtual programming for undergraduate students across the country.
- 2025: With support from the National Science Foundation, we’ve begun expanding our network of Instructional Hubs across the country with the goal of democratizing AI education and expanding the pipeline of undergraduate students trained in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- 2020: We launched our Computing Program in Chicago in partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).
- 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 innovative AI Program, a ten-month program focused on training undergraduate students in the fastest-growing areas of tech: data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
- 2023: Our AI program expanded to Boston and Los Angeles in partnership with MIT and UCLA. 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.
Break Through Tech’s AI Program is now the largest program of its kind in the United States with over 1000 students from over 200 colleges and universities admitted each year. Our outcomes tell the story – over 75% of our fellows land paid summer internship or jobs after completing the program – outperforming their peers by more than 100%.
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