Who Gets to Code

There’s this assumption that’s been floating around forever—that tech is a boys’ thing. Not because of anything real, just because someone decided it was decades ago. Girls interested in coding get pointed toward design or marketing instead. Not because they can’t logic. Because of culture. Because the shape everyone assumes tech takes is male.

Fiona Krakenbürger, a programmer in Berlin, has spent years working against that assumption. She builds spaces for girls to learn code, tinker with networks, build actual things. She’s vocal about open digital culture, the basic principle that the people creating the future should be the ones who get to shape it, not people gatekeeping it.

In an interview with German public radio, she talked about the problem simply: coding is a language. You learn languages. No genetic prerequisites. The barrier is cultural—nobody told girls they could, so they didn’t try, and then the field pointed to their absence as proof they weren’t interested. A self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone treated as biology.

What strikes me is the waste of it. How many problems never get solved, how much work stays unmade, because we told half the population tech wasn’t for them. Fiona spends her time changing that calculation.

The thing that’s weirdest, looking back, is how recently this all became controversial. For decades everyone was fine with the idea that computers required a Y chromosome. Then someone said it out loud and it sounded ridiculous. It always was ridiculous. We just weren’t paying attention.