Hackbright Academy puts women coders in their own league

Grad statsAccording to the American Society for Engineering Education, 55 women graduated with computer science or related bachelor's degrees from UC Berkeley, and 27 women graduated with computer science degrees from Stanford in 2012.

For a fee of $12,000 per student, Hackbright Academy ( www.hackbrightacademy.com) teaches 20 to 30 women to program in a 10-week crash course on software engineering.

After working on projects in pairs for the first five weeks, students complete a final project, which they present to about 25 prospective employers during a career day.

'Impostor syndrome'Hackbright also encourages its students in their career pursuits by teaching them to overcome "impostor syndrome," a doubt in one's own achievements frequently experienced by women in tech jobs.

Hackbright pushes its students to promote themselves as software developers by giving them business cards during their second week of class and instructing them to refer to themselves not as students, but as programmers.

"Because of the really stellar instruction and because of the community we have, I was able to say I'm a software engineer at a party while I was a software engineering student," alumna Kathryn King, 29, said.