Ivanka Trump Shunned By Girls Who Code Founder

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By Nathan Guttman September 29, 2017

Ivanka Trump was on tour this week, promoting STEM educating and encouraging young students to take on computer coding.

But she didn’t get a welcome from one of the nation’s largest groups working to help girls study programming at an early age.

Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, which works with 40,000 young female students across the country, rejected an invitation from Ivanka Trump to meet and discuss ways of advancing computer science education.

“To work with this administration in any capacity is to normalize it, and all of the hate and bigotry it represents,” Saujani explained in a New York Times op-ed.

She had initially intended to accept the invitation, which came only days after Trump’s inauguration in January, but after he issued the travel ban orders, targeting 7 Muslim-majority countries, Saujani decided to decline. “If I agreed to work with his administration, how could I look these girls in the eye?” she said of the many Muslim girls participating in her programs.

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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