Ladies Learning Code: Non-Profit Helps Young Women Get Tech-Savvy

Frustrated with a lack of female-targeted resources to help women learn high-tech skills for today's digital world, Heather Payne decided to act. The 25-year-old's brainwave is Toronto-based non-profit Ladies Learning Code, a group that aims to "empower everyone to feel comfortable learning beginner-friendly technical skills in a social, collaborative way."

"We all see the issue of women (underrepresented) in technology and it hasn't gone away," says Payne, who launched the organization with its first seminar last July. She herself had a non-technical background when she got the idea, inspired by a workshop in the U.S. for women to learn the computer programming language Python...