SAN FRANCISCO – We signed our girls up for coding camp this summer, much to their distress.

"I don't want to be a computer programmer when I grow up!" one said.

"Can't we do another week of basketball camp instead?" the other begged. "Please!"

Well, no. You can't. Because these days, knowing how to program a computer or write an app is a lot like math — a baseline skill everyone needs.

And women, especially, are all too often the ones without that skill. Last month, Google released numbers showing that women make up just 17% of its tech staff. And Google's a company that's working to change those numbers and is honest about its staffing, unlike a lot of others in Silicon Valley.




But without the basics, they're always going to be on the outside looking in, at the mercy of those for whom coding isn't a magical process that somehow makes the Angry Birds fly through the sky.

When I was in college, I had a cousin who was happy to lend me his Dodge Dart, but not until I'd shown him I could change the oil and a tire.

I cursed him as I stomped on the tire iron to get the lug nuts off. I was even less polite when I scraped my knuckles bloody trying to get the oil filter wrench on.

This cousin also thought college was a waste of time and that I should become a welder, because "welders are never unemployed."

I think I ended up happier as a reporter. But that basic, hands-on knowledge of what went on in the car's insides gave me a much stronger position going through life than I would have had if it had been left up to me.

Cars are machines, not magical devices. Having gotten down and dirty with one, I wasn't afraid of what went on inside them.

Coding's like that. It's a skill, a language, and once you get the concept down, you can apply it elsewhere.

Too often, I sit in meetings or conferences and see something that involves programming come up, and half the people in the room just go blank. It's as if the discussion has moved into Swahili, behind an impenetrable barrier.

What's happening behind that barrier is increasingly the real stuff of civilization. It's what makes our phones work, keeps our schedules, amuses us while waiting in line and even runs the heart monitor on a sick friend.

Whatever our girls end up doing in life, they need to be able to follow those conversations. Maybe they'll become fluent and end up working for Alibaba in Beijing. Or maybe they'll just be able to get by.

Either way, we don't want a huge part of modern life to be utterly alien to them. For too many people, and especially too many girls, computers and the code that runs them make up a country they've never visited.

Here's to a coming generation of kids for whom writing an app will be child's play.

USA TODAY reporter Weise is based in San Francisco, where you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.

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