Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and now CEO of mobile payments company Square believes in actively encouraging women to assume leadership positions in tech and to be role models for young women coming up behind them.

That’s why his company started College Code Camp, which brings female engineering students from different colleges to come to the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, being exposed to a real working environment so as to prepare them for their future careers. Students spend four days at Square participating in workshops, discussions, leadership sessions and a hackathon. 

For younger girls, there’s High School Code Camp, an eight-month program designed to teach local San Francisco high school girls computer science.

“I don’t think there’s a push early enough for a lot of young girls to get into tech,” Dorsey says in an interview insert with Bianna Golodryga, finance and news anchor at Yahoo. “It’s also about getting more women comfortable and engaged with the leadership…making sure that everyone at our company has a close role model to look to and that’s just as important as really investing in maths and science.”

“There’s no better way to inspire women engineers than to show that right at the head of engineering at Sqaure, we have a woman,” adds Sarah Friar, CFO at Square.

“The pool is very small and that’s why these programmes are so important, the earlier you start, the pool naturally increases,” Dorsey concludes.

Watch the insert below.

[Via – Yahoo News, Image – Code Camp]