Renee Noble

An interest in chemistry, physics, maths and biomedicine led Noble to choose a career in STEM. She had a childhood fascination with bionic eyes, but computer science steered her interest toward coding.

“They didn’t teach girls to code in Coffs Harbour,” said Renee Noble of her north-coast New South Wales hometown.

“Actually, they didn’t really teach anyone to code in Coffs Harbour when I was at school.”

It was during her undergraduate studies – a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical and Biomolecular) and a Bachelor of Science at University of Sydney – that the 28-year-old discovered computer programming. Now, she is committed to ensuring that other girls can learn to code, too.

An interest in chemistry, physics, maths and biomedicine led Noble to choose a career in STEM. She had a childhood fascination with bionic eyes, but computer science steered her interest toward coding.

“I picked it up really quickly, even compared to the guys in the room who had been doing it since they were eight,” she said.

Today, Noble is a software engineer at Grok Learning, an online platform for learning and teaching computer programming in the classroom.

She is also executive director of Girls’ Programming Network (GPN), an extra-curricular program that serves to advance knowledge and promote gender equality for girls interested in IT, programming and software development.

“When I first joined GPN, I was still nervous about being the only girl in my classes and I didn’t really feel confident, compared to the boys in my classes who were very loud and arrogant at times,” said Noble, who joined GPN as a tutor in 2013.

“The culture was like,

‘Oh you have to be into Star Wars or all the nerdy things and, if you’re not, you don’t fit in’. It was quite isolating.”

Noble’s career highlights include developing new coding experiences for the Grok Learning platform. She has also helped expand the reach of GPN from 160 to 2000 enrollees a year and led its national expansion four years ago.

She has firm ideas for how educators can encourage more girls to study STEM and how employers can harness the potential of women engineers.

“Encourage girls [to study STEM] twice as hard, because you know society is doing the opposite,” she said.

“Employers also need to acknowledge that they shape team culture. Seek out mentors for your younger women, especially if your organisation has a low number of women. Pull in women friends from other companies if you need to.”

She also believes diversity will lead to better solutions that suit more people.

“Don’t blame the pipeline,” Noble said.

“Train women rather than just waiting for them to filter through. Look harder for women and, if no women apply, maybe consider if your ad is what’s sending them away.

Women want to solve problems, she said.

“And we are really good at it.”