How an Insult Became a Movement
Canada won gold. Always ran an ad. I made a sticker. It snowballed.
Do you remember the first time someone said it?
You throw like a girl. You run like a girl. You play like a girl.
You knew exactly what they meant. Weak. Silly. Not quite good enough.
Then you started a career in tech. And they did it again.
Different words, same message.
Not technical enough. Too assertive. Not the right fit.
They might as well have said you code like a girl.
Dearest Gentle Reader, one does not simply name a publication after an insult without a very good story.
This is that story.
Hockey Gold
To understand where the name came from, I need to take you back to the 2014 Olympics and the Women’s Gold Medal Final.
I know a Canadian talking about hockey, how cliché.
At the beginning of the third period team USA scored, making the score 2-0.
We thought it was over.
Then Brianne Jenner scored with 3:35 left. 2-1. We had a pulse!
The whole country leaned forward.
Then — 55 seconds left in regulation — Marie-Philip Poulin scored.
TIED. 2-2.
WE WERE GOING TO OVERTIME!!!
Canada held its breath.
Seven minutes into overtime, the great Haley Wickenheiser drew a penalty on American Hilary Knight.
We were on the power play. One chance. Don’t blow it.
Poulin got the puck.
SHE SHOOTS. SHE SCORES.
WE WON!!! CANADA WON GOLD!!!
It was one of the most dramatic comebacks in Olympic history.
Stay with me. It’s worth it.
For weeks after, kids were playing street hockey and doing the play-by-play.
Not Crosby. Not Gretzky. Wickenheiser. Poulin.
“She shoots, she scores.”
Boys were calling each other out for playing like girls. Something that would have come to blows just months before. Now it was something to aspire to.
The Super Bowl Commercial
If you watched the Super Bowl in February 2015, you may remember this one.
Always ran an ad. They asked men, women, and boys to:
Run like a girl.
Throw like a girl.
Fight like a girl.
You can probably guess what happened.
Weak. Silly. Floppy. Because that’s what we’d all been taught that phrase meant.
Then they asked girls to do the same thing.
The girls did it with gusto, with speed, with heart, and it didn’t look weak or silly it was triumphant.
Then the producers went back to the first group and showed them what the girls had actually done. They were ashamed. They had never thought about the implications before. It completely changed their perspective.
The message was simple:
Doing things like a girl shouldn't be an insult.
It should be something to aspire to.
The Sticker that Started it All
Both the gold medal and this ad were still very much in the air in the spring of 2015 when I was invited to participate in Think About Math, a STEM workshop for Grade 9 girls at the University of Waterloo.
The event brought in women with math degrees from Waterloo to talk about where that education could take them. I had a master's in math from Waterloo and a career in tech. I said yes.
I didn’t want to be some boring old lady telling them about my job. I wanted to inspire them. I asked my company, D2L, for swag to bring. D2L makes education software. The kind these same high school students use every single day.
D2L gave me pens.
Corporate pens….. For Grade 9 girls.
BORING!
I knew I needed something better. I also knew that every Grade 9 student in Ontario had been given a Chromebook for the duration of high school. So no matter their background, they all had a computer. And the school encouraged them to put stickers on it so each one looked different.
A lightbulb went off.
I found an androgynous girl in clip art online. Added the words: Code Like a Girl. Ordered 80 stickers from a Canadian company and paid for them out of my own pocket.
I thought 80 would be enough.
I was wrong.
The girls loved them. And so did every other woman in the room.
I ran out of stickers. All 80 of them.
The Publication
A couple of months after Think About Math, I bought the domains codelikeagirl.io and likeagirl.io and built a small website. I called it Code Like a Girl.
I had no idea what it was going to be. Something involving Girl in STEM and Women in Tech. It existed. That’s about all I can say for it.
But by late 2015, something was becoming clear. I wanted to do more than tell my own story. I wanted a space where other women in tech could tell theirs. Where we could show girls what was possible in STEM. Where male allies could come and learn to do better.
A place that didn’t exist yet.
And wouldn’t you know it. The perfect name was just sitting there waiting.
On January 11, 2016, I pointed the URL at Medium, and Code Like a Girl became a publication.
Ten years later, here we are.
And if you're reading this, you're part of it.
We still have a little girl inside us who was told she didn't belong here.
And most of us grew up to be women who were told the same thing.
This publication is for her — for you.
We code like a girl. And we're proud of it.
If This Resonated With You
Most of what gets written about women in tech stays at the surface. We don’t.
Code Like a Girl publishes three times a week with stories, tutorials, and hard-won lessons from women who are building, leading, and refusing to stay quiet.
If you’re not subscribed yet, start there. It’s free.
If you’re already here and ready to go deeper, Her Edge is my monthly paid column. I spent twenty years in tech, hit that ceiling, and came out the other side as a VP who retired at 43.
Each month, I share the specific frameworks that broke through it.
There's More Where This Came From
I Didn’t Plan to Start a Movement. I Just Stopped Staying Quiet.
This piece has everything: a rejection that backfired spectacularly, a 2011 moment I've never talked about publicly, a year I nearly burned it all down, and a daughter who refused to fall off the STEM cliff.
Ten years. A lot of plot twists. Zero regrets.
2025: The Year We Stopped Waiting to Be Seen
This story is about what almost ended Code Like a Girl.
Our best year collapsed overnight, the platform stopped working for our writers, and we had a decision to make.
We didn't wait for someone to fix it.
We moved to Substack and started building something better.
Women Rising: Why Women in Tech Writers Are Invisible on Substack
Women are writing about tech on Substack. A lot of them. Thoughtful, rigorous, well-researched work.
So why do they make up just 10% of the tech leaderboards? We went looking for answers, and then we built a tool to track them.









I love that you shared this story and what you do is amazing, Dinah! 🩵
That sticker could have made millions in merch - t-shirts, water bottles, caps...