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Corin Manning was 14 when she discovered what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
She and a friend signed up for IndeedWeCode, a summer camp that teaches programming, or computer programming, to young black girls in Cleveland, Ohio. Manning, now a senior at the University of Cincinnati, fell in love with coding and web development that summer and is now about to start her career at Rockwell Automation, a Cleveland industrial automation company.
Manning’s experience is similar to UC Information Technology’s initiatives such as the Early IT Program and Early IT Summer Camp, in that it focuses on closing the gender gap in information technology.
Build a positive culture
As Jen Fritz, an associate professor and educator at the school, sees it, aside from the perception that IT is a male-dominated industry, there’s nothing stopping women from entering the field.
“There’s nothing in this field that women can’t do,” Fritz said. “In the IT field, women are just as qualified as men for jobs in this field.
“It’s not an area that excludes women. It’s how comfortable they feel in the environment.”
In the 1990s, when Freeze began working on information systems after retiring from the Marine Corps, it was not uncommon for computer labs to see naked women on their screen savers. While this was accepted at the time, the tech industry has since become more welcoming to women, Fritz said.
Still, progress remains to be made.
Breanna King, a senior from Cincinnati, encountered people during her work experience who questioned her knowledge and didn’t believe her ideas. This led her to believe that the hostility she faced was due to her gender.
“The negative experiences I’ve had have caused me to drift away from my ability to have those experiences, stop truly sharing my perspective, and cause me to second-guess myself on a regular basis,” King said. “It doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t happen often. It’s just that when they do happen, it sticks with you more than the positive things.”
While this negative environment tainted her experience, Kim did find a better culture while working with the Department of Justice (DOJ).
At the Department of Justice, King felt supported as a woman and disabled, using a wheelchair, cane or leg braces for mobility issues. She also found a culture where people wanted to learn and find solutions to the problems they faced.
“It’s great to get on-the-ground experience,” said King, who has accepted a job as a data analyst for the Justice Department. “I don’t think I could understand that aspect of it outside of the co-op.”
“It’s really important to make sure you reach people early,” Manning said. “I can take it all the way back to elementary school. My mom took me to a lot of different STEM camps from when I was little. It just became ingrained in me. I knew I wanted to be in STEM, I just didn’t know which way to go, and the IndeedWeCode camp solidified my dream.”
UC makes great progress
Bekah Michael is an associate professor and educator in the College of Information Technology, part of the university’s College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services, and executive director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute. Often the only woman in the class.
She loved her classmates and never felt discriminated against by them because of her gender, but it was clear she was different.
“I noticed there weren’t many women,” she said. “It took me a while, but [I] It’s crazy to realize that this field isn’t diverse at all because it makes me feel so accepting.
“This is a very special field,” she said. “You can make a lot of money, have so much flexibility, but women can’t get in. There are a lot of reasons why that’s the case, and we’re going to continue to look at it and work to remove barriers and build a more inclusive community. That’s it The reason I returned to UC to study and teach after many years in industry.”
Women studying information technology still find themselves underrepresented in classes, but at UC, the gap is closing.
- In fall 2023, there are 679 women (28% of the student body) in UC Information Technology.
- In fall 2023, 41% of the school’s graduate students are women (512).
- From fall 2019 to fall 2023, the number of first-year female students enrolling in SoIT for the first time increased by 161%.
- From fall 2022 to fall 2023, female enrollment in the Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity program will increase by 31%.
- From fall 2019 to fall 2023, the number of women on the school’s IT faculty increased by 60%.
“It’s a great thing for our students to have women represented in our department,” Michael said. “Other underrepresented groups are represented in our departments and schools. This is part of what we need to support our students. Our students need to see all of us at the front of the classroom so they don’t feel alone.
“I often talk to people at national conferences about our cosmetics, and they’re blown away. That’s not their experience.”
Overcome negative perceptions
To overcome perceptions of information technology that sometimes make women feel unwelcome, UC faculty and students have created a support system.
Organizations including Women in Cybersecurity provide services to female students. These clubs provide a safe place for students to share their successes and failures, practice technical and non-technical skills, and build their professional network.
Other programs and organizations, including Cyber@UC, Bearcat Coders and IT Proud, also provide spaces for students to support each other, who are also supported by faculty.
“They are very supportive. Even if you are not their student that semester, you can always go to them. It feels good to have them there,” Manning said. She is a student success coach in the information technology program, and she shows her classmates the same support she received at Cal.
Not only do they want to help their UC classmates, these organizations also reach out to younger students.
“I’ve been able to talk to high school girls and even middle school girls who are already interested in this field. When we went to the library, there were two girls there who were in Girl Scouts together. One of my opening questions was, ‘Has anyone heard of Steganography?'” King said, referring to the practice of hiding one document, message, image or video within another document, message, image or video. “Two little girls raised their hands, they were probably no older than fifth or sixth grade, and they were able to tell me all this. I think resources would go a long way in bridging that gap.”
Highlight opportunities
Professor Frieze said that in order to close the gender gap in tech, it was important to show women and girls that opportunities existed.
“We can’t just go out and say, ‘It’s for anyone. Let’s see how many women or how many minorities we can get into this field,” she said. “It doesn’t solve our problem. It doesn’t make its distribution more equitable. What we need is word of mouth and personal experience: ‘My sister did it and now I’m doing it.’ “We’ve seen that.”
In order to increase personal experience, the University of California has created projects such as Early IT Project and Early IT Summer Camp.
Early IT Summer Camp is a free program that allows high school students to explore the many career opportunities available through information technology, including cybersecurity, software development, game development and simulation, and data and cloud technologies.
The Early IT program allows high school students to complete the first year of a bachelor’s degree at more than 50 high schools. Through training at the University of California, high school teachers are able to teach college courses in their schools.
All students who complete their first year of early IT courses in high school with a grade point average of C or above will automatically be admitted to the UC Information Technology program.
“At UC, IT is becoming more and more accessible because we have things like Early IT,” said Nikki Holden, a lecturer and educator at the school. “We have more and more people working in IT who wouldn’t have been attracted to IT 10, 15 years ago.”
Students, including King and Manning, also took advantage of the IT Acceleration Program, which allows students to complete bachelor’s and master’s degrees simultaneously in five years. Manning earned a bachelor’s degree in IT and a master’s degree in business administration, while King earned a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity and a master’s degree in IT.
By working to attract younger students, UC faculty hope their efforts will make more underrepresented students comfortable with information technology and that students from all backgrounds will become interested in the field.
“Students need to have someone teach who looks like them. No matter what the class is or what level they are in, they need someone to relate to, so having women teach makes women feel more comfortable in the classroom,” Fritz said . “But when I teach, I don’t see a person as male or female, a minority or anything else. I see them as students. I try to treat them all equally.”
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