Wanted: women cybergeeks

Phyllis Schneck, chief technology officer for public sector at McAfee, said she was one of the only women in computer science as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University and her friends used to make geek jokes. “But when it came time to help them fix their computers because it ate their term paper, I’m the one they called.”

Schneck’s father, who wrote operating systems and code at Nasa, inspired her.

“His rule was if you’re going to play with a computer in this house, like a game, you’re going to write it,” Schneck said.

Lucinda Sanders, co-founder of the National Centre for Women and Information Technology, also followed the lead of her father, who ran one of the first data centres for Western Electric.

Once, as chief technology officer, she went to a meeting to brief customers. They wanted to know where her boss – the chief technology officer – was, Sanders recalls.

The lack of women in cybersecurity reflects the broader hi-tech industry.

The National Centre for Women and Information Technology was launched in 2004 with a National Science Foundation grant to address women’s declining participation in computing.

Women account for more than half of the overall professional workforce, but for only 25 percent of information technology jobs, according to the National Centre for Women and Information Technology website.

In 1985, when the field was fairly new, women earned 37 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees. That was the peak. The figure was 18 percent in 2009; it is 11 percent at research universities.

The government and private sector want to draw more women into the cybersecurity field for very practical reasons: the need for a bigger pool of talent and the innovation that diversity brings.

“The cyber issue is a huge issue. We are up against some determined countries,” said Richard “Dickie” George, who recently retired as a top official from the National Security Agency.

“Today, if you look at countries like China and India they have so many more people than we do that it is going to be very, very hard for us to out-people them.

“We have to be more creative and more innovative.”

Unlike sectors of the economy where jobs are stagnant, cybersecurity is a growing field. The National Security Agency expects to hire 1 200 and the Department of Homeland Security about 1 000 more cybersecurity professionals.

“I would have every cybergeek in the US who is any good at detecting hackers and intrusions come work for me,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a cybersecurity event on Thursday sponsored by The Washington Post.

The government and private sector try to recruit women, but there are not enough in the pipeline.

George said women had told him they did not like being in such a small minority in computer science classes. “It wasn’t like anyone was making life hard for them, but they just felt uncomfortable.”

And they were not as comfortable initially in dealing with computers and code as the men in class.

“A big part of that is computer games,” George said. “Guys are just used to sitting there playing these games, trying to find ways to beat the game, trying to find ways to cheat, and that’s setting up a cyber mentality that makes them more comfortable with the whole field.”

Technology experts say interest needs to be sparked before college as it can be difficult to grasp what a technology career would look like.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a programme for high school girls to explore engineering and computer science. Dartmouth College holds a summer robotics camp for boys and girls. Microsoft has a DigiGirlz programme for high school girls.

George and Sanders expect a shift towards more gender balance will take another decade.

But as men are in most of the power positions it is they who will have to engineer the shift to attract more women to computing.