What's not big is the percentage of women working in the field of cybersecurity.
Try 10 percent, says Virginia Lehmkuhl-Dakhwe, organizer of Saturday's first-ever CyberGirlz Silicon Valley summit.
The event at San Jose State was a chance for 50 South Bay middle school girls to show off what they've learned the past few months from a program designed to train and inspire them to eventually make a living nabbing cyberthieves.
"The field of cybersecurity is expected to grow tenfold over the next 10 years," said Lehmkuhl-Dakhwe, director of San Jose State's Jay Pinson STEM Education Program, as teams from various schools set up their exhibits and prepared for the summit. "I want that workforce to reflect the diversity of this area, which means 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Right now, it's mostly men and mostly Caucasian."
The initiative, which targets girls in seventh and eighth grades, encourages them to "involve themselves in the field of Computer Science as well as Cybersecurity."
A collaborative effort launched in January, the program offers after-school courses in which 150 girls are taught computer coding by university students and industry professionals, along with lessons in encoding and decoding messages online. The hope is that with this first taste, some of the girls will pursue scientific and engineering courses in college and eventually become cyber-sleuths and possibly help save the world.
"I learned that there are a lot of people out there who take a lot of time to put words into code and kind of hide stuff on the Internet from other people," said Cynthia Solorio, a soft-spoken seventh-grader from Bridges Academy in San Jose. In the classes, she learned simple coding as well as how to use online tools like Caesar cipher, a simple and widely used encryption technique, and Bacon's cipher, a method of steganography, the science of hiding information.
"There are a lot more people hiding stuff online than I'd realized," Solorio said.
Sitting beside her, CyberGirlz teacher Philip Ye laid out some of the work he'd done with the girls, who received early training in cryptography, networking, forensics, web exploitation and basic programming skills in several school districts in San Jose.
"We started with basic cryptography where the girls learned to compose and then encode messages using online tools," said Ye, a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz whose participation in AmeriCorps led him to share his skills with CyberGirlz.
"We taught them how to traverse the Internet," Ye said, "using Google to find vulnerabilities and then find software patches to fix them."
For 12-year-old Cassie Pinkney, a seventh-grader at John Muir Middle School, the CyberGirlz summit seemed to fit her DNA. "My dad's a data analyst," she said, "so I grew up hearing about computer science, and I see myself doing something like that when I get older."
During her training, Pinkney and her fellow students learned to make their own video games, "which was very exciting."
"If you can make a video game," she said, "you can then learn how to protect it from hackers, which is great training for me to one day do the same thing on a larger scale."
CyberGirlz, she said, presented "a good opportunity for my future and possibly pursuing a tech career. We live in a very tech-savvy era and not knowing about tech isolates you." She said growing up in a "male-dominated world" has taught her: "If we can get more girls into tech, that will improve gender inequality on a larger scale."
©2015 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
