Advancing women in cyber through INI and EWF partnership

If there is one unnerving statistic that jumps out this National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s that women make up only 24 percent of the cybersecurity workforce. But at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Information Networking Institute (INI) is closing that gender gap, one student at a time.

Carolina Zarate is an elite hacker and aspiring security professional whose education at Carnegie Mellon is made possible through a partnership between the INI and the Executive Women’s Forum on Information Security, Risk Management and Privacy (EWF), sponsored by Alta Associates. This fall, she became the eleventh recipient of the full-tuition EWF INI Fellowship, which was established in 2007 to support a graduate student from a historically underrepresented population.

“Our partnership with EWF has been crucial in affording remarkable women and underrepresented minorities with the opportunity to study information security,” said Dr. Dena Haritos Tsamitis, Barbara Lazarus Professor in Information Networking and director of the INI….