Gender Initiative

Women are often excluded from the career opportunities offered by IT. Without targeted recruitment and training, women will continue to be left behind. To address the global challenge of the digital divide between the sexes, Cisco is implementing what we call the Gender Initiative “ABCs”: accessing the Internet, building knowledge, and creating careers.

Accessing the Internet

Cisco’s Gender Initiative, a component of the Networking Academy, helps provide Internet access for women and girls through partnerships with regional telecenters, community organizations, shelters, girls’ schools, and women’s colleges and universities. This includes equipment donations to global NGOs. Examples:

• Pakistan: Cisco donated laboratory equipment to eight new Networking Academy sites in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi. Five of the partnerships are with women-only universities, and three are with coeducation institutions committed to achieving a 30-percent female enrollment. As a consequence of this program, approximately 500 women will be enrolled in technology courses by next year. Cisco received an award from the Minister of Science and Technology recognizing our efforts in promoting IT gender participation in Pakistan universities.
• Kenya: Using equipment donated to the Maasai Education Discovery School, instructors and students from the Networking Academy set up Internet networks at 14 local organizations, including dormitories, libraries, an orphanage, and secondary and primary schools.

Building Knowledge

Cisco promotes the Internet as a source of information and as a means for students to acquire and refine their technical skills. Today 18 percent of students taking Cisco Networking Academy courses worldwide are women. The Gender Initiative focuses on recruitment and retention of technically trained women through scholarship programs, development partnerships, and local, regional, and national workforce partnerships.

The U.N. Global Compact publication “Joining Forces for Change: Demonstrating Innovation and Impact through U.N. Business Partnerships” (July 2007) cited the work Cisco has done with UNIFEM as a best practice in workforce development. Examples:

• Latin America: With only an 11 percent Networking Academy female enrollment, Brazil was targeted for the first Cisco Scholarship Pilot Program for Women and Girls. This scholarship program, part of the Gender Initiative Latin America campaign, sponsors academy attendance in the poorest regions of Brazil as well as in the growing business areas. National Industrial Training Service of Brazil (Portuguese acronym SENAI), a Brazilian government organization that operates a network of not-for-profit, secondary-level professional schools, will select approximately 50 women from two academies to receive scholarships for classes in August 2007.
• Poland: In response to the comparatively low percentage of women with IT jobs in Poland, a Cisco Gender Scholarship Pilot was established in 2007 to encourage women to enter Cisco Networking Academy and the IT fields. Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun and Zespol Szkol Chlodniczych i Elektronicznych Local Academy in Gdynia are participating in the Gender Initiative with 30 partial scholarships for women in CCNA courses.
• Kenya: Mukuru is a large slum district near the capital city of Nairobi. The Mukuru Skills Training Centre Initiative, which began in 2000, is a partnership that also includes British Airways, Microsoft Education, Colemar (Revlon), the Kenya and U.K. Ministries of Education, and Sisters of Mercy (Ireland). The initiative provides several services aimed at preparing people to establish economically viable small businesses. Cisco is partnering to develop two modules: an instructor training program in the use of technology for teaching and learning, and a module for an online hairdressing course.

Because of cultural and economic barriers, certain parts of the world present particular challenges when it comes to attaining gender equality in a technical education setting. Cisco’s Gender Initiative has made significant progress in many of these regions. For example, the table below shows women as a percentage of all the students enrolled in Networking Academy classes in selected Middle Eastern, African, and Asia-Pacific countries.

These percentages compare very favorably with the overall female enrollment of 18 percent.

Creating Careers

Career programs connect Cisco volunteers and partners with community organizations to mentor and coach girls and women who are interested in future technology jobs. Additional programs help sustain women who are already working in the technology sector.

For example, the Women’s Empowerment Program (WEP) is a training program for women aged 20 to 35 who belong to disadvantaged Jewish and Arab communities in Israel that delivers high-technology education, fosters personal and social empowerment, and nurtures business skills.

WEP was launched in 2006 with two pilots—one for Jewish women in Netanya and the other for Arab women in Baqa el Garbya—comprising 150 women. Every woman in the Netanya pilot completed the training, and 60 percent have already found IT-related jobs. The Baqa el Garbya pilot is expected to produce similar results. We plan to extend this program to Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey in FY08.