Communications of the ACM
Cybersecurity Badge: One Big Step For Girl Scouts, Potentially Giant Leap For Women
The Girl Scouts have announced they will be offering 18 cybersecurity badges, to expose girls to technology concepts and challenges.
Credit: Norm Dettlaff/AP
My association with the Girl Scouts has spanned decades — as a scout, camp counselor, steadfast cookie connoisseur and now donor. It is an experience strongly associated with the great outdoors. Cook meals on a campfire? Check. Hike long distances wearing a heavy backpack? Check. Lead two dozen 5-year-olds for a week in a woodland camp? Check. In adulthood, all of those experiences stayed with me, and I put them to use in the wilderness and in my work as a cybersecurity researcher for the RAND Corporation.
Scouting has always given girls opportunities that challenge them and allow their leadership skills to develop. But the modern world — with its headlines about Russians hacking our elections and disruptive prank email impersonations of White House staffers — can seem far removed from a Girl Scout camp. So imagine my delight when the Girl Scouts announced they would be offering 18 cybersecurity badges to expose girls to information-age concepts and challenges.
This heartening development is more than just an indication of changing times, more than just updating badge programs to replace the outmoded with the modern. This is a way for more girls to obtain valuable hands-on experience with the concepts that are shaping the modern world. The service ethos Girl Scouts have always embodied and championed can now "go viral" as many as 1.8 million girls are given the chance to learn to protect themselves and their community in cyberspace.
Just by offering these cybersecurity badges, the Girl Scouts are breaking down a barrier. It's no secret that women are underrepresented in career fields like information technology, computer science and cybersecurity. Every year since 1982, more women than men have earned college degrees. But women are less likely than men to pursue degrees in the technical disciplines that often lead to cyber careers — think information technology, information security, computer science, mathematics or electrical and computer engineering.
From USA Today
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