1. Audience: readers of the local community section from Miami Hurricanes.
Non-profit targets local girls for technology careers
By Giovanna de Cristofaro
South Florida
Local non-governmental organization incentives and trains disadvantaged high school girls, in
order to increase the number of women in informational technology fields and satisfy the
market’s demand.
ITWomen is a group managed by Senior IT women from large enterprise and consulting
backgrounds that created a supportive network of professionals to help advance women in
technology by offering them free workshops, training and scholarships.
Currently, the non-profit has raised over $500,000k and awarded 84 scholarships. Besides that,
they have developed a mentoring program that pairs the scholarship recipients with senior female
IT professionals to help the young women through their journey, as many of them are the first
generation in their families to attend college.
At this time, the organization have been focusing in outreaching disadvantaged girls in local
middle schools and high schools in order to encourage them to pursue IT related careers. “We
are talking about girls who are often struggling with a myriad of economic challenges and living
with many cultural stereotypes” said Claire Marrero, ITWomen’s President.
Claire calls attention to the fact that many girls do not consider IT careers as an option for their
lives because of the stereotypes that it is only for super smart, geeky and white men. They also
think IT is simply coding, which is not true, said the president. According to her, women hold
only 26 percent of roles across Tech industry nowadays, with only three percent being Black and
a low one percent being Latinas, when the market demand is actually huge.
“Over the years, we have engaged the support of local technology leaders from the Chief
Information Officer (CIO) community to deliver a role models program across the Tri-County
Public Schools, that has reached over 22,000 girls and aimed at inspiring them to pursue careers
in Technology and Engineering” said Claire.
Recently, the NGO was one of the very few selected groups to participate in the annual
PhilAdthropy, an event hosted by the University of Miami School of Communications.
Out of 150 applications received, only 16 non-profit organizations were chosen to have a free
advertising campaign developed by the university students in a time frame of 24 hours. “I was
truly amazed at the quality output and creative work developed by the team of students whom
I worked with” said President Marrero.