BlackGirlsHack

BlackGirlsHack was created to share knowledge and resources to help black girls and women breakthrough barriers to careers in information security and cyber security. The vision for Black Girls Hack (BGH) is to provide resources, training, mentoring, and access to black girls and women and increase representation and diversity in the cyber security field and in the executive suites.

BlackGirlsHack Foundation (BGH Foundation) is a 501(c)(3) organization created to bring awareness and provide knowledge and resources to help increase the diversity and representation in Cyber Security.  BlackGirlsHack Foundation is a not for profit organization whose focus is to increase representation in Cyber Security for Black Women and Girls. BlackGirlsHack Foundation will do this through providing training and engagement to encourage Black Women and Girls to be engaged in STEM fields. Lack of diversity in STEM fields leads to poor representation in STEM occupations and is fixed by encouraging young Black (and minority) boys and GIRLS to engage in STEM activities that focus on practical applications of math, robotics, computer programming and engineering. Fixing the lack of diversity in STEM fields starts with engaging children in early childhood education and exposing them throughout their education. As learning requires a collaborative environment, all of BlackGirlsHack’s spaces and programming welcome people of all genders, nationalities, races and orientation.

In 2016, while 56% of women were enrolled in undergraduate education, only 21% of women were enrolled in engineering fields and only 12% of the undergraduate engineering population was Black. What this says for Women in STEM is that while they are well represented in undergraduate education, the number of women, and black women specifically in the pipeline to STEM fields is severely lacking. Black Girls Hack’s goal is to change that.

We have created programming and workshops to help train the next generation of cyber professionals and are rolling out the BlackKidsHack program to start to affect change in the K-12 spaces.